“Here in Vermont, we believe in science and we follow science,” state Attorney General Charity Clark said. “So it’s a shame that the federal administration doesn’t share that view and has gone through many efforts to try to unwind efforts to protect the public’s safety from things like climate change and greenhouse gas emissions.”
Vermont has joined a coalition of 24 states and several counties and cities in suing the Trump administration over the rapid-fire weakening of the federal government’s ability to curtail man-made climate change.
“Here in Vermont, we believe in science and we follow science,” state Attorney General Charity Clark said. “So it’s a shame that the federal administration doesn’t share that view and has gone through many efforts to try to unwind efforts to protect the public’s safety from things like climate change and greenhouse gas emissions.”
The lawsuit was filed last Thursday in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. It specifically alleges that the Environmental Protection Agency acted unlawfully when it overturned the so-called “Endangerment Finding,” the EPA’s official recognition in 2009 that greenhouse gases pose an imminent threat to public health and welfare.
The Trump administration has since tried to use the repeal as reason to end federal regulations on motor vehicle emissions, as well as similar rules for power plants. The Environmental Protection Agency has justified its decision by saying that the removal of restrictions would save Americans $1.3 trillion by lowering car prices and long-haul trucking expenses, which include fuel costs.
However, Trump has long been odds with science on climate change, and has repeatedly called global warming a hoax. Scientists, in contrast, have long said that climate change has already forced Americans to incur significant costs—costs that will almost certainly rise in the future without further intervention.
Patrick Parenteau, a professor emeritus at Vermont Law and a former EPA regulator, told Vermont Public Radio that repealing the endangerment finding could actually hurt the oil and gas industry’s prior arguments that, while individual states don’t have the power to regulate the climate, the federal government almost certainly does.
“They’re talking out of both sides of their mouths,” Parenteau told VPR. “They’re saying, on the one hand, we are repealing the endangerment finding, but on the other hand, the Clean Air Act still preempts the state’s ability to charge the oil companies for the damage from climate change. So it’s cognitive dissonance, and the courts are not going to accept that.”
Parenteau said that states like Vermont could suffer from accelerated climate change in several ways, ranging from more frequent and severe floods to decreased air quality caused by less-regulated power plants in other states.
“Whatever metric you want to use to measure this decision, it fails utterly on public health, economic legal grounds, that’s really the truth of where we are,” he said.
Sources
Trump’s EPA will stop regulating greenhouse gases, setting up a legal fight
Vermont joins lawsuit suing EPA for renouncing its power to fight climate change
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