Less than a week after the Trump administration revoked the “endangerment finding” that ended the Environmental Protection Agency’s regulation of climate warming greenhouse gas emissions, the first lawsuit contesting that has been filed.

New England is already in the mix.

The Boston-based Conservation Law Foundation is among more than one dozen environmental advocacy and health organizations that filed suit in federal district court in Washington, D.C. on Wednesday just hours after it became even legal to do so.

The suit challenges a rule finalized by the EPA last Thursday that rescinds a 2009 government declaration known as the endangerment finding that determined that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases threaten public health and welfare. The Obama-era finding is the legal underpinning of nearly all climate regulations under the Clean Air Act for motor vehicles, power plants and other pollution sources that are heating the planet.

The repeal eliminates all greenhouse gas emissions standards for cars and trucks and could unleash a broader undoing of climate regulations on stationary sources such as power plants and oil and gas facilities, experts say.

The legal challenge, filed Wednesday in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, asserts that the EPA’s rescission of the endangerment finding is unlawful. The 2009 finding supported common sense safeguards to cut climate pollution, including from cars and trucks, the lawsuit says. Clean vehicle standards imposed by the Biden administration were set to “deliver the single biggest cut to U.S. carbon pollution in history, save lives and save Americans hard-earned money on gas,” the coalition said in filing the case.

After nearly two decades of scientific evidence supporting the 2009 finding, “the agency cannot credibly claim that the body of work is now incorrect,” said Brian Lynk, a senior attorney at the Environmental Law & Policy Center.

“This reckless and legally untenable decision creates immediate uncertainty for businesses, guarantees prolonged legal battles and undermines the stability of federal climate regulations,” Lynk said.

Aside from CLF, the coalition of groups bringing the case includes the American Public Health Association, American Lung Association, Alliance of Nurses for a Healthy Environment and Physicians for Social Responsibility, along with the Center for Biological Diversity, Environmental Defense Fund, Natural Resources Defense Council and Sierra Club.

The suit named EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin and EPA itself as defendants.

President Donald Trump said in announcing the repeal that it was “the single largest deregulatory action in American history, by far,” while Zeldin called the endangerment finding “the Holy Grail of federal regulatory overreach.”

The endangerment finding “led to trillions of dollars in regulations that strangled entire sectors of the United States economy, including the American auto industry,” Zeldin said. “The Obama and Biden administrations used it to steamroll into existence a left-wing wish list of costly climate policies, electric vehicle mandates and other requirements that assaulted consumer choice and affordability.”

In the wake of last week’s repeal, Connecticut Attorney General William Tong indicated that states may also be planning to take legal action.

“The next step is now the legal fight in court,” Tong, who is president of the National Association of Attorneys General, said last week. “But we are going to stop him. …We will be in this fight for as long as it takes.”

[RELATED: ‘Endangerment finding’ repealed; CT promises legal battle]

Environmental groups described the move as the single biggest attack in U.S. history against federal authority to address climate change. Evidence backing up the endangerment finding has only grown stronger in the 17 years since it was approved, they said.

Under the Clean Air Act, EPA is legally required to limit emissions of any air pollutant that causes or contributes to “air pollution that may reasonably be anticipated to endanger public health or welfare.” In 2007, the Supreme Court held in Massachusetts v. EPA that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are “air pollutants” under the Clean Air Act and told EPA to determine, based on the science, if that pollution endangers human health and welfare. EPA made that determination in 2009, which led to new standards for vehicles. It built on that finding when issuing other standards.

“If you go back to the Massachusetts v. EPA decision from the Supreme Court, that case held that that the Clean Air Act unambiguously gives EPA the authority to regulate greenhouse gases if it finds that they endanger health and the environment,” Kate Sinding Daly, vice president for law and policy at the Conservation Law Foundation, said. Daly said the lawsuit argues that “because there is no rational basis for concluding otherwise, the rescission of the endangerment finding, in and of itself, violates the Administrative Procedures Act, and taken a step further, compels that they regulate greenhouse gas emissions.”

The EPA’s own analysis found that eliminating the vehicle standards will increase gas prices and force Americans to spend more on fuel, advocates said.

EPA’s repeal of the endangerment finding, along with the elimination of safeguards to limit vehicle emissions, “marks a complete dereliction of the agency’s mission to protect people’s health and its legal obligations under the Clean Air Act,” said Dr. Gretchen Goldman, president and CEO at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

“This shameful and dangerous action … is rooted in falsehoods, not facts, and is at complete odds with the public interest and the best available science,” Goldman said. Heat-trapping emissions and global average temperatures are rising — primarily due to the burning of fossil fuels — contributing to a mounting human and economic toll across the world, she said.

Sinding Daly of CLF added, “Congress, when it enacted the Clean Air Act, obviously didn’t have the same awareness of, or maybe arguably, any awareness of the particular issues that we’re confronting now when it comes to climate change. But they certainly contemplated that there was enough life in the statute, that over time, EPA would look at what the science is saying, and that it would determine which pollutants were, in fact, endangering health and welfare, and that they would regulate those.

“They don’t get to just kind of pick and choose which ones they want,” she said. “The science is clear on this.”