The decision last week by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to revoke a 16-year-old ruling that has underpinned action on vehicle exhaust and fossil infrastructure emissions has left US climate action on greenhouse gas emissions in turmoil. But how big an impact is this single decision likely to have on regulating climate-warming gases?
The 2009 ‘endangerment finding’ by the EPA recognised that rising levels of greenhouse gases threatened the lives of the public in the US. It has formed the basis of the agency’s authority to regulate climate-warming gases such as carbon dioxide and methane. The revocation will have widespread consequences on innovation at home and abroad and for investors, although it has already provoked a swathe of legal challenges. ‘Let’s be clear, it’s not a decision based on science,’ says Ray Minjares, who leads on the deployment of zero-emission lorries and buses for the International Council on Clean Transportation.
Alongside revoking the ‘endangerment finding’ the EPA removed regulations on vehicle exhaust emissions, its first application under the US Clean Air Act. Observers fear it paves the way for dismantling regulations on a host of point source emissions from power plants to steel furnaces and cement kilns.
The endangerment finding is ‘what one might call a linchpin: once you take that out, then a lot of things could start crashing to the ground with respect to climate, and climate protection through regulation and law’, says David Widawsky, at the World Resources Institute, who’s a former director of the Greenhouse Gas Reduction fund at the EPA.
Not only did the finding provide the foundation for regulation but for ‘a lot of economic activity and innovation and industries that developed around supporting the management of greenhouse gases’, he adds.
One concern centres on the fate of regulations to cut methane emissions from oil and gas facilities, which were expected to prevent 53 million tonnes of methane from escaping into the atmosphere. It was one of 31 regulatory policies identified by the EPA’s director, Lee Zeldin, for review.
Modelling of the trajectory of US emissions published last year by the Rhodium Group suggested that if those policies (including the endangerment finding) remained in place greenhouse gas emissions would fall by 32–44% by 2035. However, without them, emissions would only fall by 26–35%. The US had pledged a 61–66% reduction in emissions by 2035, compared with 2005, before it left the Paris Agreement.
Transport is the largest source of US energy-related emissions but now, for the first time anywhere in the world, there are no regulations on vehicle exhaust pollutants and manufacturers won’t have to design more efficient vehicles – a situation Minjares suggests could continue to the end of the decade. The new vehicle standards introduced in 2024 had been expected to cut 6 billion tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions by 2055.
States can still take action
While he doubts any US state will be able to design a new vehicle standard without a change in federal policy, Minjares says they can take other action. ‘The Clean Air Act still allows states the freedom to regulate the use and behaviour of vehicles,’ he says, so they could preferentially lower licensing and registration fees on zero emission vehicles while maintaining or increasing them on fossil vehicles. It’s been an effective policy in other parts of the world, he adds, such as Norway.
States can also require utilities to procure an ever-increasing share of their electricity from renewable energy sources.
Many US states that form part of climate alliances such as America is All In have said they will continue to decarbonise. ‘What these states need to do is find a way to maintain markets for those technologies and for those companies, and that means ensuring that their policies sustain some level of demand,’ says Minjares.
The upshot of individual state action means ‘it’s going to become a fairly colourful tapestry of regulation’, suggests Widawsky. He expects that for the ‘foreseeable future’ management of greenhouse gases will be done for business reasons – to reduce costs or to meet international regulation such as the EU’s carbon border adjustment mechanism, which came into force this year.
However long it takes to resolve legal actions in the courts, the question is whether any future administration can restore the obligations being ripped up by the EPA. ‘It’s always harder to put something back together than it is to tear it apart,’ Widawsky observes. ‘I think in a future world, it’s possible. It’s not going to be trivial, it’s going to be a lot of work, and there’s going to be a lot of damage on the way.’
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