The Chesapeake Bay Foundation this week joined a national coalition in a lawsuit challenging the Trump administration’s repeal of a key climate rule.
Earlier this year, the Environmental Protection Agency announced it was nixing the nearly two-decade-old endangerment finding in “the single largest deregulatory action in U.S. history.”
The 2009 rule under the Clean Air Act underpinned the government’s fight against climate change by stating that emissions of planet-warming greenhouse gases threaten public health and welfare. The repeal also eliminated associated vehicle emissions standards meant to limit soot and smog.
The nonprofit Earthjustice and the Environmental Law & Policy Center are leading the new lawsuit, on behalf of more than a dozen organizations including farming associations, Indigenous tribes and community groups.
“If allowed to stand, the repeal would abandon climate action at the federal level,” the coalition stated in a news release Wednesday.
The Bay Foundation says the Chesapeake watershed would suffer from the government’s reversal because it’s “on the front lines of climate change threats.”
That includes sea level rise drowning wetlands, warmer waters harming marine life and heavier rainfall causing flooding and washing pollutants into the bay.
“Climate change is already harming people and the Chesapeake Bay,” Alison Hooper Prost, CBF’s senior vice president for programs, said in a statement. “This latest rollback is a threat to us all.”
In December, state and federal leaders around the region, including the EPA, approved the latest iteration of the Chesapeake Bay Watershed Agreement, which directs the decades-long restoration program.
The document acknowledges the need to adapt to long-term changes in sea level, temperature and precipitation.
