EPA Drops Greenhouse Gas Risk Ruling as New El Niño Looms, Data Be Damned

The rescinding of the EPA’s “endangerment finding” imperils New York’s climate future and challenges the city’s hard-won environmental gains.

On a sultry June evening, as wildfire smoke from Canada once again dimmed the Manhattan skyline, the Trump administration’s Environmental Protection Agency quietly erased a cornerstone of American climate policy. With a swift pen-stroke, officials overturned the agency’s “endangerment finding”—the legal determination, standing since 2009, that carbon emissions threaten both the health of the planet and the American public. For a city wrapped by rising seas and battered by volatile weather, the fallout could reverberate for years.

The policy maneuver under Secretary Doug Burgum unmuzzles federal regulators, stripping the legal foundation that empowered the EPA to rein in greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act. Burgum, lately governor of North Dakota and now the nation’s steward of public lands, justified the move with the claim that “CO2 was never a pollutant,” pointing wryly to the fact that humans exhale the gas and plants consume it. As scientific reasoning goes, it is a rather tepid defense—akin to arguing that water, lethal in floods, cannot possibly drown.

New York City, already on the climate frontlines, faces outsized risks as a result. Stripped of federal backing, the city must now rely on its own patchwork of policies—congestion pricing, Local Law 97, green roofs—to keep making environmental progress. Albany may move to stiffen state-level curbs, but the federal government’s abdication portends a patchier, slower, and costlier transition. Without national standards, New York’s hard-won progress on emissions risks being swamped by pollution drifting from less zealous neighbors.

These are not distant, abstract dangers. Climate volatility has become a part of daily life for the city’s 8.5 million residents: hurricanes have battered the subway, historic rains have drowned basements, routine “code red” air-quality days have upended school and work. The endangerment finding—a bureaucratic mouthful—still formed the basis for regulating emissions not just from power plants but from cars, trucks, heating systems and more. Its absence bodes ill for any coordinated national response.

Second-order effects trickle inevitably through the local economy and civic politics. A rollback invites persistent uncertainty: Will developers gamble on new floodplain construction, emboldened by looser restrictions? Might utilities defer desperately needed investments in clean infrastructure, facing unpredictable regulation and costlier piecemeal mandates? Consumers, for their part, may pay more for energy as local workarounds for federal inaction are layered into bills, and lower-income New Yorkers, already overburdened, will find little solace in ideological victory parades from Washington.

Politically, this decision is no mere inside-the-Beltway skirmish. New York has built much of its post-Sandy resilience on the premise that the federal government will push, prod, and sometimes require states to clean up their act. Now, climate action is left to a patchwork of state and municipal efforts—uneven, perhaps, but for now, the city’s last shield. The retreat reverberates through City Hall and Albany, where officials may find their hands suddenly tied or, worse, undermined by federal lawsuits emboldened by the EPA’s reversal.

The economic implications are hardly limited to New York’s shores. The city’s status as a global finance and innovation hub depends, in part, on its credibility as a clean, livable, and forward-looking metropolis. Rapid climate action—lower emissions, upgraded infrastructure—has been a selling point to international investors and businesses seeking long-term stability. The rescinded finding injects friction and risk, making every climate bond and green project a harder sell.

A dangerous precedent for the nation—and the world

Nationally, the EPA’s decision unspools a legal tapestry painstakingly woven over decades. The original “endangerment finding” flowed from the Supreme Court’s 2007 Massachusetts v. EPA decision, which confirmed, with some droll judicial understatement, that gases lacking odour and colour could nonetheless kill millions. That the current U.S. administration now asserts the contrary not only tests the patience of scientists and judges, but sets up a protracted legal contest likely to paralyze meaningful action for years.

Internationally, the move draws scorn and anxiety in equal measure. America is, after all, the world’s second-largest emitter, and New York one of its most visible victims. The city’s leaders have, at climate summits and in fierce op-eds, styled themselves as the “anti-Trump”—declaring “we’re still in” the Paris Agreement when Washington walked away. In reality, though, the EPA’s turn risks emboldening other laggards abroad, making global targets slip ever further from reach. New York’s own future—the quality of its air, the safety of its shoreline—will hinge in part on decisions made far outside its jurisdiction.

Legal battles are surely en route. Environmental groups and several states, New York prominent among them, have promised immediate lawsuits. The courts may yet smack down the EPA’s revisionism, as they have on previous occasions when ideology trampled both statute and science. Even if the effort stalls, the real damage may be measured in lost time—a luxury climate does not permit.

For all New York’s vaunted resilience, the city’s future demands a federal government that at least acknowledges physical reality. Data, not dogma, has long been the city’s lodestar; wry jokes about cartoon lumps of coal may amuse certain cabinet officials, but they offer cold comfort to residents sandbagging their basement steps.

Undoing the endangerment finding is, as scientists have warned in scholarly understatement, a dangerous experiment—the policy equivalent of sticking one’s head in the sand and hoping the tide recedes. The risks are not theoretical: rising sea levels, stifling summers, and billion-dollar recovery bills are now a biennial feature of city life. New Yorkers, who have grown adept at muddling through, deserve better from Washington than a reheated debate over photosynthesis.

If New York, city of islands, has often served as America’s harbinger, then federal climate retrenchment bodes ill for the rest of the country. The stakes of this administrative gambit cannot be overstated: a legal maneuver in Washington will echo, tenaciously, as the next hurricane draws near.

Without the ballast of federal recognition that carbon emissions are dangerous, the city’s struggle to avoid the worst climate risks becomes both lonelier and more expensive. One hopes, perhaps quixotically, that the courts—or, failing that, voters—restore equilibrium before the next disaster cues up New Yorkers’ wryest of survival instincts. ■