Last month, SACE published an article raising the alarm that political appointees at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) are doing the bidding of oil and gas lobbyists and sabotaging the agency’s own ability to protect people and the environment by scrubbing science out of its policies, programs, and staffing. This self-sabotage came to a head on July 25 when EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin announced that the EPA would be rescinding the scientific finding that greenhouse gas emissions are harmful air pollution, a concept formally called the “Endangerment Finding.”
This article aims to delve deeper into this troubling action, explaining in simple terms what the EPA’s action entails and what we can do as Americans to oppose this egregious proposal.
Context: What’s Going On At EPA These Days?
It’s impossible to understand the Endangerment Finding recission proposal without first understanding the broader context of what is happening at the EPA under President Trump.
As we profiled in another recent article, under the Trump administration, the EPA’s leadership has become stacked with former lobbyists and lawyers for polluting industries, creating a situation where the fox is dangerously guarding the henhouse. In the past six months, high-level positions at the EPA have been filled by individuals who previously worked for the chemical industry trade group, the oil and gas industry trade group, and various oil, chemical, pipeline, and energy companies. These political appointees have been methodically enacting an agenda to give free rein to corporate polluters. This agenda will harm people’s health and the environment with impunity by sabotaging the EPA’s willingness and abilities to carry out its sole mission: to protect people and the environment. They are eliminating rules to prevent polluters from harming the environment; giving a free pass to corporate polluters; and stripping the agency of its ability to do research, enforce environmental rules, or fund environmental programs.
The current proposal to eliminate the Endangerment Finding, and thus sabotage the EPA’s regulatory authority, can only start to make any sense when it’s understood that EPA’s current political leadership is not as interested in protecting people and the environment as it is in protecting the profits of polluting industries.
What is the Endangerment Finding?
The Endangerment Finding is a cornerstone of the body of law that allows the federal government to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, which cause climate change. It can be considered an extension of the Clean Air Act, which states that the EPA shall establish limits on any air pollutant that causes or contributes to air pollution that may reasonably be anticipated to endanger public health or welfare. In the late 1990s and the 2000s, a series of legal proceedings ended up at the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled in 2007 that greenhouse gas emissions are indeed air pollutants according to the Clean Air Act, and that the EPA has the legal authority to regulate them, and thus an obligation to establish pollution limits if they are a danger. The court also ordered the EPA to determine whether greenhouse gas emissions reach the legal threshold of being reasonably anticipated to endanger public health or welfare.
The EPA subsequently undertook a rigorous process to document the large body of scientific understanding about greenhouse gas emissions’ effect on climate change and impact on people, and formalized their decision in 2009, when the EPA published the Endangerment Finding. The publication of the Endangerment Finding put the EPA on the record officially determining that “six greenhouse gases taken in combination endanger both the public health and the public welfare of current and future generations.”
With the Supreme Court’s decision that the EPA has the authority and obligation to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, and the EPA’s finding that greenhouse gas emissions indeed endanger the public, the stage was set for the EPA to establish limits on greenhouse gas pollution from vehicles, power plants, and oil and gas operations.
What is the EPA’s Current Proposal?
On July 25, Administrator Zeldin announced that the EPA was moving to eliminate the Endangerment Finding completely. This move was not a surprise. Zeldin previously announced that he would target the Finding, which was a specific target of the Project 2025 anti-government playbook last year. What was, however, surprising to many experts once the written proposal was made public, was the array of arguments the EPA used to try to justify such a move, including the claim that the EPA does not have the authority to regulate greenhouse gases at all under the Clean Air Act – essentially the same argument that the Supreme Court rejected in 2007 and later stuck to in multiple subsequent court cases. But in case that argument fails in court, the EPA is also offering other demonstrably false reasons for their proposal, including that climate warming really isn’t necessarily all that bad, and also that even if climate change is truly harmful to Americans, the cost of climate regulations outweighs the benefits.
Learn more about the EPA’s proposal:
A Legal Analysis of the Trump EPA’s Plan to Revoke the Endangerment Finding by Earthjustice
Why Does This Proposal Matter?
Climate change is causing staggering harm to people and the environment, and the harm is only growing. The federal government absolutely has a responsibility to do what it can to help us protect ourselves from these harms, and EPA limits on climate pollution under the Clean Air Act are the most effective tool that the executive branch has at its disposal to do so.
By rescinding the Endangerment Finding, the EPA could undo federal limits on greenhouse gas pollution from vehicles, power plants, and the oil and gas industry. Depending on how courts rule on the legal challenges that will no doubt be filed against this action, it’s possible that a future presidential administration could reinstate a new endangerment finding, or it’s even possible that the rescission could end up barring future administrations from establishing any limits on harmful greenhouse gas pollution under the Clean Air Act.
In an interesting twist, legal experts have raised the possibility that if the EPA declines to regulate greenhouse gas emissions at the federal level, individual corporate polluters such as power utilities may get exposed to legal liability and get sued for their climate pollution. Companies have had the benefit of a legal shield since the EPA has taken responsibility for regulating greenhouse gas emissions across the nation, but that defense may go away if the EPA goes through with rescinding the Endangerment Finding.
SACE’s Take
As expressed in an organizational statement SACE issued upon the announcement of this proposal, President Trump, Administrator Zeldin, and the political decision makers at EPA are recklessly undermining our ability to stave off the worst impacts of climate change, even as we’re paying the price of intensifying flooding, wildfires, hurricanes, and extreme heat. The number of billion-dollar weather and climate disasters — like Hurricanes Helene, Irma, and Milton — has skyrocketed, with the last ten years accounting for nearly half of the costs of such disasters over the entire 44-year period that records have been kept.
SACE’s Executive Director, Dr. Stephen A. Smith, said in our statement:
The Trump administration is recklessly undermining the rules and agencies established to protect Americans’ health and our environment, while at the same time gaslighting Americans by telling us that climate disruption isn’t a threat. We can see with our own eyes the parade of horribles of repeating record-breaking climate disasters. We know that 2024 was the hottest year on record by a wide margin, and each of the last ten years has been the hottest year on record. We’ve had more flash flood warnings in 2025 than ever before, driven by climate warming, and we’ve seen far too many families and communities, such as those in the Texas floods and Hurricane Helene’s path across the Southeast, face the deadly and tragic consequences. It defies logic and common sense for the Trump administration to remove the foundational pillars of our pollution rules when the EPA’s sole job is to protect the people and places we love.
Contrary to Administrator Zeldin’s hopes, the American people are not so gullible that we will be deceived to put blinders on to the climate chaos that is happening all around us.
The EPA must scrap this reckless proposal.
How Can You Oppose EPA’s Dangerous Proposal?
The EPA is taking public comments on the proposal through September 22. We want to make sure that the political appointees hear loud and clear from hundreds of thousands of Americans that their proposal is a dangerous disaster. Please take one minute to submit your comment on the web form here, and it will go directly to the EPA as an official comment. You can either send the pre-written message as is or personalize the message as you see fit.
