The Trump administration scrapped the endangerment finding. Now what?
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Hello, everyone. I'm Kimberly Adams. Welcome back to Make Me Smart, where none of us is as smart as all of us. We're talking climate news today, which is also about federal policy and consumer choice. The Trump administration recently struck down a policy that's known as the endangerment finding. That was the EPA's 2009 official finding that greenhouse gas emissions are a danger to public health. Now, that endangerment finding has served as the legal bedrock for federal emissions regulations for cars, trucks, power plants, you name it. Now, my colleague Amy Scott is here to make us smart about what the repealing of the endangerment finding means for the economy, the environment and us. She's the host of Marketplace's Climate Solutions podcast, How We Survive and No Stranger to Make Me Smart.
Welcome back, Amy. Thank you so much for having me. It's good to be here.
What is the endangerment finding and why is it significant?
Now, you have been on the climate beat for quite some time now. What was your reaction when you heard that the endangerment finding had been struck down? Well, honestly, I was not surprised. The Trump administration has been laying the groundwork for this basically since he returned to office. On his first day in the second term, President Trump signed an executive order saying basically setting this in motion. But, you know, I think like anyone who cares about the planet, I do find it alarming that the administration continues to deny the overwhelming scientific consensus that human-driven climate change is a threat to human health and safety. I think, you know, people can reasonably disagree about what kinds of regulations are appropriate in the face of the climate crisis.
But the administration continues to really push a fringe view that climate change just isn't a big enough deal to justify the costs of transitioning to renewable energy sources. And this repeal of the endangerment finding is really just the latest rollback. You know, Trump has pulled the United States out of the Paris Climate Agreement, as well as the global treaty that led to that agreement, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. It's gutted or proposed gutting many different pollution and energy efficiency regulations. It's pulled back on investments in wind and solar energy and aggressively pushed more oil and gas drilling and coal burning. You know, if you really want to keep track, I found a good tracker at the Climate Action Campaign that basically lists all of these things.
If you're having trouble keeping up, as I am. There's so many changes. So you recently did an episode of How We Survive's Burning Questions series specifically about the endangerment finding, digging into what it means for the economy. Now that the finding has been scrapped, can you lay out just some of the top lines that you discovered in your reporting about what the fallout of this is? Yeah. So what the Trump administration has said is that the repeal will save Americans more than a trillion dollars in lower vehicle costs because manufacturers will no longer have to pay for measuring, controlling and reporting greenhouse gas emissions for new vehicles. And the estimate is it'll save on average more than twenty four hundred dollars per vehicle, plus the added savings of not having to buy EV chargers and other equipment.
But the experts I talked to dispute that figure because, for one thing, the additional upfront costs of buying an electric vehicle are generally recovered over time because of lower maintenance, not having to buy gas, you know, often within five years. And so the overall cost Cost of ownership, as they call it, tends to be lower. And B, the costs of producing electric vehicles have been coming down as particularly batteries get cheaper. And so within a few years, that upfront cost is actually going to go away. And, you know, if you look at the EPA's own numbers, the repeal will increase costs significantly. for consumers by a net $180 billion or so because they're going to be paying more for gas, maintenance, and insurance.
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