U.S. Rep. Tom Suozzi (D-NY-03) and a cadre of environmental advocates from Long Island and beyond say they’ll fight back against what they call a devastating blow to climate protections after the Trump Administration announced a major environmental policy change.
On Feb. 12, the president and head of the Environmental Protection Agency eliminated 2009’s so-called “endangerment finding” that links greenhouse gas emissions to adverse health effects. It’s the scientific foundation behind the federal government’s legal authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. Without it, environmentalists warn, passenger cars and trucks will no longer be subject to virtually any federal fuel efficiency standards.
“This is very real, serious business,” U.S. Rep. Tom Suozzi (D-NY-04) said Tuesday at a news conference in Glen Cove on the water's edge where Hempstead Bay slices into Garvies Point Preserve. “This is affecting the quality of your life. We here on Long Island, the waterfront, right here, we're subject to the effects of rising sea levels.”
This kind of deregulation is one of the primary goals that President Donald Trump and his EPA Administrator, Lee Zeldin, said they wanted to accomplish at the beginning of Trump’s second term.
In remarks last week, Zeldin called eliminating the endangerment finding “the single largest act of deregulation” in U.S. history.
“It regulated and targeted the American dream, and now the endangerment finding is hereby eliminated, as well as all greenhouse gas emission standards that followed,” Zeldin said. “The red tape has been cut. Manufacturers will no longer be burdened by measuring, compiling or reporting greenhouse gas emissions for vehicles and engines and the forced transition to electric vehicles is eliminated.”
He said the move will make cars cheaper and lower costs for families, especially those who live in rural areas where personal vehicles are all but required.
The EPA never had the authority to regulate air pollutants in the first place, according to Zeldin.
“If Congress wants EPA to regulate the heck out of greenhouse gases emitted from motor vehicles, Congress can clearly make that the law, which they haven't done for good reason,” he said. “Today, we dismantle the tactics and legal gymnastics used by the Obama and Biden administrations to backdoor their ideological agendas on the American people.”
Suozzi and the environmental advocates who joined him this week argue that the decades-old Clean Air Act does, in fact, permit EPA to regulate emissions.
“Greenhouse gas emissions are a danger to the public,” said Pete Budden, Senior Advocate for Hydrogen, Climate & Energy at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “They are a threat to our public health, our safety, and therefore they should be regulated under the Clean Air Act. And it's as simple as that.”
That’s the basis for the lawsuit the NRDC filed in federal court Wednesday to keep the endangerment finding in place. Budden said it’s an environmental and economic imperative as intense weather events occur more frequently and on a larger scale.
“Trump and Zeldin are asking you to ignore the rising costs that we are all facing in our wallets, not only the cost of recovering from these disasters — [Superstorm] Sandy alone caused an estimated $65 billion in damages — but the rising cost of energy prices and homeowners' insurance,” Budden said. “It's a pattern that we are seeing over and over again from this administration. The best interests of fossil fuel executives are put above the needs of regular people.”
Long Island is fourth on the list of most vulnerable places nationwide due to climate change, according to the market rating agency, Moody’s.
That’s why Tom Suozzi says he’s building a coalition of lawmakers who would support legislation to strengthen the Clean Air Act.
“Legislation is the number one vehicle available to us now,” Suozzi said. “If we can get a bipartisan effort with Democrats and Republicans working together, who all care about climate, then we could do something now, even before November [midterm elections], but we're going to need to educate people and bring this to people's attention and try and build a coalition.”
Suozzi said Long Islanders can’t afford the cost of deregulating emissions.
“This is an existential threat to us here on Long Island, and we need to stand up and get people motivated to speak out against it.”
