Trump revokes the historic decision that greenhouse gases pose a health risk to the public.

US President Donald Trump has reversed a key Obama-era scientific ruling that underpins all federal actions on curbing planet-warming gases.The so-called 2009 “endangerment finding” concluded that a range of greenhouse gases were a threat to public health. It’s become the legal bedrock of federal efforts to rein in emissions, especially in vehicles.
The White House called the reversal the “largest deregulation in American history”, saying it would make cars cheaper, bringing down costs for automakers by $2,400 per vehicle. Environmental groups say the move is by far the most significant rollback on climate change yet attempted and are set to challenge it in the courts.
Speaking in the Oval Office on Thursday, Trump said the 2009 ruling was “a disastrous Obama era policy that severely damaged the American auto industry and massively drove up prices for American consumers”.
“This radical rule became the legal foundation for the Green New Scam, one of the greatest scams in history,” added the Republican president, about the Democrats’ climate agenda.
Former President Barack Obama, who infrequently comments on the policies of sitting presidents, said that repealing the finding would make Americans more vulnerable. “Without it, we’ll be less safe, less healthy and less able to fight climate change — all so the fossil fuel industry can make even more money,” he wrote on X.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) first took a stance on the impacts of greenhouse gases in 2009, in the first year of Obama’s first term.
The agency decided that six key planet-warming greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide and methane, were a danger to human health.
With a divided Congress unable to agree on legislation to tackle rising global temperatures, the EPA finding became central to federal efforts to rein in emissions in the years that followed.
“The endangerment finding has really served as the lynchpin of US regulation of greenhouse gases,” said Meghan Greenfield, a former EPA and Department of Justice attorney.
“So that includes motor vehicles, but it also includes power plants, the oil and gas sector, methane from landfills, even aircraft. So it really runs the gamut, all of the standards for each of the sectors is premised on this one thing.”
Trump administration officials are stressing that overturning the regulation will save more than $1tn and will help cut the price of energy and transport. Reversing the finding will reduce automobile manufacturers’ costs by $2,400 per vehicle, the White House claimed. These regulations have been an economic strain, said Diana Furchtgott-Roth, who served in the US Department of Transportation during the first Trump term.
“The burden on the economy results in higher prices and manufacturing has left. It’s gone to China, where it’s made in a dirtier way,” she told the BBC.
“So to say that we’re reducing global emissions by ending energy intensive manufacturing in some countries, then having it go to China and India, where it’s made in a dirtier way, does not reduce global emissions.”
Many environmentalists are sceptical of the potential cost savings being touted by the Trump team.
“It’s going to force Americans to spend more money, around $1.4tn in additional fuel costs to power these less efficient and higher polluting vehicles,” said Peter Zalzal from the Environmental Defense Fund.
“We’ve also analysed the health impacts and found that the action would result in up to 58,000 additional premature deaths, 37 million more asthma attacks,” he said.
“This rollback is sort of cementing things that have already been done, such as the relaxation of the fuel economy standards,” said Michael Gerrard, a climate law expert from Columbia University. “But it really does put the US automakers in a bind, because nobody else is going to want to buy American cars.”
The scientific basis for the endangerment finding’s reversal will be a major point of contention.Last year, the Department of Energy assembled a group of scientists to produce a paper that questioned the conventional wisdom regarding the warming effects of greenhouse gases.

The original proposal to overturn the 2009 finding was supported by that report.
However, a number of climate specialists expressed dissatisfaction with the study, claiming it was inaccurate and misleading and that the panel that produced it was unrepresentative and full of people who were skeptical of the human influence on warming