Medical and Environmental Groups Challenge EPA's Climate Health Decision

Medical and environmental groups are challenging the EPA’s decision to break with the long-standing scientific evidence that climate change endangers human health. On Wednesday prominent medical and environmental groups challenged the Trump administration’s decision to scrap a 2009 finding that climate change threatens human health. The suit was filed on February 18 by the American Public Health Association (APHA), the American Lung Association, the Union of Concerned Scientists, and several other medical and environmental advocacy groups.

The Environmental Protection Agency “has a duty to consider the well-being and safety of all, and the science is clear; climate change and air pollution threaten everyone’s health,” said Georges Benjamin, chief executive officer of the APHA, in a statement.

The challenge comes days after EPA administrator Lee Zeldin announced that the agency would scrap the 2009 “endangerment finding,” breaking with the long-standing scientific consensus that global warming poses a risk to human health. The finding played a critical role in regulating greenhouse gas emissions from vehicles such as cars and trucks, which accounted for 28 percent of all U.S. emissions in 2022.

The new lawsuit could once more elevate the fight over whether climate change harms health to the Supreme Court. In 2007 the Court decided in the case Massachusetts v. EPA that greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide, qualified as air pollutants under the Clean Air Act. This formed the basis of the endangerment finding, which held that six greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide from combustion engines, did “threaten the public health and welfare of current and future generations.”

Rescinding the endangerment finding removes mileage requirements from automakers and could undermine future regulation of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act.