More than a dozen health and environmental justice nonprofits have sued the Environmental Protection Agency over a legal decision to strengthen US federal climate regulations.
Filed in Washington DC Circuit Court, the lawsuit challenges the EPA’s rollback of the “endangerment finding” claiming that increased heat-trapping pollution in the atmosphere harms public health and welfare and allowed the EPA to limit emissions from vehicles, power plants and other industrial sources.
The suit was brought by the American Public Health Association, American Lung Association, Center for Biological Diversity, Environmental Defense Fund, Natural Resources Defense Council, Sierra Club and 11 other public health and environmental organizations. The lawsuit was filed by green legal organizations Clean Air Task Force and EarthJustice, and it names the EPA and agency administrator Lee Zeldin as defendants.
“EPA’s catastrophic finding and repeal of protections to limit vehicle emissions represents a complete disregard for the agency’s mission to protect public health and its legal responsibility under the Clean Air Act,” said Gretchen Goldman, president and CEO of the Union of Concerned Scientists. “This disgraceful and dangerous action by the Trump Administrator and EPA Administrator Zeldin is rooted in lies rather than facts and is completely contrary to the public interest and the best available science.”
Last week Donald Trump hailed the finding as “the single largest regulatory action in American history,” and Zeldin said the Obama and Biden administrations used the dangerous finding to “bring into existence a left-wing wish list of expensive climate policies.”
Asked about criticism of the move and potential legal challenges last week, an EPA spokesman said: “The Trump EPA is pursuing legislation that ends the bogus overreach of previous administrations by agenda-driven climate zealots.”
Asked Thursday about the environmental and health concerns of critics of the rollback, Trump said: “I would tell them, don’t worry about it because it has nothing to do with public health.”
