Schumer, Whitehouse: EPA Abandons Its Duty to Protect the American People

Washington, D.C. – Today, Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), Ranking Member of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works (EPW), issued the following statement after Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Lee Zeldin announced the repeal of EPA’s 2009 greenhouse gas endangerment finding.  The repeal constitutes a formal denial by EPA that greenhouse gases pose a threat to public health and welfare, a position that defies decades of scientific evidence, agency precedent, Supreme Court rulings, and perhaps most importantly, the lived experiences of millions of Americans.  Repealing it sets the stage for rolling back pollution standards for power plants, airplanes, and more.  

“The Trump EPA has fully abandoned its duty to protect the American people from greenhouse gas pollution and climate change.  This shameful abdication—an economic, moral, and political failure—will harm Americans’ health, homes, and economic well-being.  It ignores scientific fact and common-sense observations to serve big political donors.

“This sham decision initially relied on a now thoroughly disgraced and abandoned ‘report’ by known climate deniers.  Zeldin stuck to this charade anyway, undaunted by half a century of actual evidence, showing the fix was in from the beginning.

“Trump’s fossil fuel corruption defies the will of the American people and undermines U.S. economic competitiveness at a moment when climate costs are already hitting families hard.  The cascading failures have begun: climate change is disrupting weather and destabilizing insurance markets, and it threatens to upend mortgage markets, crash home values, and trash the entire economy.  As climate change drives up insurance premiums, grocery prices, energy costs, and health care spending, American families will be left holding the bill.  

“Ironically, stripping away federal preemption leaves these fossil fuel companies more vulnerable to litigation for the harms their products cause.  States, tribes, and local governments should take up the mantle and hold Big Oil accountable for the decades of devastation it has inflicted on the American people.”

Leader Schumer and Ranking Member Whitehouse previously led the entire Senate Democratic Caucus in demanding the Trump Administration withdraw its legally deficient and factually inaccurate proposed rollback.  The Senators called the repeal of the climate and public health protection a “dereliction of duty” and a “blatant failure to protect the American people.” 

Ranking Member Whitehouse also excoriated the legal infirmities in EPA’s proposal.  The Senator described the proposed rollback as “political rhetoric masquerading as legal and scientific reasoning” that “serves no purpose beyond regulatory corporate welfare to President Trump’s fossil fuel industry donors, its only beneficiaries.”  Not only did EPA’s proposed rollback “rel[y] on untenable interpretations of the Clean Air Act and applicable precedent to justify its conclusions,” but it ignored the “near-absolute scientific consensus that climate change poses dire threats to humanity’s collective future and must be addressed.”

None of the issues raised in these comments were meaningfully addressed in EPA’s final ruling.