The wave of legal opposition to the Trump administration’s latest climate regulation rollback is gaining momentum. A coalition of more than a dozen environmental and public health groups filed suit against the Environmental Protection Agency on Wednesday to challenge its scrapping last week of the “endangerment finding” that undergirds most US climate regulation. The EPA’s move “will have disastrous consequences for the American people, our health, and our shared future,” and seeks to rehash arguments that have already been settled in prior Supreme Court decisions, Joanne Spalding, director of the Sierra Club’s Environmental Law Program, said in a statement. The attorneys general of California and Connecticut, meanwhile, said they are preparing their own “plan of attack” against the EPA.
In the meantime, numerous Democrat-led states are accelerating plans to replace EPA regulations with their own new restrictions on emissions from vehicles and power plants. But the administration isn’t done with its rollback; on Friday, EPA officials are expected to announce plans to scrap restrictions on emissions of mercury and other toxic air pollutants from coal-fired power plants.