WASHINGTON, D.C. (March 13, 2025) – Yesterday, Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Lee Zeldin announced that EPA will “reconsider” dozens of environmental protections. EPA’s rules protect millions of Americans from pollution and are crucial to averting the most devastating effects of the climate crisis. A key action on the chopping block is the Endangerment Finding – which is critical to regulating greenhouse gases and curbing climate change.

In 2009, after being ordered by the United States Supreme Court to fulfill its duties, EPA comprehensively reviewed climate science and arrived at an inescapable and long-understood conclusion: emissions of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide are endangering public health and welfare by driving climate change. This determination, known as the “Endangerment Finding,” triggered EPA’s legal duty and provides its corresponding authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. The supporting scientific evidence has since grown exponentially stronger while Americans and the global community have suffered from the increased deadly fires, storms, floods, droughts, heat waves, and other impacts from climate disruption. 

Yet now Zeldin’s EPA seeks to abdicate its duties to protect Americans from this threat to our health, economy, and national security by withdrawing the Endangerment Finding and vital environmental regulations. By denying the reality all around us and falsely declaring that greenhouse gases do not threaten human health, EPA would no longer be required to regulate them.

Alex Bomstein, Clean Air Council Executive Director, issued the following statement: 

“Scientists have known that greenhouse gases cause climate change since the 1800s, and we are all now living through the wildfires, floods, and other climate chaos that generations of unchecked climate pollution have sowed. EPA’s attempt to reverse the Endangerment Finding is like declaring that tobacco doesn’t cause cancer and alcohol is fine for your liver. In attempting to deny reality, the Trump EPA wants to abandon efforts to protect us from the defining crisis of our time. We can’t let them do that.”