Vermont has joined a coalition of 24 states and several counties and cities in suing the Trump administration over its efforts to weaken the federal government’s ability to take action on climate change.
“Here in Vermont, we believe in science and we follow science,” said Attorney General Charity Clark. “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 petition, filed Thursday in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, alleges the Environmental Protection Agency acted illegally when it threw out a scientific finding from 2009 that said the federal government can and should regulate greenhouse gas emissions from burning and extracting fossil fuels under the Clean Air Act.
Called the "endangerment finding," it draws on the EPA’s own science to support the government’s role in regulating greenhouse gases.
The Trump administration has used the repeal to justify ending federal regulations on emissions from cars and trucks — the biggest source of climate-warming greenhouse gas emissions in Vermont and nationwide — as well as regulations on power plant emissions.
Trump’s EPA has argued this would save Americans $1.3 trillion by lowering car prices and trucking expenses, and eliminating regulations. Meanwhile, other analysis consistently shows that climate change is already costing Americans and will continue to do so into the future.
The president has called climate change a hoax. Meanwhile, scientists agree broadly that burning fossil fuels is leading to global warming and impacts like more extreme flooding.
The lawsuit will likely be consolidated with one filed by health and environmental advocates earlier this year.
The case could go to the Supreme Court, which has previously said the federal government does have the authority to regulate pollutants like carbon dioxide and methane.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration is arguing in other lawsuits that these pollutants are the jurisdiction of the federal government, including in its active litigation of Vermont’s Climate Superfund Act.
Patrick Parenteau, a professor emeritus at Vermont Law and Graduate School and former EPA regulator, said repealing the endangerment finding could actually hurt the oil and gas industry’s prior arguments that states are stepping on the federal government’s toes in demanding compensation for climate damages.
Power plant operators and car manufacturers have already spent a lot of money complying with federal emissions regulations, and he said the Trump administration’s efforts create uncertainty for them.
“They're talking out of both sides of their mouths,” Parenteau said. “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.”
The environmental advocacy group Environmental Defense Fund has estimated repealing the endangerment finding would cause as much as 18 billion metric tons more carbon to be emitted into the atmosphere by 2055.
Parenteau said Vermont could see impacts ranging from more frequent and severe flooding to haze and poor air quality from pollution produced at out-of-state power plants.
“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.
If the Trump administration is successful, the decision would reverse almost 15 years of precedent allowing the federal government to restrict climate-warming emissions.
