On September 22, 2025, the Environmental Protection Network (EPN) submitted formal comments to EPA regarding the agency’s proposal to rescind the 2009 Endangerment Finding and vehicle GHG standards. EPN calls the proposal unlawful, scientifically flawed, economically harmful, and urges for retention of existing protections.
EPN’s comments focus on the points summarized below:
- The “legal analysis” that undergirds this action is both deeply flawed and dishonest.
This proposal misrepresents the Clean Air Act (CAA) by conveniently ignoring key parts of the law that the courts have affirmed require EPA to act on climate change. For example, they eliminate the words “weather” and “climate” from the definition of “welfare.” The Administrator does this to pretend that the Act cannot be used to regulate greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. He imagines that the best reading of CAA does not allow the regulation of GHGs while ignoring that GHG regulation has been upheld in three separate Supreme Court opinions. Zeldin also misconstrues recent Supreme Court cases and decisions and imagines a best reading of the CAA that ignores the plain language of the law. He also imagines a test that the CAA can only regulate local and regional impacts, a test that simply does not exist and is inconsistent with a number of CAA provisions, including provisions protecting the ozone layer.
- The Administrator has made no demonstration how the scientific bases for the 2009 Endangerment Finding have been weakened or contradicted.
The Administrator claims that, since 2009, the scientific evidence that climate change harms human health and the environment has been weakened or contradicted. This claim is made despite publication of numerous major national and international assessments of the science that demonstrate climate change is now causing such harm and those harms will worsen in the future without effective action. EPA’s claims ignore these scientifically-robust findings. Instead, they base their claims upon fatally-flawed information presented as science. EPA fails to provide any scientifically valid information that weakens or contradicts the scientific basis for the Endangerment Finding.
- The analysis of the impacts of this action is woefully inadequate.
The length of EPA’s Regulatory Impact Analysis (RIA) for the current proposal is a mere 3% of the combined length of the RIAs of the two most recent rules that EPA is rescinding. The RIA does not include any analysis of vehicle technology or economics, which may explain why the proposal shows a lack of understanding that electric vehicles (EVs) are both more efficient and more powerful than gas vehicles. EPA does not explain why American car companies cannot in six years produce EVs comparable to those produced in China today. EPA also excludes any analysis of potential alternative regulatory options such as extending the deadline or reducing the stringency of the standard. Instead, EPA takes an all or nothing approach as though regulatory options do not exist.
- The Administrator ignores the benefits of pollution reduction from the existing regulations and the significant increase in gas prices that would result from this action.
EPA imagines that there are no benefits from reduced GHG emissions and reduces, without technical justification, the particulate matter (PM) and ozone benefits of rules it is proposing to rescind. The Administrator, without justification, says that rescinding a series of rules that all had positive net benefits will result in costs. The three most recent rules that would be rescinded by EPA’s action had between $198 billion – $252 billion in net benefits including between $17 billion – $22 billion in health benefits.