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It’s official: The Trump Administration has killed the legal and scientific basis for U.S. action on greenhouse gas emissions.
During a Thursday press briefing, President Trump and Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Lee Zeldin announced the repeal of the agency’s “endangerment finding,” which ruled in 2009 that planet-warming gases such as carbon dioxide are dangerous to human health and welfare. This landmark determination has empowered the U.S. to regulate greenhouse gas emissions for nearly two decades.
Basically, if American climate policy was a house of cards, the Trump administration just pulled the card keeping the whole thing standing.
Environmentalists have been bracing for this for months. Zeldin first announced the EPA’s bid to repeal the finding while speaking at an Indiana auto dealership in July. In its proposal, the agency argued that the move would save Americans $54 billion annually through the elimination of all greenhouse gas standards for motor vehicles and engines, including Biden’s electric vehicle mandate.
Of course, that rationale was the central focus of the Thursday briefing. Trump called the move “the single largest deregulatory action in American history” and admonished the endangerment finding as “a disastrous Obama-era policy that severely damaged the American auto industry and massively drove up prices for American consumers.”
“This is a big deal,” Zeldin said. “This action will save American taxpayers over $1.3 trillion.”
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Source: Gizmodo