Washington state climate policies face headwinds as Trump aims to ax regulations

Fighting climate change in Washington state could get more difficult if a Trump administration proposal becomes law.

Environmental Protection Agency head Lee Zeldin announced the proposal to overturn what’s known as the "endangerment finding" — and the anti-pollution laws it enables — at an auto dealership in Indiana on Tuesday.

Zeldin called the proposal “the largest deregulatory action in the history of the United States.”

By declaring that climate-altering gases like carbon dioxide and methane endanger human health and welfare, the endangerment finding underlies federal laws restricting emissions of those gases under the Clean Air Act.

An EPA press release said the agency’s greenhouse gas emissions standards, not the gases themselves, were “the real threat to Americans’ livelihoods.”

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For decades, scientists have been warning policymakers and the public that those gases are overheating the planet, with disastrous consequences including extreme heat, drought, and sea-level rise already taking a toll.

If the endangerment finding is overturned, federal fuel-economy standards and requirements for cleaner power plants would go out the window.

“That sort of divorce from reality is frustrating," Washington Department of Ecology director Casey Sixkiller said. "It certainly is a curveball for us here in the state."

State-level climate policies, such as Washington’s cap-and-trade system to make major polluters limit and pay for their emissions, would not be directly affected, according to Department of Ecology officials.

But meeting the state’s deadlines for emissions reductions could become much more difficult, the officials say. Energy-saving technologies like electric vehicles, needed for the state to meet its deadlines, could be harder to find.

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“It's just a very frustrating moment, when we've been making so much progress, to have the federal government pull back in such a significant way,” Sixkiller said.

Legal challenges to the Trump policy, if it is enacted, are expected.

“We won’t stand by as our children’s future is sacrificed to appease fossil fuel interests,” Washington Attorney General Nick Brown said in a press release.

In an email, Rep. Jim Walsh, chair of the Washington State Republican Party, said the proposal would bring relief from federal bureaucratic overreach and from state-level policies, such as the state’s phase-out of gasoline-powered car sales by 2035, that he said derive from the endangerment finding.

“The federal EPA's good reform allows us to begin to repair the real economic harm done to all Washingtonians by these destructive and divisive actions in Olympia,” Walsh said.

A spokesperson for the Western States Petroleum Association declined to comment, while representatives of the Association of Washington Business and the nonprofit Climate Solutions did not respond to interview requests.

The Environmental Protection Agency is taking public comment on its proposal through Sept. 15.