The Trump administration’s erasure of the scientific finding that emissions driving climate change endanger public health drew swift condemnation from Catholic leaders, who characterized the move as morally indefensible.
The decision, finalized Feb. 12 by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, sets the stage for a high-stakes legal battle that many see ultimately leading to the U.S. Supreme Court.
In 2009, EPA issued the “endangerment finding,” a scientific determination that six greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide and methane, pose a danger to human health and welfare. It stemmed from a directive by the Supreme Court in its landmark 2007 decision in Massachusetts v. EPA, which ruled greenhouse gas emissions are air pollutants subject to EPA regulation under the Clean Air Act.
Greenhouse gases are primarily released from burning coal, oil and gas. An overwhelming preponderance of scientific evidence has shown that increasing rates of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are rapidly heating the planet and with it altering climates across the map with more intense heat waves, extreme storms, droughts, wildfires and flooding.
The last 11 years have been the hottest on record, and climate scientists project the rise in average temperatures will eclipse 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) sometime in the next decade, a point at which hundreds of millions more people worldwide would be at risk of climate impacts.
The endangerment finding has been the bedrock of nearly all federal climate-related regulations and policies in the past 16 years, including limits on emissions from vehicles, coal-fired power plants and other polluting industrial sources. Environmental groups and several states have said they will challenge the EPA move in court.
Eliminating the endangerment finding “places our country and our planet on a dangerous path,” the Catholic Climate Covenant and the North American chapter of the Laudato Si’ Movement said in a joint statement.
“Today’s decision is more than a setback — it is unconscionable,” the leading U.S. Catholic environmental organizations said.
“The Endangerment Finding should have stood. But our moral obligation to care for our common home remains unchanged.”
Calling climate change “one of the greatest environmental threats we face,” Chieko Noguchi, spokeswoman for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, said in a statement that EPA rescinding greenhouse gas regulations “flies in the face of efforts that have been put in place to protect and care for the earth now and for future generations, and we strongly urge the Administration to reconsider this consequential decision.”
Bishop Joseph Tyson of Yakima, Washington, the episcopal liaison to the Catholic Climate Covenant, said in an interview that the endangerment finding repeal runs counter to church teaching on the environment and dignity of the human person.
“The science is pretty clear on this and it hasn’t changed. It’s only gotten stronger over time,” he said.
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