Trump Wants To Stop Regulating Greenhouse Gases Entirely

The decision could have far-reaching consequences — including for the fossil fuel industry, which may find itself exposed to a flood of new litigation.

By Kate Yoder, Grist

In 2009, the Environmental Protection Agency declared that the rising concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere threatened public health and welfare. This “endangerment finding,” as it’s known in legal jargon, may have sounded self-evident to those who had been following climate science for decades, but its consequences for U.S. policy were tremendous: It allowed the EPA to issue rules limiting emissions from U.S. vehicles, power plants, and other industrial sources. While those rules have not always survived court challenges and changing presidential administrations, the regulatory authority underpinning them has proven remarkably stable.

On Tuesday, President Donald Trump’s EPA took a major step toward changing that. At a truck dealership in Indianapolis, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin announced a formal proposal to repeal the endangerment finding, which has been in the works since the beginning of Trump’s second presidency. At the same time, Zeldin announced a plan to repeal all federal greenhouse gas emissions regulations for motor vehicles. “If finalized, today’s announcement would amount to the largest deregulatory action in the history of the United States,” he said at the press conference.

Zeldin accused his predecessors at the EPA of making “many, many, many mental leaps” in the 2009 declaration, and he argued that the “real threat” to people’s livelihoods is not carbon dioxide but instead the regulations themselves, which he claimed lead to higher prices and restrict people’s choices.

If the EPA succeeds in reversing the endangerment finding, it would “eviscerate the biggest regulatory tool the federal government has” to keep climate change in check, said Ann Carlson, an environmental law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Republicans in Congress have already repealed much of former President Joe Biden’s landmark climate law, which aimed to put the U.S. within reach of its Paris Agreement targets primarily by funneling money to renewable energy sources. Rescinding the endangerment finding targets the other main tool the U.S. government can use to address climate change: the executive branch’s power to limit emissions through regulatory action. In other words, Republicans have already eliminated many of the federal government’s proverbial climate carrots — now they’re going after the sticks.

“We will not have a serious national climate policy if this goes through,” said Patrick Parenteau, an emeritus professor of climate policy and environmental law at Vermont Law School.

But that’s a big “if.” Experts say that the EPA’s plan is bound to be embroiled in years of lawsuits, perhaps one day making its way to the Supreme Court, which blessed the EPA’s authority to regulate greenhouse gases in 2007 and declined to hear a challenge to the endangerment finding as recently as December 2023. And even if the EPA does manage to overturn the endangerment finding after all court challenges have been exhausted, it would result in sweeping consequences — including some that the administration’s allies in the oil industry may not like. Indeed, the risk is serious enough that some fossil fuel industry groups have urged the Trump administration not to repeal the finding.