NJ Sues Trump Over Last Minute Environmental Rollbacks

NEW JERSEY – On President Trump’s last full day in office, Attorney General Gurbir S. Grewal filed nine new lawsuits challenging a series of environmental rollbacks rushed through during the waning days of the current administration.

The nine lawsuits announced today touch on issues including protections for clean air, energy efficiency requirements for appliances, and measures to protect migratory birds and endangered wildlife species.

• An EPA rule that will allow major sources of hazardous air pollutants to reclassify themselves as less regulated “area sources” under the Clean Air Act, abandoning the “once-in, always-in” policy that had been in place for 25 years.
• An EPA rule on greenhouse gas emission standards for airplanes that fails to adequately mitigate public health and environmental harms from such emissions, including the environmental justice impacts on residents living near airports, which disproportionately include disadvantaged minority and low-income communities.
• An EPA rule maintaining the national ambient air quality standard (NAAQS) for ozone at a level that fails to protect public health and welfare based on the existing scientific evidence.
• An EPA rule that will skew how the agency weighs the costs and benefits of rules under the Clean Air Act by excluding important public health benefits from the analysis while inflating the costs. In particular, the rule will cause future EPA rules to undercount the harmful effects of carbon emissions that lead to climate change and distort the value of “co-benefits,” the often-substantial benefits of rules that addresses more than one pollutant.
• An EPA rule weakening the Clean Air Act’s new source review program for major modifications to existing major stationary sources of emissions. The rule will subject New Jersey residents to lower air quality and will make it more difficult for downwind States like New Jersey to attain or maintain federal air quality standards.
• Rules from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and National Marine Fisheries Service that will make it harder to protect endangered and threatened species by narrowly defining critical “habitat” and establishing a skewed process for excluding areas from critical habitat designations.
• A rule from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service that rolls back protections for migratory birds. The lawsuit alleges that the rule will increase the risk of death for birds that migrate within and through New Jersey and other States, depriving residents of scientific, recreational, and birdwatching opportunities, and undermining the ecological balance that the birds help maintain, including by controlling insects and rodents, pollinating, and dispersing seeds. The complaint on behalf of 12 States was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York and alleges that the rule violates the Endangered Species Act, other laws, and principles of international comity.
• An EPA rule that unlawfully and arbitrarily limits the scientific evidence that the agency can consider when adopting rules and standards to protect human health and the environment.
• A U.S. Department of Energy rule that will weaken federal energy efficiency standards for consumer appliances and industrial equipment by making it easier for manufacturers to obtain waivers from product testing requirements.

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