Trump Administration Action Runs Counter to Decades of Environmental Protection

This afternoon, the Trump Administration announced a major rollback of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s efforts to curb air pollution from vehicles that causes climate change. The EPA proposed to rescind the "endangerment finding" – the agency’s 2009 finding that greenhouse gases pose a danger to public health and welfare that forms the legal basis for federal actions to limit climate-changing air pollution under the Clean Air Act. This action, if finalized, would remove longstanding regulations crucial to protecting Americans from dangerous pollution and worsening climate hazards.

“Rescinding the Endangerment Finding would contradict decades of legal precedent and sound science,” said Kate Zyla, Georgetown Climate Center’s Executive Director. “Floods, wildfires, drought, extreme heat, and rising sea levels exacerbated by climate change affect the lives of all Americans and their communities, every day, in every corner of the country. Vehicles are the largest U.S. source of dangerous greenhouse gas emissions contributing to climate change, and taking away EPA’s ability to regulate those emissions makes it unnecessarily harder to solve this existential problem.”

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