From The New York Times:
24 States Sue the E.P.A. for Renouncing Its Power to Fight Climate Change
The suit accuses the agency of illegally repealing the endangerment finding, the scientific assessment that required it to regulate greenhouse gases.
Reporting from Washington
A coalition of 24 states, along with a dozen cities and counties, sued the Trump administration on Thursday over its decision to relinquish the government’s legal authority to fight climate change.
The lawsuit was filed in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. It is expected to be consolidated with a case that environmental groups filed in February, making for one of the largest legal challenges to date against the Trump administration’s unraveling of federal climate policy.
The states are arguing that the Environmental Protection Agency acted illegally when it rescinded a 2009 scientific conclusion that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases threaten public health and welfare. That determination, known as the endangerment finding, formed the legal basis for the E.P.A. to regulate emissions from automobile tailpipes, power plant smokestacks, oil and gas wells, and other sources.
Decades of scientific research has found that emissions from burning fossil fuels are warming the atmosphere, acidifying the oceans and supercharging heat waves, droughts, wildfires and other extreme weather.
The lawsuit seeks to reinstate the endangerment finding, forcing the Trump administration to retain the government’s authority to regulate greenhouse gas pollution even if it doesn’t exercise that power.
The suit also seeks to reverse a related E.P.A. move that repealed limits on greenhouse gases produced by motor vehicles. Transportation is the largest single source of greenhouse gases in the United States, accounting for more than a third of total climate pollution.
“The endangerment finding is critical for us to protect the health and well-being of our families, of our kids,” Andrea Joy Campbell, the attorney general of Massachusetts, which is leading the lawsuit along with California, New York and Connecticut, said in an interview. She accused the E.P.A. of “blatant violations of the law” in repealing it.
“The E.P.A. came out with no new science, no new law or legal precedent that would allow them to walk away from the endangerment finding,” said Ms. Campbell, a Democrat like all the officials who joined the litigation. Also joining the lawsuit were the attorneys general of Arizona, Colorado, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, Nevada, North Carolina, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia, Washington State, Wisconsin and the District of Columbia, as well as the governor of Pennsylvania.
“Across our country, communities are already suffering from climate disasters,” Letitia James, the New York attorney general, said in a statement. “Instead of helping Americans face our new reality, the Trump administration has chosen denial, repealing critical protections that are foundational to the federal government’s response to climate change.”
The Trump administration has already begun to repeal federal rules imposed by the Biden administration on cars and trucks, coal-fired power plants and other sources of climate pollution. But getting rid of the endangerment finding was seen as a way to tear out climate regulations at their roots.
That’s because, if courts uphold the repeal, the E.P.A. would have no legal authority to regulate greenhouse gases and future presidents would not be able to restore limits on them through the federal rule-making process.
Brigit Hirsch, a spokeswoman for the E.P.A., said in a statement that the agency conducted a “robust analysis of the law” and concluded that the Clean Air Act does not allow it to regulate vehicle emissions for the purpose of addressing climate change.
“In the absence of such authority, the Endangerment Finding is not valid, and E.P.A. cannot retain the regulations that resulted from it,” Ms. Hirsch said.
The United States is currently the world’s second-largest climate polluter, after China. It also is the world’s biggest historic emitter since the Industrial Revolution, responsible for more than 20 percent of all carbon dioxide emissions since 1751. That distinction matters because past emissions of long-lived greenhouse gases significantly contribute to current and future warming.
President Trump has called climate change a “hoax,” and his cabinet secretaries have claimed the planet’s rapid warming is having little effect on humanity. But the E.P.A. didn’t make those arguments when it repealed the endangerment finding, and instead zeroed in on the law.
The agency declared that the Clean Air Act of 1970 allows the government to limit only pollution that causes direct harm to Americans. Greenhouse gases, which collect in the atmosphere to form a blanket-like layer that traps heat from the Earth’s surface and carry global effects, do not meet that criteria, the agency argued.
In the new lawsuit, the states said that opponents of tackling climate change already tried to use the E.P.A.’s argument nearly two decades ago, when they sought to prevent the government from being able to address climate change. The Supreme Court rejected the move in a landmark 2007 case known as Massachusetts v. E.P.A.
Justices in that case found that greenhouse gases are air pollutants under the Clean Air Act, and that the agency could regulate such emissions if they were found to endanger human health or the environment. The E.P.A. would have to make that determination, they ruled.
Two years later, the E.P.A. issued a nearly 200-page scientific analysis concluding that six specific greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide and methane, endanger current and future generations.
The states may prevail in lower court, Richard Lazarus, a professor of environmental law at Harvard Law School, said. But legal experts widely believe that the Trump administration’s goal is to get the case heard by the Supreme Court in the hopes that the conservative majority will reverse the 2007 ruling, which was decided on a 5-4 vote.
None of the justices who voted in the majority then are still on the court.
“It’s really hard to say what the Supreme Court would do, but it’s certainly an open issue for them,” Mr. Lazarus said.
Lisa Friedman is a Times reporter who writes about how governments are addressing climate change and the effects of those policies on communities.
ADVERTISEMENT
Trump Administration Readies Plans to Dismantle Renowned Science Lab
Proposals include transferring a supercomputer to the University of Wyoming and shifting a space weather lab to a private company.
The Trump administration is reviewing proposals to break up one of the world’s leading climate and weather laboratories, transfer its work to universities and private companies, take away its aircraft, and sell its property in Boulder, Colo.
The laboratory, the National Center for Atmospheric Research, has been targeted for months by the Trump administration. In a social media post in December, Russell Vought, the White House budget director, called the Colorado center “one of the largest sources of climate alarmism in the country.”
The center, founded in 1960, is responsible for many of the biggest scientific advances in understanding of weather and climate. Its research aircraft and sophisticated computer models of the Earth’s atmosphere and oceans are widely used in forecasting weather events and disasters.
Scientists say the move to dismantle the center would weaken research that is crucial to understanding the atmosphere, space and oceans, air pollution and climate change. It would leave emergency officials and planners less prepared for extreme weather events, critics said.
ADVERTISEMENT
The center’s staff includes about 830 employees working under the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, a nonprofit consortium of colleges and universities that oversees the center for the federal government.
The center also operates a massive supercomputer, known as Derecho, in Cheyenne, Wyo., that scientists use to predict the behavior of wildfires, space weather, hurricanes and other complex weather patterns.
Proposals are due on Friday to the National Science Foundation from institutions that want to take over management of the center’s research portfolio and various facilities; comments from the public about the center’s future are also due then.
Michael England, a spokesman for N.S.F., which oversees the center, said the proposals and comments from interested parties would not be made public. He would not say when the officials would make a final decision about the fate of the center.
“I don’t have anything on that for you,” Mr. England said.
Colorado’s elected officials have been fighting to preserve the center. Putting it on the chopping block would also be an economic blow to the state. President Trump has feuded with Gov. Jared Polis, a Democrat, over Mr. Trump’s pardoning of a former Colorado election official who was convicted of multiple state felonies after she gave Mr. Trump’s supporters unauthorized access to voting machines after the 2020 presidential election.
ADVERTISEMENT
“Breaking up the institution would have detrimental impacts,” Gov. Polis said in a statement on Thursday. “People evacuate more quickly and safely from fires because of NCAR.”
The center’s data, Mr. Polis said, “improve forecasting of severe weather events like fires and floods, support safer aviation and transportation, and help businesses and communities make informed decisions.”
In a letter to the N.S.F.’s acting director, Brian Stone, Representatives Joe Neguse, a Democrat, and Jeff Hurd, a Republican, wrote that dismantling the center would increase costs and “erode critical research capacity, disrupt longstanding partnerships, and diminish our ability to understand, anticipate and respond to extreme weather-related risks.”
Mr. Neguse said that the proposals and comments should be made public, and that he intended to press N.S.F. should it refrain from doing so.
He has asked the N.S.F. inspector general to review allegations from a whistle-blower that Trump administration officials began negotiating the transfer of the center’s space weather program to a private company in January, before the review had been completed.
ADVERTISEMENT
According to Mr. Neguse’s letter to the inspector general, the whistle-blower confirmed the report with an employee of an unnamed for-profit company during a January meeting of the American Meteorological Society in Houston.
“I remain deeply concerned about any attempts to improperly transfer public assets to private companies,” Mr. Neguse wrote.
Scott Rayder, the chief executive of Lynker, a firm in Leesburg, Va., that provides space weather forecasts for the U.S. military and other federal agencies, said that he was submitting a proposal to the N.S.F. to take over management of the center’s High Altitude Observatory, whose scientists study solar flares, space radiation and other atmospheric phenomena.
“Our thinking here was that this is important and we need to save it,” Mr. Rayder said about the observatory. “These are critical functions. If you are going to break them up, don’t let them go. They need to be kept together.”
Mr. Rayder said in an interview that his firm had not been negotiating with officials from the Trump administration. Scott McIntosh, Lynker’s vice president for space operations, was the deputy director at the center until 2024 and also ran the observatory.
ADVERTISEMENT
The University of Oklahoma is making a proposal to the N.S.F. “on how the nation can best preserve that legacy and organize our atmospheric science capabilities to meet current and future needs,” said Matthew Wade Hulver, the university’s vice president for research and partnerships.
The University of Wyoming has begun negotiations with N.S.F. officials about taking over management of the Derecho supercomputer, according to Chad Baldwin, a university spokesman.
Mr. Baldwin said it was too early to know who would set the research priorities for the supercomputer. But some scientists say the university’s goals may not match the priorities of the larger U.S. scientific research community.
“How much will be focused on climate versus weather versus other disciplines?” said Carlos Javier Martinez, chief climate scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, an advocacy group, and a former postdoctoral researcher at the center.
“It feels rushed,” Dr. Martinez said about the N.S.F. process. “I question whether the public comment period is of good faith.”
ADVERTISEMENT
Also unclear is the fate of the center’s Mesa Laboratory, which was founded in 1960, designed by the famed architect I.M. Pei, and used as the setting for the 1973 Woody Allen sci-fi comedy film “Sleeper.”
In a January letter, the N.S.F. said that it wanted proposals to sell the buildings and transfer the center’s two high-flying research aircraft to another federal agency.
The Latest on the Trump Administration
Tulsi Gabbard: In a Senate hearing, the director of national intelligence said she had turned over the duty to make nonpolitical judgments about threats to American security to President Trump.
Prosecuting Protesters: The Justice Department has struggled to prove in court what the president and his aides have repeatedly said in public: that a network of leftist activists presents a serious threat to national security.
FEMA: The agency said it would relaunch a program that had helped states invest in projects that made communities more resilient to natural disasters. In December, a judge ruled the Trump administration’s decision to end the program was illegal.
America’s 250th Anniversary: A closed-door meeting at the White House provided a window into the ideas driving the Trump administration’s approach to this year’s event, which included a strong emphasis on religion.
Senator Markwayne Mullin: The nominee for homeland security secretary suggested that he had observed war firsthand but declined to provide details, which he said were “classified.”
Voice of America: Christopher Wallace, a news director at the pro-Trump Newsmax network, was named the next deputy director at the international broadcaster, according to an internal email, raising concerns that the Trump administration would try to erode its independence.
How We Report on the Trump Administration
Hundreds of readers asked about our coverage of the president. Times editors and reporters responded to some of the most common questions.
No comments:
Post a Comment