Donald Trump says goodbye to Obama-era ruling: what difference does it make?
A sweeping regulatory reversal reignites the legal and political clash over the government’s role in tackling climate change.
The Trump administration has taken its most sweeping step yet to dismantle climate regulations, eliminating the scientific finding that has underpinned federal limits on greenhouse gas emissions for more than a decade. As a result, greenhouse gases will no longer be regulated by the federal government after the repeal announced Thursday.
Trump admin continues anti-science push
President Donald Trump, and Lee Zeldin, head of the Environmental Protection Agency, said they were rescinding the so-called “endangerment finding,” the 2009 determination that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases pose a threat to public health. Adopted under Barack Obama, the rule became the cornerstone of climate regulations under the Clean Air Act, covering vehicles and power plants.
Trump described the move as “the greatest deregulatory action in the history of the United States, by far,” and “one of the greatest scams in history,” arguing it “has no factual basis.” Zeldin called the measure “the Holy Grail of federal regulatory overreach.”
“On the contrary, over generations, fossil fuels have saved millions of lives and lifted billions of people out of poverty around the world,” Trump said at the White House.
Trump attacks Biden and Obama administrations
“This was all a scam, a big scam … This was a theft from the country by Obama and Biden,” he said, without sharing any evidence.
Zeldin, a former Republican congressman chosen by Trump last year to lead the EPA, criticized previous Democratic administrations, saying that in the name of fighting climate change they were “willing to bankrupt the country.”
By scrapping the endangerment finding, the administration would gain broader latitude to dismantle other rules aimed at limiting emissions from power plants and the oil and gas industry.
The Supreme Court of the United States has repeatedly upheld the federal government’s authority to regulate greenhouse gas pollution. In 2022, however, it narrowed the scope of that power, prompting the Biden administration to adopt more limited rules for power plants. Repealing the endangerment finding would reopen the legal fight in the courts, a process that could stretch on for years and potentially return to the Supreme Court.
A former senior EPA official told CNN that he believes the move is part of a long-term legal strategy by the Trump administration. “Their definition of winning, I think, has been and will be when they take a final action and defend it in court, to permanently eliminate the EPA’s authority under the Clean Air Act to regulate greenhouse gases,” said Joe Goffman, who led the EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation during the Biden administration.
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