Trump EPA Makes Major Moves to Repeal Climate Regulation

In 2008, the Obama administration compiled a massive report with the goal of answering one big question: Is climate change a danger to human health in America? Comprised of some of the most comprehensive scientific findings of all time, the Endangerment Finding concluded that it was, which allowed the  government to regulate climate change—including putting restrictions on greenhouse gas emissions. Now, the Trump administration and the Environmental Protection Agency have ruled to rescind the Endangerment Finding, in turn stripping climate regulations. It’s just the latest in Trump’s attack on climate science and regulations including the firing of hundreds of scientists, and the erasure of critical climate reports and data. We talk with climate reporters and scientists about what’s at stake. And what’s coming next. 

This partial transcript was computer-generated. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.

Leslie McClurg: Welcome to Forum. I’m Leslie McClurg. I’m in today for Alexis Madrigal. The Trump administration is dismantling very key climate protections. It’s scrapping pollution limits. It’s stalling renewable energy projects, deleting years of federal climate data. Its latest target is the Endangerment Finding. This is the legal foundation for regulating greenhouse gas emissions. Today, we’ll look at what’s at stake for the planet and public health. We’re joined first by Molly Taft. She’s a journalist and climate reporter for Wired. Shaye Wolf is climate science director at the Center for Biological Diversity.

Molly, let’s talk a little bit about this Endangerment Finding. I briefly defined it there, but what is it and why is it important?

Molly Taft: Yeah. So the Endangerment Finding is a really, really crucial cornerstone of how the U.S. is addressing and combating climate change. It’s basically the scientific and legal basis that the EPA uses to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, which we know are caused by fossil fuels and are driving these changes in our planet. So the EPA has a responsibility under the Clean Air Act to regulate air emissions that pose a threat to the environment and public health.

In the 2000s, there was a growing body of research linking fossil fuel use to climate change—GHG emissions from fossil fuel use to climate change—and a growing sort of global imperative to figure out how to act on this issue. In the U.S. though, the Bush EPA was dragging its feet a little bit and wasn’t taking action to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. So Massachusetts and a couple other states actually ended up taking the EPA to court, and that is kind of the basis of where the Endangerment Finding springs from.

The Supreme Court ruled that EPA needed to make some sort of determination on how it was going to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, and it ruled that greenhouse gas emissions should be able to be regulated under the Clean Air Act. And so that’s where the Endangerment Finding comes from.

Interestingly, the Endangerment Finding has always been a hot potato—even before it came into being in 2009. After that Supreme Court decision, the Bush EPA actually did undertake a scientific and policy analysis of six GHGs, and they basically found, like, look, we should be regulating these. They sent this analysis to the White House, and then the Bush White House just didn’t open the email. They refused to acknowledge the finding.

This finding came on top of years of really dedicated pushback from fossil fuel and business interests against any sort of action or regulation on climate change. So it’s always been a controversial finding. But curiously, there was this sense over the past decade and a half that it had become such a bedrock finding and that the world was moving forward on acknowledging that we do need to regulate greenhouse gas emissions.

The reversal of this in this Trump administration is actually kind of a departure from the first Trump administration, where some special interests asked then-EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt and his successor Andrew Wheeler to reconsider the Endangerment Finding. But some interests that traditionally may have not wanted to see so much regulation actually pushed back and said, “You know what? This regulation is kind of a bedrock of U.S. law right now.” Even big oil majors at that point, like ExxonMobil, were acknowledging that fossil fuel use does contribute to climate change.

And so the first Trump EPA actually passed on challenging this. They said, “You know what? We’re gonna leave it be. We’re gonna try to deregulate in other ways.” Now what we’re seeing is this administration really taking that to the extreme. And what they’ve done last week is decide to challenge this finding.

One of the biggest critics of the Endangerment Finding since before its inception was the Heritage Foundation, which of course is the right-wing organization that authored Project 2025, which has been the blueprint for much of the Trump administration in these first couple of months. Project 2025 did recommend “updating” the Endangerment Finding. So this wasn’t actually a surprise. But this is a really stark attack on climate regulation—on the very idea that these gases should and must be regulated under U.S. law.

Leslie McClurg: So basically, a finding that these emissions are dangerous—they endanger us. If it goes away, what happens in terms of our ability to limit the emissions? What does it tangibly look like on the ground?

Molly Taft: Yeah. I mean, it reverses the decision that we need to regulate this under the Clean Air Act. So it takes away—particularly, what this administration has challenged is tailpipe emissions from cars, these standards that, you know, you have to have a certain set of—you can’t bypass a certain number of these emissions from cars. That could be gone.

Power plants is its own story, but that’s kind of taken away. It’s really pulling out the rug from a lot of the environmental rules and laws coming out of the EPA around greenhouse gas emissions and kind of sets our regulatory counter back to zero a little bit if they do succeed in this.

Leslie McClurg: Shaye, what do you think this says about the administration—that they’re willing to make this move or they’re going after it this time, when they didn’t do it the first time?

Shaye Wolf: As destructive as the first Trump administration was, this time around, they are moving even farther and faster to roll back any climate progress and to pave the way for the fossil fuel industry and other industrial polluters.

And just to set the stage of what the EPA should do—what it was created to do—it is a science-based agency that was created to protect public health and the environment, to enforce our environmental laws, and to do its own scientific research. And critically, as Molly said, it has this vital role in requiring the big polluters—the cars and power plants—to reduce their greenhouse gas pollution, to slow the climate crisis, and to protect public health.

And so the EPA under the Trump administration has become the exact opposite. It is a science-denial agency now. It is working for the fossil fuel industry and big polluters, not for the people. And it has fired scientists and other federal workers from the agency. It has cut funding for research. It’s eliminating its research arm. And then critically, it is doing all of these climate rollbacks.

So the Endangerment Finding—rolling back, repealing the Endangerment Finding—is just one of the many attacks on science, on public health, on the climate, on our families, on our future.

Leslie McClurg: Molly, do we know if there are folks inside the federal government, inside the EPA, who are resisting these changes, or has he eliminated that bracket?

Molly Taft: I think that if you speak to a lot of EPA employees, especially folks who are career civil servants who have been in the agency for a long time, they would think that a lot of this pushback is, at the very least, ill-advised—if not illegal.

But I think what we are really seeing, as Shaye just mentioned, is an administration that is kind of on the extreme, even from its past iteration in the first Trump administration. These are folks who are really determined to ride it out as far as they can go, and those are the folks that have power right now.

There have even been some industry lawyers who’ve said that industries have quietly said, “We don’t actually need to do this.” Businesses abhor uncertainty, and this has been such a certain policy for the past decade and a half that, you know, the first time the Trump administration thought about reversing the Endangerment Finding back in 2017, there were some coal interests that said, “Hey, we don’t actually need this.” The American Petroleum Institute came out and said, “We don’t actually, you know, super need this to happen.”

But I think it’s remarkable that the folks running the agency now are even beyond what industry interests want. This is like a very dream version of what we could expect from these folks being in place.

Leslie McClurg: What do you expect to happen next? You mentioned that many people inside the EPA don’t even see this as potentially legal. So I imagine court battles are ahead?

Molly Taft: Yeah. Absolutely. There are going to be court battles. There are going to be a lot of challenges as to how they’re choosing to go about this.

I’ve read a little bit of the draft finding—and Shaye can speak more to this—but it does seem like they’re kind of throwing everything at the wall.

The Supreme Court decision didn’t say the EPA had to regulate greenhouse gas emissions—they didn’t say they had to make a finding one way or the other—but they did say, “Hey EPA, you should actually be regulating this.”

We have precedent, but on the other hand, the makeup of the court is extremely different than it was in 2007. And if this does go to the Supreme Court, there’s kind of no telling what they will weigh in on. They’ve been extremely conservative and made a lot of changes to environmental law over the past five years.

So, court challenges—definitely. How those will shake out remains to be seen.

Leslie McClurg: In our couple minutes before we take a break here—Shaye, this is obviously federal regulation. What does this mean at the state level? If the Endangerment Finding goes away, can states fill the gap?

Shaye Wolf: Yeah. As the Trump administration really tries to eviscerate the ability to reduce greenhouse gas pollution—this planet-heating pollution—at the federal level, it’s so important for states and local governments to step in, and step in strongly.

There are a lot of ways under state and local law that states can reduce greenhouse gas pollution. The key is to phase out fossil fuel extraction and combustion, and speed the transition to clean, renewable wind and solar energy.

California has shown this—phasing out oil and gas extraction, enacting a fracking ban, creating a mandatory buffer between where drilling happens and where people go to school, live or work. California has done a really good job in expediting clean car credits and solar and wind development, and putting that energy on the grid.

Leslie McClurg: We’re talking about the Trump administration’s attacks on climate science and environmental regulation. We’re joined by Molly Taft from Wired, Shaye Wolf, climate science director at the Center for Biological Diversity, and Kristin Sissner, executive director at Berkeley Earth. We’ll be right back after this break. Stay with us.