Environmental and public health groups are suing the Trump administration over its most recent move to eliminate protections against climate-warming pollution.
The Environmental Protection Agency announced a plan on Monday, finalized in the Federal Register on Thursday, to revoke most of a Biden-era rule to limit greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel power plants. The agency also proposed getting rid of all remaining greenhouse gas emission requirements for the plants, doubling down on climate denial.
Opposing the final rule, the American Lung Association, Natural Resources Defense Council, Environmental Defense Fund and others submitted a petition Thursday asking the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit to review the changes. Leaders from the groups called the EPA plan unlawful and said it would endanger human health and the environment by worsening climate change, while triggering billions of dollars of healthcare costs.
“By rolling back these critical protections, millions of Americans will get sicker, face more extreme weather, and pay more for energy and electricity, with vulnerable communities suffering the most,” said Lawrence Hafetz, legal director of the Pennsylvania-based Clean Air Council, one of the groups involved, in a statement. “EPA is supposed to protect people and the environment, not rewrite the rules to benefit polluters.”
The EPA’s announcement came on the heels of a summer of deadly and record-breaking heat, massive wildfires and, last month in Nepal, devastating floods from glacial collapse that killed at least 1,300 people—and which scientists confirmed this week were precipitated by human-caused climate change. Meanwhile, a new United Nations report said current emissions are rapidly pushing the world into even more intensifying dangers.
Globally, the U.S. is the largest historic emitter of greenhouse gases, which are primarily produced by burning fossil fuels.
The EPA said it does not comment on pending litigation. The agency did not respond to questions about critiques of its rule.
The second Trump administration’s efforts to claw back climate protections have been met with a wave of lawsuits, most of which still await a ruling. Among them are challenges to the repeal of the 2009 endangerment finding, which found that climate pollution threatens public health. Last week, federal judges ruled in favor of environmental groups who argued the administration’s use of emergency orders to keep old coal plants running was illegal.
“The courts are our last line of defense,” said Pat Parenteau, a climate law expert at Vermont Law & Graduate School. “I’m reasonably optimistic that the lawsuits are going to prevail against the Trump administration because [the administration’s] legal positions are frivolous, frankly.”
But Parenteau said the newest case will focus on whether it’s been “adequately demonstrated” that meeting the 2024 power plant rule’s requirements, including for carbon capture and sequestration, is feasible. That enters “new territory” for judicial review, he said.
“The courts are going to have to look very carefully at all of the evidence that’s being brought before them for how much has this technology matured, at what scales, for what purposes,” he said. “This will be a very technical review.”
Frank Sturges, a senior staff attorney at the Clean Air Task Force who represents some of the groups in the latest lawsuit, said the 2024 rule for coal and gas-fired power plants was based on scientifically, technically and legally sound evidence that the repeal failed to engage with. Scrapping the rule was unlawful, Sturges said, and fits into a broader pattern from the administration.
“What we see here is a rush to try to eliminate standards that are well-founded … and the arguments that have been put forward to repeal them really lack a lawful basis,” Sturges said. “This is not the only place we’re seeing that happening right now.”
The EPA’s choice to eliminate the Biden-era standards instead of attempting to replace them with weaker standards undermines the notion that the case is about a technical debate, added Sean H. Donahue, an attorney representing the Environmental Defense Fund in the lawsuit.
“They’re trying to make climate change disappear from federal policy across the board, and this is part of that,” Donahue said.
In 2024, during the Biden administration, the EPA estimated that its strengthened standards for coal and gas-fired power plants would avoid up to 1,200 premature deaths and 360,000 asthma symptom cases in 2035 alone, among many other health benefits. The agency projected a reduction of 1.38 billion metric tons of carbon pollution through 2047, the equivalent of taking 328 million gas cars off the roads.
A new analysis this week from the Environmental Defense Fund estimates the repeal of those standards will add 7.5 billion metric tons of climate pollution, equivalent to the annual pollution of 1.6 billion cars, and cause up to 84,000 premature deaths by 2047.
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The lawsuit was “inevitable,” said Michael Gerrard, founder and faculty director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University. He added that the groups have a strong case that the EPA’s actions violate the Clean Air Act.
“The claims by EPA that greenhouse gas emissions do not cause endangerment fly in the face of mountains of contrary scientific evidence,” Gerrard said. “So I think that’s very vulnerable.”
He added that nearly all of the Trump administration’s actions on the environment are being challenged in court.
A judicial review of regulatory policy during the first Trump administration from New York University School of Law’s Institute for Policy Integrity found that the Trump administration only won 23 percent of legal challenges to agency actions, compared with a rate of about 70 percent in previous administrations.
Gerrard said many of those defeats were based on procedural failures.
“They’re not being any more careful this time,” he said, “so I wouldn’t be surprised to see a comparable success rate at the end of the second Trump administration.”
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Reporter, Health and Justice
Keerti Gopal covers intersections between climate change, public health and environmental justice at Inside Climate News. Previously, she covered climate activism and movement repression. She is a National Geographic Explorer and has received fellowships from Fulbright, the Solutions Journalism Network, The Lever, and the National Press Foundation.
