CSLDF opposes Trump administration’s attempt to repeal endangerment finding
Yesterday, the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund, with the Jacobs Institute of Women’s Health, submitted a comment opposing the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) attempt to avoid addressing climate change by repealing the Endangerment Finding. This is a direct and jaded attack on scientific truth and would set the stage to dismantle a landmark victory in the battle against climate change.
The Endangerment Finding is a formal determination made by the EPA in 2009 that greenhouse gas emissions contribute to air pollution that endangers public health or welfare. EPA grounded its determination in decades of scientific research, publicly providing a massive trove of evidence to support its conclusion that carbon dioxide, methane, and four other greenhouse gases posed a human health risk. It has been a critical part of the federal government’s legal authority to regulate emissions from vehicles, methane wells, and power plants.
Despite the scientific evidence about the health and welfare risks of greenhouse gases only strengthening in recent years, the Trump administration is set to repeal the Endangerment Finding. To justify the proposed rule, the government relies on a draft Department of Energy (DOE) report that mischaracterizes and subverts the facts about climate change.
The ploy is hard to believe. The DOE report – now the foundation to dismantle decades of global scientific consensus underpinning the Endangerment Finding – was created by only five well-known climate contrarians, many of whom have previous ties to the fossil fuel industry. Assembled in secret to avoid public scrutiny, these authors created and published their report in mere weeks without any peer review. Simply put, the report fails to adequately or even accurately represent the scientific understanding of climate change. A thorough review of the DOE report by renowned climate scientists found over 100 false or misleading claims, including “factual errors, misrepresentation of research, messy citations and the cherry-picking of data.”
The DOE report violates the tenets of scientific integrity, and it reflects an alarming pattern of sidelining experts and ignoring evidence. Ironically, this report also undermines a recent Trump executive order (EO-14303), “Restoring Gold Standard Science,” which mandated that best available science be utilized in agency decision-making.
The Climate Science Defense Fund will not remain silent as this proposed rule twists and subverts the scientific endeavor to serve a dangerous deregulatory agenda. As our Silencing Science Tracker already documents over 100 attacks on the scientific endeavor by the second Trump administration, we will continue to fight for scientific integrity. As such, we are proud to co-author this comment, which explains how this fatally flawed DOE report fits into Trump’s broader anti-science agenda and details many of the fallacies within this proposed rule. We are also pleased to have joined another comment with Democracy Forward and other groups.
CSLDF offers free guides on how to participate in notice and comment rulemaking, as well as other resources concerning advocacy, activism, and First Amendment rights. Please feel free to contact us with any questions at lawyer@csldf.org.