A coalition of 24 states, along with a dozen cities and counties, sued the Trump administration on Thursday over its decision to relinquish the government’s legal authority to fight climate change.
The lawsuit was filed in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. It is expected to be consolidated with a case that environmental groups filed in February, making for one of the largest legal challenges to date against the Trump administration’s unraveling of federal climate policy.
The states are arguing that the Environmental Protection Agency acted illegally when it rescinded a 2009 scientific conclusion that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases threaten public health and welfare. That determination, known as the endangerment finding, formed the legal basis for the E.P.A. to regulate emissions from automobile tailpipes, power plant smokestacks, oil and gas wells, and other sources.
Decades of scientific research has found that emissions from burning fossil fuels are warming the atmosphere, acidifying the oceans and supercharging heat waves, droughts, wildfires and other extreme weather.
The lawsuit seeks to reinstate the endangerment finding, forcing the Trump administration to retain the government’s authority to regulate greenhouse gas pollution even if it doesn’t exercise that power.
The suit also seeks to reverse a related E.P.A. move that repealed limits on greenhouse gases produced by motor vehicles. Transportation is the largest single source of greenhouse gases in the United States, accounting for more than a third of total climate pollution.
“The endangerment finding is critical for us to protect the health and well-being of our families, of our kids,” Andrea Joy Campbell, the attorney general of Massachusetts, which is leading the lawsuit along with California, New York and Connecticut, said in an interview. She accused the E.P.A. of “blatant violations of the law” in repealing it.
“The E.P.A. came out with no new science, no new law or legal precedent that would allow them to walk away from the endangerment finding,” said Ms. Campbell, a Democrat like all the officials who joined the litigation. Also joining the lawsuit were the attorneys general of Arizona, Colorado, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, Nevada, North Carolina, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia, Washington State, Wisconsin, and the District of Columbia, as well as the governor of Pennsylvania.
“Across our country, communities are already suffering from climate disasters,” Letitia James, the New York attorney general, said in a statement. “Instead of helping Americans face our new reality, the Trump administration has chosen denial, repealing critical protections that are foundational to the federal government’s response to climate change.”
The Trump administration has already begun to repeal federal rules imposed by the Biden administration on cars and trucks, coal-fired power plants and other sources of climate pollution. But getting rid of the endangerment finding was seen as a way to tear out climate regulations at their roots.
That’s because, if courts uphold the repeal, the E.P.A. would have no legal authority to regulate greenhouse gases and future presidents would not be able to restore limits on them through the federal rule-making process.
The E.P.A. did not immediately respond to a request for comment. But agency officials said in response to an earlier lawsuit that the E.P.A. was following the law as it was written and as Congress intended.
The United States is currently the world’s second-largest climate polluter, after China. It also is the world’s biggest historic emitter since the Industrial Revolution, responsible for more than 20 percent of all carbon dioxide emissions since 1751. That distinction matters because past emissions of long-lived greenhouse gases significantly contribute to current and future warming.
President Trump has called climate change a “hoax,” and his cabinet secretaries have claimed the planet’s rapid warming is having little effect on humanity. But the E.P.A. didn’t make those arguments when it repealed the endangerment finding, and instead zeroed in on the law.
The agency declared that the Clean Air Act of 1970 allows the government to limit only pollution that causes direct harm to Americans. Greenhouse gases, which collect in the atmosphere to form a blanket-like layer that traps heat from the Earth’s surface and carry global effects, do not meet that criteria, the agency argued.
In the new lawsuit, the states said that opponents of tackling climate change already tried to use the E.P.A.’s argument nearly two decades ago, when they sought to prevent the government from being able to address climate change. The Supreme Court rejected the move in a landmark 2007 case known as Massachusetts v. E.P.A.
Justices in that case found that greenhouse gases are air pollutants under the Clean Air Act, and that the agency could regulate such emissions if they were found to endanger human health or the environment. The E.P.A. would have to make that determination, they ruled.
Two years later, the E.P.A. issued a nearly 200-page scientific analysis concluding that six specific greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide and methane, endanger current and future generations.
The states may prevail in lower court, Richard Lazarus, a professor of environmental law at Harvard Law School, said. But legal experts widely believe that the Trump administration’s goal is to get the case heard by the Supreme Court in the hopes that the conservative majority will reverse the 2007 ruling, which was decided on a 5-4 vote.
None of the justices who voted in the majority then are still on the court.
“It’s really hard to say what the Supreme Court would do, but it’s certainly an open issue for them,” Mr. Lazarus said.
Lisa Friedman is a Times reporter who writes about how governments are addressing climate change and the effects of those policies on communities.
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