The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced Wednesday its intent to undo more than two dozen major environmental regulations dealing with greenhouse gas emissions, toxic air pollution and waste from fossil fuel extraction in the biggest deregulation action in the agency’s nearly 55-year history.
“All told, it adds up to a complete unraveling of any serious climate policy,” Harvard Law School professor and Environmental and Energy Law Program Director Jody Freeman told Newsweek.
Freeman said the onslaught of rollbacks means the Trump administration is “swinging for the fences” with its deregulatory agenda. But she added that announcements are not the same as final actions, and each of the changes announced Wednesday will require a long and likely difficult legal process.
“I think they’re going to run into some trouble in the courts if they go for broke,” she said.
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Over a span of about two hours Wednesday afternoon, the EPA announced that it would eliminate its environmental justice offices, revisit rules on carbon dioxide emissions limits for vehicles and power plants, weaken limits on harmful soot and toxic mercury pollution from power plants, reduce safeguards on toxic coal ash and wastewater from drilling, and modify a “good neighbor” rule that protects downwind communities from pollution drifting over state lines.
EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin also said that he will reconsider the carbon dioxide endangerment finding, the agency’s scientific ruling and legal basis for regulating CO2 as a pollutant.
“We are driving a dagger through the heart of climate-change religion and ushering in America’s Golden Age,” Zeldin wrote in an essay in The Wall Street Journal timed to coincide with the flurry of announcements.
One of Zeldin’s predecessors at the EPA, Gina McCarthy, called it “the most disastrous day in EPA history.” McCarthy was the 13th EPA administrator, under President Barack Obama, and served as White House national climate adviser to President Joe Biden.
“The agency has fully abdicated its mission to protect Americans’ health and wellbeing,” McCarthy said in an email to Newsweek.
Environmental nonprofits and clean-energy groups voiced similar statements of outrage while beltway groups representing fossil fuels cheered Zeldin’s announcements.
“Voters sent a clear message in support of affordable, reliable and secure American energy, and the Trump administration is answering the call,” American Petroleum Institute President and CEO Mike Sommers said in a statement.
As Newsweek noted in January, the API sent the Trump administration a “policy roadmap” after the oil and gas industry spent a record high in support of Republican and conservative causes during the last election cycle.
Sommers said Zeldin’s actions mean the EPA is “moving forward on many of the priorities” the API called for.
“Today is the day Trump’s Big Oil megadonors paid for,” U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island said in a statement Wednesday. Whitehouse is the highest-ranking Democrat on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, which has oversight of the EPA. Whitehouse said the rollbacks are directly at odds with what Zeldin told the committee during his confirmation hearings.
“Administrator Zeldin clearly lied when he told us that he would respect the science and listen to the experts, when decades of science—including from Exxon’s own scientists—have established the truth about climate change,” Whitehouse said, adding that he and his Democratic colleagues will “fight every step of the way” as the EPA works to implement the changes Zeldin announced.
Harvard law professor Freeman offered some analysis of how those coming fights might unfold.
Part of the EPA’s goal in unleashing all the intended rule changes at once, she said, was to send a political signal that climate change was no longer a priority and to put proponents of climate action on their heels.
“It’s part of their ‘shock and awe’ routine,” Freeman said. “The truth is, nothing is happening immediately.”
The Administrative Procedures Act and other applicable laws mean the EPA must follow a process to make the changes announced Wednesday, she said, including periods for public comment and input from stakeholders and various decision points along the way.
Of the more than 30 changes the EPA proposed Wednesday, the one that Freeman said is potentially most consequential is Zeldin’s decision to revisit the endangerment finding for carbon dioxide. She said it is too early to tell what Zeldin intends to do, but a decision to rescind the finding entirely would have a profound impact.
“It would remove the whole legal basis for setting all the greenhouse gas standards for any major sector of the economy,” Freeman said. “It would essentially knock out EPA as a climate regulator.”
Freeman was counselor for energy and climate change to President Obama as that administration first implemented rules to limit carbon dioxide.
In the 2007 Massachusetts v. EPA case, the Supreme Court narrowly ruled that CO2 is a pollutant. Freeman noted that none of the justices on the winning side of that 5-4 ruling are there today.
“That case would have come out differently if it were in front of this court, I’m certain of it,” Freeman said, adding that the High Court’s rightward ideological shift means Zeldin will have a friendlier court. “They think they’ve got five votes for a lot of the things they want to do, including the environmental rollbacks.”
However, she said, the EPA could face resistance from some unexpected quarters in both courts and corporations as it pushes for rapid changes to well-established rules.
Even conservative courts do not like it when agencies attempt to cut corners and short-cut legally mandated procedure, she said. And Freeman, who has served on the corporate boards of fossil fuel companies and negotiated with automakers, said many major industry leaders have already adapted to climate regulations and prefer stability to sudden change.
“These businesses rely on settled regulation to make long-term investments,” Freeman said. “I’m not so sure that everyone in the industry is behind this drastic effort to roll things back.”
