(Washington) Donald Trump’s administration is preparing to repeal this week a text dating from Barack Obama and serving as the basis for the fight against greenhouse gas emissions in the United States.
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It will be the “largest act of deregulation in US history,” the Wall Street Journal the head of the American Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Lee Zeldin, at the origin of this effort.
In July, his agency announced its desire to repeal this so-called Endangerment Finding text, a turnaround which would deal a major blow to the climate action of the United States, the largest historical contributor to emissions warming the planet.
Questioned by AFP, the federal agency on Tuesday simply accused the administration of former President Barack Obama of having “made one of the most damaging decisions in modern history”.
Adopted by the same Environmental Protection Agency in 2009, this text stipulates that six greenhouse gases are dangerous for public health and therefore fall within the scope of pollutants regulated by the federal agency.
This decision legally opened the way to numerous federal regulations aimed at limiting the release of these gases warming the atmosphere (CO2methane, etc.), starting with trucks and cars, which emit CO2 by burning gasoline.
Donald Trump’s administration, which strongly supports oil and coal, is seeking to reverse that decision and the resulting regulations, downplaying the role of human activities in climate change and arguing that greenhouse gases should not be treated as pollutants in the traditional sense because their effects on human health are indirect and global rather than local.
If confirmed, the repeal of this decision will certainly be challenged in court and could go all the way to the Supreme Court. “We will see them in court,” Manish Bapna, president of the environmental organization NRDC, recently promised.
