Days after finalizing a rule that would eliminate climate rules for power plants, the Environmental Protection Agency was sued by groups who say the EPA’s repeal was short-sighted and risked leaving the country’s single largest source of industrial climate pollution unchecked.
On Thursday, the American Lung Association, the American Public Health Association, the Clean Air Council, Clean Wisconsin, the Environmental Defense Fund, and the Natural Resources Defense Council filed a petition requesting that the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit review if the EPA’s action conflicts with the Clean Air Act.
“Clean air is a basic human right,” APHA CEO Georges C. Benjamin said.
The petition alleges that the rule change could cause thousands of premature deaths.
In the EPA’s announcement of the proposed repeal, the agency said that its action was based on “the best reading of the Clean Air Act.”
The EPA may struggle to defend the rule given that its core mission is “to protect human health and the environment.” Meredith Hankins, NRDC’s federal climate legal director, accused the EPA of abdicating its legal responsibilities.
Rather than meaningfully addressing the risks that advocacy groups describe, the EPA relied on an argument that anyone who has ever monitored a climate lawsuit will recognize: that climate change is global, and “public health harms are too uncertain, conjectural, remote, and convoluted to tie specifically to the US power sector.”
The EPA’s timing is terrible, and communities will experience unnecessary deaths if the court does not intervene, said Vickie Patton, who serves as general counsel for the Environmental Defense Fund.