Truthout is a vital news source and a living history of political struggle. If you think our work is valuable, support us with a donation of any size.

This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, non-partisan news organization that covers climate, energy and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter here.

Two lawsuits filed Wednesday in the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals mark the beginning of a rocky legal road for the Environmental Protection Agency following its reversal of a 2009 rule underpinning federal regulation of greenhouse gas emissions.

The challenges include a lawsuit brought against both the EPA and its administrator, Lee Zeldin, by a coalition of 17 health and environmental groups, as well as a suit filed on behalf of 18 youths across the United States.

Created in the wake of a 2007 Supreme Court decision, Massachusetts v. EPA, which unambiguously held that greenhouse gases are pollutants under the Clean Air Act, the 2009 endangerment finding states that current or projected concentrations of greenhouse gases “threaten the public health and welfare of current and future generations.”

Reversing the 17-year-old scientific finding effectively undermines the EPA’s authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from sectors such as motor vehicles and power plants.

“This repeal has no basis in law, science or reality, and human health is at extreme risk,” Georges Benjamin, the executive director of the American Public Health Association, said in a Wednesday press conference. “The Trump administration is making climate denialism the official government policy and undercutting the EPA’s ability to act.”

EPA No Longer Considering Lives Saved in Pollution Rules, Only Cost to Business

In a White House press conference last week, President Donald Trump hailed the endangerment finding reversal as “the single largest deregulatory action in American history.”

The EPA is attempting “an end run” around the 2007 Supreme Court decision, said the Sierra Club’s Andres Restrepo, senior attorney for the organization’s environmental law program. “They’re relying on what is clearly a mischaracterization of that decision,” Restrepo said.

“EPA is bound by the laws established by Congress, including under the CAA [Clean Air Act]. Congress never intended to give EPA authority to impose GHG........

© Truthout