April 14, 2026 – Farmers joined a coalition of environmental groups last week to sue the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) over its deregulating of greenhouse gas emissions.

The lawsuit challenges the legality of the EPA’s rollback of vehicle emissions regulations and its repeal of the endangerment finding, the scientific determination that allowed the federal government to regulate emissions based on public health harms. If the changes stand, both are likely to significantly increase greenhouse gas emissions, accelerating climate change.

Members of the Northeast Organic Farming Association of New York (NOFA-NY) said in a press release that they are already experiencing the impacts, making farming riskier.

“Despite the critical role we play in the American food and fiber supply economy, farmers are completely at the mercy of droughts, floods, and other extreme weather,” said Wes Gillingham, NOFA-NY board president and a farmer at Gael Roots Community Farm. “This policy repeal ignores the realities of climate change and will lead to the economic demise of many good farmers.”

In the most recent round of reports from the Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change, the world’s leading climate experts found climate change is already affecting the world’s food supply and exacerbating hunger. To avoid catastrophic outcomes, they said, global emissions must be reduced by 60 percent by 2035.

Many of the impacts cited in that 2023 report echoed examples the New York farmers gave of the challenges they now face: pests and diseases appearing earlier and lasting longer, shifting growing seasons, and extreme heat, flooding, and droughts that destroy crops or reduce yields.

The lawsuit, which also involves Food and Water Watch, Iowa and Illinois Environmental Councils, and Alaskan Tribes, represented by Earthjustice, is one of several challenging the legality of the EPA’s repeal of the endangerment finding, as well as the validity of the working group report used to justify that repeal. (Link to this post.)

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