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In what is set to be its most audacious anti-environment move yet, the Trump administration on Thursday will roll back the mechanism allowing the government to regulate planet-heating pollution, the White House press secretary has told reporters.
“President Trump will be joined by EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin to formalize the recession of the 2009 Obama-era endangerment finding,” Karoline Leavitt said at a press conference on Tuesday. “This will be the largest deregulatory action in American history.”
The finding determined that CO2 and other greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare, establishing a legal basis to regulate them under the Clean Air Act. Its overturning would be a “devastating blow to millions of Americans facing growing risks of unnatural disasters”, said Meredith Hankins, federal climate legal director at the environmental advocacy non-profit National Resources Defense Council.
“The Trump EPA is cynically pretending climate change isn’t a risk to Americans’ health and welfare,” said Hankins. “This is the biggest attack ever on federal authority to tackle the climate crisis.
The rollback is sure to draw legal challenges.
“This isn’t going to stand without a fight,” Hankins added. “The EPA’s slapdash legal arguments should be laughed out of court. We will be seeing them in court – and we are going to win.”
The Environmental Defense Fund has also promised to sue the EPA over the rule, said Fred Krupp, its president. Abigail Dillen, president of the green legal organization Earthjustice, also said her group “will see the Trump administration in court”.
In a statement, an EPA spokesperson called the endangerment finding “one of the most damaging decisions in modern history” and said “hardworking families and small businesses have paid the price” for it.
“EPA is actively working to deliver a historic action for the American people,” the spokesperson said.
Trump signed an executive order on his first day back in office directing EPA to assess whether the endangerment finding should be preserved.
After Zeldin announced the plan to repeal the finding in July 2025, the agency received half a million comments on the proposal. He then submitted the repeal of the legal determination for White House review last month.
Leavitt said on Tuesday the rollback would save Americans $1.3tn, but did not explain how officials arrived at that number. Though the new rule may save some corporations money, it could pose trillions in climate damages and healthcare costs, experts warn. The climate rules EPA is targeting could prevent tens of thousands of deaths and save the US $275bn for each year they are in effect, an analysis by the Associated Press in July found.
“Trump and Zeldin are telling our families: we’ll let you get sicker and watch your healthcare costs skyrocket as long as oil and gas CEOs can profit,” said Alex Witt, senior adviser at environmental advocacy group Climate Power.
The endangerment finding forms the legal underpinning of virtually all federal climate regulations, including those on vehicles, oil and gas operations and power plants. But the final rule, Zeldin told the Wall Street Journal this week, will apply only to emissions standards on cars and trucks, not those governing stationary sources such as power plants.
The EPA did not directly confirm the scope of the planned change. The spokesperson said: “The Endangerment Finding is the legal prerequisite used by the Obama and Biden administrations to justify trillions of dollars of greenhouse gas regulations covering new vehicles and engines. Absent this finding, EPA would lack statutory authority … to prescribe standards for certain motor vehicle emissions.”
The agency has separately proposed to find that emissions from power plants “do not contribute significantly to dangerous air pollution” and therefore should not be regulated.
Gretchen Goldman, president of the science advocacy group Union of Concerned Scientists, said: “The science establishing harm to human health and the environment from global warming emissions was evident in 2009 and it’s even more undeniable today.
“EPA has a legal obligation to regulate this pollution under the Clean Air Act,” said Goldman, who previously served in the Department of Transportation and the White House. “The American public deserves a government that will face the challenge of the climate crisis head on with proven policy solutions, not actively serve as agents of destruction by worsening it to boost fossil fuel profits.”
