One of the biggest mysteries surrounding President Donald Trump’s EPA is how it plans to revoke the agency’s greenhouse gas (GHG) endangerment finding. Experts said EPA may be betting that it can upend the scientific finding without taking direct aim at the overwhelming evidence that GHGs are driving up global temperatures.
Instead, EPA could raise questions about whether a sector, or even the whole country, contributes enough climate pollution globally to warrant regulation. The agency may also try to redefine how air pollution can harm the public — a necessary predicate for regulating GHGs under the Clean Air Act.
“Maybe they’ll change their mind, but they seem to have an idea of how they want to go about revoking the finding,” Bracewell’s Jeff Holmstead told Politico’s E&E News.
Experts see hints of that strategy in a relatively detailed press release the agency issued last month. Holmstead called the document “very telling.” He and other experts say the administration may take aim at the cost increases that regulations have on energy and other pillars of Americans’ lives, not at atmospheric science directly. That could allow EPA to skip the cumbersome process of assembling panels of contrarian scientists to build an alternative record on the indisputable link between human emissions and global warming.
“They can probably get it out in the next few months,” Holmstead said of a proposed endangerment finding that focuses on regulatory costs. “They won’t need to spend a lot of time — and Federal Register pages — reviewing the science.”
