Effects of Trump's attack on climate regs

Independent, UK  - Again and again, research has found increasing disease and deaths — thousands every year — in a warming world.

The Environmental Protection Agency finding in 2009, under the Obama administration, has been the legal underpinning of nearly all regulations fighting global warming.

Thousands of scientific studies have looked at climate change and its effects on human health in the past five years and they predominantly show climate change is increasingly dangerous to people.

Many conclude that in the United States, thousands of people have died and even more were sickened because of climate change in the past few decades.

.For example, a study on “Trends in heat-related deaths in the U.S., 1999-2023 ” in the prestigious JAMA journal shows the yearly heat-related death count and rate have more than doubled in the past quarter century from 1,069 in 1999 to a record high 2,325 in 2023.

A 2021 study in Nature Climate Change looked at 732 locations in 43 countries — including 210 in the United States — and determined that more than a third of heat deaths are due to human-caused climate change. That means more than 9,700 global deaths a year attributed to warming from the burning of coal, oil and natural gas.

A new study published this week found that 2.2% of summer deaths in Texas from 2010 to 2023 were heat related “as climate change brings more frequent and intense heat to Texas.”

.In the more than 15 years, since the government first determined climate change to be a public health danger, there have been more than 29,000 peer-reviewed studies that looked at the intersection of climate and health, with more than 5,000 looking specifically at the United States, according to the National Library of Medicine's PubMed research database. More than 60% of those studies have been published in the past five years.

Study after study documents that climate change endangers health, for one simple reason: It’s true,” said Dr. Howard Frumkin, professor emeritus of public health at the University of Washington and a former director of the National Center for Environmental Health appointed by President George W. Bush.

Axios - The White House's gutting of the legal foundation of climate regs will spill into U.S. elections, global diplomacy, C-suites, and litigation that's on a collision course with the Supreme Court... EPA yesterday repealed the "endangerment finding" — the formal 2009 conclusion that greenhouse gases threaten humans.

• The move, if it stands, makes it much tougher for a future president to impose various emissions rules that this White House is already abandoning.
• EPA is also eliminating vehicle CO2 standards, which rest on the finding.

It tests how 2028 hopefuls will approach climate. The response from California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) hit Trump but also looked past him as Newsom preps a 2028 run.

• "This decision betrays the American people and cements the Republican Party's status as the pro-pollution party," he said in a statement....

The legal battle will get underway fast, and early contours are emerging already. Environmental groups and Newsom have vowed to sue.

• EPA boss Lee Zeldin, at the White House, said the Supreme Court established "clear precedent" in 2022 and 2024 rulings that support nixing the finding and vehicle rules.
• Those rulings — in West Virginia v. EPA and Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo — together limit federal agencies' power to impose sweeping regulations without clear congressional blessing....

The money battle is already underway, as rising power costs are way above rising temps on the political radar.

• EPA estimates the repeal and related scuttling of tailpipe CO2 rules will create $1.3 trillion in long-term savings for Americans, mostly from the reduced costs for new vehicles.
• But the Environmental Defense Fund projects up to several trillion dollars in long-term costs. Think more fuel needed for less-efficient cars, health effects from soot that's emitted alongside CO2, and damage from climate change...

It might have global ripple effects. Sure, the Trump administration has already backed away from the Paris Agreement. But other nations track other U.S. steps, too. 

While the Trump White House has already exited from global climate talks, other nations are still watching U.S. policies as they make decisions — at least to a point, analysts say.

 "It does ... undermine the scientific consensus that has been reached by nations through the UN process," said Alice Hill, a senior energy and environment fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

• "I would anticipate that it sends a signal to other nations to do less, and that we will see some — probably quietly, I don't think they would necessarily announce this — display less ambition in cutting their emissions and acting on climate change," said Hill, who was on the National Security Council under President Obama.

Hill doesn't see a "huge impact" on other countries, noting "I don't expect that a lot of foreign ministries will be sweating over the fact that the United States, Trump, is seeking to repeal the endangerment finding."...

"The rest of the world is anxiously watching U.S. climate policy with each week and month, and each new development, to understand whether or not the U.S. is going to meet the commitments that it has pledged," said Kate Guy, a State Department climate diplomat in the Biden era now with Columbia University's energy think tank.