By admin January 23, 2025 – Documents released by environmental groups Thursday shed new light on the process the Trump administration used to create the report that supported the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) proposal to repeal the “endangerment finding.”
The endangerment finding—the agency’s own ruling that greenhouse gas emissions are contributing to climate change and therefore endanger human health and the environment— has enabled the government to regulate greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Air Act. The ruling has direct implications on both emissions from, and the stability of, the food system.
When the EPA proposed getting rid of it in July, the agency relied heavily on a new report produced by a Climate Working Group consisting of five “independent scientists.” In a press release from the Department of Energy at the time, agency officials said the report found “U.S. policy actions are expected to have undetectably small direct impacts on the global climate and any effects will emerge only with long delays.”
Environmental groups sued the agencies, and the documents released yesterday came out of that lawsuit.
In a summary posted to their website, the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) said the documents show the DOE emphasized the process should be secret, despite the law requiring federal advisory committee meetings to be public. They also said the records show that group members “recognized their objective was to ‘call into question’ the basis for EPA’s long-standing determination that greenhouse gas pollution endangers public health and welfare.”
Emails released by the EDF show group members discussing the fact that they barely examined human health or welfare impacts during the process. Internal reviewers at the DOE also identified many issues with the scientific rigor of the report, but their comments were mostly ignored.
“With court-mandated government disclosure of these records, it is clear that the Trump Administration unlawfully pursued a secretive effort to develop a fatally tainted report, abdicating its responsibility to protect public health and well-being,” Erin Murphy, EDF Senior Attorney and Director of Clean Air and Energy Markets, said in a statement.
Experts say climate policy rollbacks since Trump took office are likely to make it harder for farmers to grow food, threaten global food security, and lead to tens of thousands of premature deaths from pollution exposure. (Link to this post.)
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