EPA’s lopsided focus on regulatory costs ignores the much larger forgone benefits and the law.
Earlier this year, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) rescinded its 2009 factual conclusion that greenhouse gases from new motor vehicles endanger the public—commonly known as the endangerment finding. Under the Clean Air Act, this finding triggered an obligation for EPA to regulate these emissions. The rescission threatens to gut an important avenue for federal climate progress. Among other legal arguments, EPA claims that the endangerment finding’s “enormous costs” are not justified. The agency uses this framing to justify the repeal of all greenhouse gas emission standards for motor vehicles and to present its actions as cost-saving measures for the public. But EPA misapplies the law and ignores the much larger regulatory benefits that these standards provide.
At a White House press conference, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin painted a picture of the agency boldly dismantling overly burdensome regulations to save $1.3 trillion cumulatively over 29 years. But he conveniently remained silent about the almost $1.5 trillion in societal costs on the other side of the ledger. These numbers come from EPA’s own analysis, which projects that the repeal is net costly by $180 billion—without even accounting for trillions of dollars in climate change and air pollution costs that EPA sidelined from its assessment.
Repealing the greenhouse gas emission standards for vehicles is not only a bad deal for society generally, but EPA’s own projections confirm that it will lighten drivers’ wallets through higher bills for gas and vehicle repair and maintenance. In fact, the vehicle pollution limits being repealed were actually expected to save new car buyers $6,000 over the lifetime of their vehicle. EPA’s numbers only get worse for consumers when layering in the current Administration’s broader efforts to dismantle key federal and state vehicle pollution control policies and the reduced eligibility for tax credits under the Inflation Reduction Act. Collectively, these policies will increase the price of gasoline 29 percent by 2050—costing drivers an extra 75 cents per gallon.
The price tag for consumers will not end at the pump. By repealing its motor vehicle greenhouse gas emission standards, EPA will cause massive climate damages and public health costs. EPA may have deleted those harms from its calculus, but it cannot magically make them disappear.
Breaking with its past practice, EPA now ignores that the existing emissions standards would have avoided $87 billion in climate damages annually—saving the public over $2 trillion cumulatively by 2055. The repeal will cause climate damages that we will all feel personally: higher costs for insurance, food, and healthcare; property damage; and even death. EPA is choosing to ignore these effects by not monetizing the impacts of increased greenhouse gas emissions.
Nor does EPA properly consider how increased smog and soot-forming pollution are expected to lead to over 2,500 early deaths and over 1 million more asthma attacks per year, alongside hundreds of thousands of lost school and work days. By failing to monetize and account for these harms, as well as the climate damages, EPA turns its back on decades of agency practice, science, and economics, and obscures the extreme costs of this repeal for the public.
The huge net benefits of the most recent vehicle standards are the norm, not an exception. EPA established its first motor vehicle greenhouse gas emission standards in 2010, and under administrations of both parties—including the first Trump Administration—it has continued to update those standards over the last 15 years. According to EPA’s own earlier estimates, these regulations would have cumulatively created trillions in net benefits through 2055.
The U.S. Supreme Court has made clear that discretionary regulations cannot do significantly more harm than good. EPA’s repeal fails that test. In its 2014 decision Michigan v. EPA, the Court also confirmed that an agency’s policy assessment of regulatory harm should normally consider “any disadvantage” from a rule, “including, for instance, harms that regulation might do to human health or the environment.”
Fundamentally, the courts require agencies to articulate “a rational connection between the facts found and the choice made”—and here the math does not work out. EPA’s effort to bolster the repeal by arguing that the vehicle emission standards impose “enormous costs” that “do not materially further public health or welfare” do not conform with reality. EPA cannot selectively cherry pick the numbers that support its decision.
As detailed above, EPA’s cost-benefit analysis fails to justify repealing the greenhouse gas emission standards for vehicles. Given this evidence, it is perplexing that EPA further argues that it should have considered regulatory costs when making the endangerment finding. This position is also flatly contradicted by caselaw: The Supreme Court and U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit have confirmed that policy considerations, such as cost, do not belong in an endangerment finding. But even if EPA could somehow find a way to shoehorn a consideration of regulatory costs into the endangerment finding, it would still face the dilemma that vehicle regulations result in benefits of avoided climate damages that far exceed the regulatory costs.
As we and others have explained, there are critical flaws in EPA’s primary argument that it lacks the authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions under the relevant provision of the Clean Air Act. For the reasons discussed above, EPA’s fallback argument regarding the regulatory costs of the endangerment finding fares no better.
In sum, EPA’s analytical maneuvers do not change the bottom line: This repeal is a bad deal for everyday Americans and against the law. When EPA looks at only one side of the ledger, society loses.
