The EPA is proposing to bury its head in the sand and ignore the mounting costs of climate change for all Americans, Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes expressed in front of Environmental Protection Agency officials Tuesday, the start of the public comment period for the EPAs proposal to revoke the endangerment finding.
The proposed repeal is wrong on the science and its unlawful, Mayes added.
Public health advocates, like Nissa Shaffi, who spoke on behalf of the Allergy & Asthma Network, warned of an increase in harmful air pollution that would exacerbate asthma and other health conditions, especially as the government is reducing spending on Medicaid and other affordable care programs.
More than 700 individuals consisting of environmentalists, public health advocates, state and local officials, and private citizens are listed on the schedule this week to share their opinions and criticism around the EPAs plan to toss the key scientific determination that has underpinned U.S. climate policy for nearly two decades. The EPAs effort has been met with consistent outrage from both science and legal communities in the weeks since the announcement.
This would amount to the largest deregulatory action in the history of the United States, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said during the proposal announcement in Indiana earlier this summer.
The endangerment finding traces back to a 2007 Supreme Court decision that recognized greenhouse gases including carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide as air pollutants. Two years later, the Environmental Protection Agency determined that those emissions endanger public health, leading to new limits on coal and gas-fired power plants, vehicle exhaust, and methane emissions from the oil and gas industry.
Now, the Trump administrations EPA is working to dismantle that framework as a part of a list of 31 environmental rules Zeldin seeks to roll back, on elements from clean air to clean water and climate change.
The EPA tells Scripps News it relied on a variety of sources and information in drafting its proposal to assess whether the endangerment finding actually requires the EPA to serve as an authority under the Clean Air Act. One of those sources includes a 140-page Department of Energy assessment that argued, in part, that mitigation policies could prove more detrimental than beneficial.
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But scientists whose research was cited in the report say their work was twisted and fundamentally misrepresented.
I think the word I used was gobsmacked, said Ben Santer, a climate scientist who spent 30 years at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, run by the DOE. The misrepresentation of the research that my colleagues and I had done was so bad, so egregious that it was shocking.
Santers research helped prove the human link to climate change, work that was central to the original endangerment finding. He told Scripps News the DOEs role in producing the recent report is alarming.
That is just so deeply concerning to me that the Department of Energy is now a nexus of climate denialism in the United States, Santer said. They're failing in that prime directive of keeping us all safe from climate harm by ignoring the reality and seriousness of climate change. Full stop.
Zeke Hausfather, a climate researcher who has previously contributed to the U.S. governments National Climate Assessment, was dismayed to see his work used in a way that reinforced sort of a skeptical narrative.
Part of my work was cherry-picked, sometimes taken out of context, Hausfather explained. This was not an objective search for truth. This was not trying to give policymakers the best information about whats actually happening to the climate. We can disagree about solutions - whether we should focus on nuclear, wind or solar - thats fine. But if the actual science in question becomes politicized, policy ping pongs every four or eight years means were never going to be able to solve the problem.
One of his projects cited in the report indicates the potential projections of greenhouse gas emissions to continue to plateau and potentially decrease as time ticks towards 2100, acknowledging that current policies in place have contributed to that projection. Hausfather warned in his Climate Brink blog, to use current policy scenarios in order to justify the repeal of current policies (as the EPA is attempting to do) rests on a fundamentally flawed premise it would potentially push us to a higher emissions scenario. He also noted that the fact that the world has made some progress in bending down the curve of future emissions should not be used as a justification that climate change is not a problem.
He, alongside about 70 other researchers, is prepping a rebuttal to the DOE report to be submitted as part of the written public comment period.
Hausfather also pointed out that while climate change is a global problem, the U.S. is currently the second-highest emitting country after China, and is historically the largest emitter and therefore should play a role in the solution. He says if the U.S. doesnt work towards building up renewable technology of the future, we really lose out and are already falling behind in terms of global competition, as China is capitalizing on building up that market right now.
A Carbon Brief review found Hausfather and Santer arent alone in their disputes, identifying more than 100 false or misleading claims in the DOE report.
Energy Secretary Chris Wright, however, defended the document in an interview with Scripps News.
We werent mis-citing anyones data or altering anyones data The report, of course, walks through the rise in atmospheric CO2 concentration. They do lead to a warming. That's uncontroversial, Wright said. He added that the reports reference to science fiction was aimed at when people exaggerate claims that aren't there.
He maintained, though, that the DOE doesnt recognize a connection between climate change impacts and increases in severe weather.
You can never hear a politician, a media, or that tiny subset of climate scientists that get to go on TV without saying that storms are more frequent and more intense, or that damages keep growing, that Americans and the world cant afford this havoc from climate change, Wright told Scripps News. Thats just wrong.
However, the growing field of attribution science research focuses on reviewing severe weather events to determine the extent to which human activities have influenced specific extreme weather or climate events.
A recent State of the Climate report from the American Meteorological Society found 2024 was a record-breaking year in terms of greenhouse gas concentrations, air and ocean temperatures, global sea level and glacial ice melt.
Sec. Wright acknowledged that if errors are expressed during this weeks public comment period, the department will issue corrections in the report. But for researchers like Santer, the damage is already done.
I think it's disingenuous, Santer said. Sadly, the bottom line is that the error-rich DOE report is already muddying the waters on the reality and seriousness of climate change. If Secretary Wright was truly interested in getting the science right, he should have done so before the DOE report was released. And he should have ensured that the review process for the report was rigorous and transparent. He failed to do that.
Its not just scientists and environmentalists that are outraged over the move so is the legal community. A new lawsuit alleges the DOE quietly arranged five handpicked skeptics to author the report in violation of federal policymaking law.
Federal law requires that when the government brings together a group of people to provide expertise or advice, the public deserves to know what is going on. But the Trump administration violated that requirement, said Erin Murphy, a senior attorney with the Environmental Defense Fund, which, alongside the Union of Concerned Scientists, filed the lawsuit against Energy Secretary Wright, DOE, EPA and Administrator Zeldin.
What were seeing here is the Trump administration trying to do things in secret to undermine the basic reality that were all facing, which is that climate change is harmful to us, Murphy added. These deeply harmful actions will worsen pollution and raise costs for Americans.
The Environmental Defense Fund tells Scripps News the government has not yet responded to its lawsuit. Secretary Wright, meanwhile, dismissed the claims as crazy in an interview with Scripps News.
They want control over an alarmist narrative because that's the way they can raise money for fear-mongering groups and for special interests, he said.
The public comment period continues this week; if the proposal ultimately goes through, overturning the endangerment finding would mean the EPA no longer has the obligation legally to limit how much greenhouse gas pollution is dumped into the air.
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