After months of telegraphing the move, the Trump administration today officially repealed the EPA’s 2009 “endangerment finding,” which found that greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and methane were a threat to human health and welfare.
The finding had so far supported the agency’s regulation of greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act. Currently, the new rule only applies to car and truck tailpipe emissions, but it’s expected to be the first of several similar changes to federal air pollution regulations.
Before the endangerment finding can be fully repealed, though, the EPA must go through a lengthy process. The original finding took two years to put in place.
The move by Lee Zeldin, the EPA administrator, will slow the decline in emissions by about 10%, according to Axios. That’s a significant amount, but not enough to reverse the trend, partly because cheap renewables have dominated new electricity generation capacity in recent years.
“This action will only lead to more pollution, and that will lead to higher costs and real harms for American families,” Fred Krupp, president of the Environmental Defense Fund, told TechCrunch in a statement.
Unabated climate change is expected to raise mortality rates by around 2% in the U.S., and it could reduce global GDP by 17% by 2050, or about $38 trillion.