Here’s What Could Happen When the Endangerment Finding Dies

February 07, 2026

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By Jean Chemnick (E&E News Climatewire) States, courts and Congress could be forced to fill the climate policy vacuum. -- ... The so-called endangerment finding undergirds federal authority to regulate climate pollution. Revoking it would have the immediate effect of sweeping aside two rules meant to lower greenhouse gases from cars and trucks. And it would help clear the way for the Trump administration’s attempts to upend environmental standards for other highly polluting sectors, such as power plants.

Future fallouts from the repeal, which is expected as early as next week, include a potential ruling by the Supreme Court that former EPA officials say would effectively bar any president from issuing a new endangerment finding.

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That outcome might drive renewed interest among congressional Democrats to pass a climate bill, if they gain control of Congress, according to some political analysts. It could also push states and the courts into higher-profile roles to address rising temperatures.

Here’s what the repeal could mean for U.S. climate policy.

Regulation

EPA argued in its draft rule proposed in July that the government never had the authority to make industries lower their carbon emissions — because the Clean Air Act applies only to pollution that directly harms people in their communities, not gases that spread globally and don’t endanger people who breathe it in.

If the Supreme Court upholds that position, it could stop future presidents from using a new endangerment finding to address climate change, said Joe Goffman, who served as EPA air chief under President Joe Biden.

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“The upshot is that the utility industry wants to get out from under these de facto technology requirements. And part and parcel of that is that they want the agency to get rid of those requirements with as little legal risk as possible,” said Goffman.

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The oil industry’s lobbying group, the American Petroleum Institute, supports regulating methane as a hedge against state policies and to show global buyers of natural gas that the industry is serious about protecting the environment.

API urged EPA in past comments to “clearly establish in the final rule” that revoking the endangerment finding applies only to regulations for cars and trucks, and not to sectors like oil and gas.

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States

If EPA reverses the endangerment finding as expected and stops regulating greenhouse gases, it could put states in the driver’s seat on climate regulation.

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It’s unclear whether removing the finding would allow states like California and New York to introduce their own vehicle rules for greenhouse gases without an EPA waiver — but that question may ultimately be settled in court.

Many legal experts agree that states have the authority to implement stricter-than-federal standards for their stationary sources of pollution, like power plants and factories, even with the endangerment finding in place.

The removal of federal controls may boost state interest in programs like the Northeast’s Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, a multistate cap-and-trade program that covers power emissions.

It could also incentivize more Democratic-led states to adopt climate Superfund laws, which allow states to seek compensation for climate damages from high-emitting industries like oil and gas. Illinois just began that process.

The Department of Justice has sued Michigan and Hawaii to scuttle their climate Superfund programs, partly on the grounds that the Clean Air Act covers greenhouse gas emissions.

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Myron Ebell, who led the EPA transition team at the start of the first Trump term, said that state authority to regulate greenhouse gases from the power sector may be limited because of the interconnected nature of the U.S. power grid.

“The flow of electricity is not confined to one state,” he said, adding that the Trump administration had legal options to “go after” states that regulate utilities for carbon.

The future

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Greenfield, the former government lawyer (Meghan Greenfield, a former EPA and DOJ attorney), noted that congressional action on climate legislation is remote under Trump.

“But politics change, and I think that in some ways, this could create more motivation to do comprehensive climate legislation in a different sort of way,” she said. READ MORE

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Excerpt from Bloomberg Law: “This amounts to the largest act of deregulation in the history of the United States,” EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin was quoted as tellingthe Wall Street Journal, which first reported the planned timing.

The EPA sent a proposal to the Office of Management and Budget last month and a “final rule will be published once it has completed interagency review,” the agency said in a statement, referring to the endangerment finding as “one of the most damaging decisions in modern history.” The White House didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

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Environmental groups, including the Natural Resources Defense Council, have pledged to challenge any decision to scrap the endangerment finding in court. READ MORE

Excerpt from Inside Climate News: EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin will be alongside President Donald Trump for an event Wednesday focused on boosting U.S. use of coal, as mercury and air toxics standards are repealed. That is expected to be a prelude to Zeldin finalizing the endangerment finding repeal, an assignment the president handed him in an executive order signed on the first day of his second term in office.

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Climate action advocates and Democrat-led states have vowed to challenge the repeal of the endangerment finding, a decision that not only erases President Joe Biden’s most important climate regulations, but is designed to make it more difficult for any future administration to rein in fossil fuel pollution from vehicles, power plants or other industries.

“Communities across the country will bear the brunt of this decision—through dirtier air, higher health costs, and increased climate harm,” said Michelle Roos, executive director of the Environmental Protection Network, a group of former EPA employees, in a statement. “The Trump EPA is surrendering its responsibility, turning its back on families and communities already facing the highest pollution and health risks, and dismantling decades of science and progress.”

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The battle seems destined to land in the Supreme Court, forcing it to revisit its landmark 2007 ruling that greenhouse gases were pollutants under the Clean Air Act. The outcome of a legal challenge is by no means clear, with all five of the justices who formed the majority in that case, Massachusetts v. EPA, dead or retired.

To help readers sort through the meaning of the highly technical legal maneuver by the Trump administration, and look to what comes next, Inside Climate News tackled some of the key questions raised by the reversal of the endangerment finding:

Does this mean that scientists now think climate change is not a problem?

A panel of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine (NASEM) put it bluntly: “The evidence for current and future harm to human health and welfare created by human-caused [greenhouse gases] is beyond scientific dispute,” the scientists said in a report submitted to the EPA as it launched its repeal process. They said that the endangerment finding that the Obama administration adopted in 2009 is now supported by longer observational records and multiple new lines of evidence.

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If this is about law and not science, how has the law changed since 2009?

The second Trump administration had the confidence to take on the endangerment finding largely because of how the president reshaped the Supreme Court in his first term, legal experts say. In two 6-3 decisions from a conservative majority bolstered by Trump’s three appointees, the justices created new doctrine that limited the power of federal regulatory agencies like the EPA.

“We’ve had an administrative law revolution,” said industry lawyer Matthew Leopold, who was the EPA’s general counsel in Trump’s first term, speaking at a forum last fall at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a conservative think tank. “The playing field that the Obama administration was playing on [when it made the endangerment finding] looks entirely different today.”

The Supreme Court struck down Obama’s signature climate policy, the Clean Power Plan, in 2022. And in that case, West Virginia v. EPA, the court established its so-called “major questions doctrine,” saying regulation of greenhouse gases was an issue of such great economic and political significance that the EPA could not regulate them without explicit direction from Congress. Then, in a 2024 case over fishing regulations, the Supreme Court overturned the principle that had guided regulatory law for 40 years, saying that federal agencies were due no deference in interpreting ambiguities in the law.

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So is this “final” decision really final?

Not in the least. The EPA’s regulatory determinations are challenged in court more than those of any other federal agency, according to tracking by the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University, and this high-stakes decision will not be an exception.

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How hard would it be for a future administration to restore the finding that greenhouse gas emissions are a danger to human health and the environment?

It depends on the courts. If Massachusetts v. EPA is still standing at the end of the battle, the EPA will still have the power to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, like an arrow in its quiver that it just has to decide to use. But if the Supreme Court were to rule the Clean Air Act gives the EPA no authority over greenhouse gas emissions—reversing the Massachusetts decision and perhaps later cases that relied upon it—that leaves future administrations with an empty quiver.

“Then there would be the problem of a lack of authority, unless Congress wrote a new law,” said Doniger of NRDC.

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Holmstead (Jeff Holmstead, a partner at the Bracewell law firm who served as head of EPA’s air office) argued that withdrawal of the endangerment finding might actually force Congress to try to reach a bipartisan agreement on climate legislation: “The business community would like to have the long-term certainty that would come with bipartisan legislation, and if the environmental community sees that it can’t get what it wants from EPA, they might be more willing to make the kind of compromises that are always required to pass meaningful legislation.” But Holmstead added that he did not expect that to happen during the Trump administration. READ MORE