What is the Endangerment Finding and why is overturning it so dangerous? Q&A

When EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin announced that the agency was seeking to throw out the Endangerment Finding, we reacted with anger and grief.

Abolishing the Endangerment Finding will undo the federal government’s ability to make rules that safeguard our lives and our future. It will accelerate the climate crisis – and make our world even drier, hotter, and – yes – more dangerous.

Issued by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in 2009, the Endangerment Finding is fairly simple, and extremely important.

Based on mountains of scientific data, it finds that greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions put us in danger. These emissions trap the sun’s heat inside the atmosphere, raise the temperature of land, air, and water, and cause deadly disruptions to our climate. This finding is nearly universally confirmed by climate scientists and scientific studies. (It turns out the fossil fuel industry itself landed on this conclusion nearly 50 years ago.)

The dangers are many. We are in danger of more frequent and more severe climate disasters (see recent fires, floods, heat waves, and hurricanes); in danger of increased illnesses and medical emergencies; in danger of worsening mental health; in danger of severe and long-lasting damage to our economy, our food supply, our housing stock, and our future.

The Endangerment Finding is the legal foundation that empowers the government to establish and implement rules that control emissions. Since 2009, the EPA has taken commonsense steps to reduce emissions – from power plants, cars and trucks, and oil and gas operations. 

Any reduction in emissions has immediate benefits. It lowers pollution and contamination of our air, water, and land; it slows heating of the planet and helps reduce the acceleration of more severe and frequent weather disasters; it reduces preventable illnesses and premature deaths; and it mitigates threats to frontline communities. 

Abolishing the finding is a gift to the fossil fuel industry, enabling it to extract and burn more and more coal, oil, and gas without any restrictions, and accelerate the rush toward a hotter, drier, and more dangerous world.

In 2025, we are now fighting with the EPA to keep this landmark finding and those rules, and to do its job of protecting health and environment. 

The EPA is brazen about elevating the profitability of the fossil fuel industry over concerns about pollution and contamination of our air, water, and land. The Administrator of the EPA, Lee Zeldin, has said repeatedly that he is more interested in “unleashing” American energy than in protecting “health and environment.”

Administrator Zeldin and the EPA are now fully aligned with President Trump, who made big campaign promises to the fossil fuel industry – and is now delivering on those promises to loosen regulations, undo permitting restrictions, and open precious lands and waters.

Abolishing the Finding will have long-term and severe impacts on all of us 

However, it will most immediately and disastrously affect people living in harm’s way, and will exacerbate many systemic inequalities. This includes people living on the frontlines of exposure to toxic air and water contamination – largely Black, Brown, Indigenous, and low-income populations. 

It will endanger people with chronic diseases like asthma and respiratory ailments; people who are unhoused or living in precarious housing; the elderly and the very young; people who are disabled; people who work in extreme heat (inside and outside), usually earning poverty wages; first responders; and so many more. 

The climate crisis is an issue of justice. Disabling a tool that helps fight the climate crisis will harm the vulnerable first and worst.

Speak out! The comment period on “Reconsideration of 2009 Endangerment Finding and Greenhouse Gas Vehicle Standards” is now open at the EPA. Send a comment today.

It’s on us to register our outrage that the EPA is turning its back on the American people and our collective future. We need to flood the public record with comments about this betrayal to “health and the environment.”

This is important right now – and it matters for the future as well. If a future administration considers reinstating the Finding, it will look to the public record to assess if it matters to Americans. It will help the case to reinstate it if there are thousands of comments in favor. 

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