https://www.politico.com/news/2025/06/11/trump-biden-obama-climate-regulations-legacy-00395857
The U.S. government has long recognized greenhouse gases as a threat, but major rules to address them have failed to stick.
President Donald Trump’s latest climate rollback makes it all but official: The United States is giving up on trying to stop the planet’s warming.
In some ways, the effort has barely started.
More than 15 years after federal regulators officially recognized that greenhouse gas pollution threatens “current and future generations,” their most ambitious efforts to defuse that threat have been blocked in the courts and by Trump’s rule-slicing buzzsaw. Wednesday’s action by the Environmental Protection Agency would extend that streak by wiping out a Biden-era regulation on power plants — leaving the nation’s second-largest source of climate pollution unshackled until at least the early 2030s. Rules aimed at lessening climate pollution from transportation, the nation’s No. 1 source, are also on the Trump hit list.
The years of whipsawing moves have left Washington with no consistent approach on how — or whether — to confront climate change, even as scientists warn that years are growing short to avoid catastrophic damage to human society. While the Trump-era GOP’s hardening opposition to climate action has been a major reason for the lack of consensus, one former Democratic adviser said her own party needs to find a message that resonates with broad swaths of the electorate.
“There’s no way around it: The left strategy on climate needs to be rethought,” said Jody Freeman, who served as counselor for energy and climate change in President Barack Obama’s White House. “We’ve lost the culture war on climate, and we have to figure out a way for it to not be a niche leftist movement.”
It’s a strategy Freeman admitted she was “struggling” to articulate, but one that included using natural gas as a “bridge fuel” to more renewable power — an approach Democrats embraced during the Obama administration — finding “a new approach” for easing permits for energy infrastructure and building broad-based political support.
As the Democratic nominee in 2008, Obama expressed the hope that his campaign would be seen as “the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.” But two years later, the Democrats’ cap-and-trade climate bill failed to get through a Senate where they held a supermajority. Obama didn’t return to the issue in earnest until his second term, taking actions including the enactment of a sweeping power plant rule that wasn’t yet in effect when Trump rescinded it and the Supreme Court declared it dead.
Republicans, meanwhile, have moved far from their seemingly moderating stance in 2008, when nominee John McCain offered his own climate proposals and even then-President George W. Bush announced a modest target for slowing carbon pollution by 2025.
EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin contended Wednesday that the Obama- and Biden-era rules were overbearing and too costly.
“The American public spoke loudly and clearly last November: They wanted to make sure that all agencies were cognizant of their economic concerns,” he said when announcing the rule rollback at agency headquarters. “At the EPA under President Trump, we have chosen to both protect the environment and grow the economy.”
…
U.S. greenhouse gas emissions were virtually flat last year, falling just 0.2 percent, after declining 20 percent since 2005, according to the research firm Rhodium Group. That output would need to fall 7.6 percent annually through 2030 to meet the climate goals Biden floated, which were aimed at limiting the rise in global temperatures to 1.5 degrees Celsius since the start of the Industrial Revolution. That level is a critical threshold for avoiding the most severe impacts of climate change.
The Obama-era rule came out during a decade when governments around the world threw their weight behind blunting climate pollution through executive actions. Ricky Revesz, who was Biden’s regulatory czar, recalled the “great excitement” at the White House Blue Room reception just before Obama announced his power plant rule, known as the Clean Power Plan. It seemed a watershed moment. But it didn’t last.
“I thought that it was going to be a more linear path forward,” he said. “That linear path forward has not materialized. And that is disappointing.”
…
Meanwhile, Congress has become harsher terrain for climate action.
In May, House Republicans voted to undo the incentives for electric cars and other clean energy technologies in Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, the nation’s most significant effort to spur clean energy and curb climate change.
That same week, 35 House Democrats and Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.) crossed the aisle and voted to kill an EPA waiver that had allowed California to set more stringent tailpipe pollution standards for vehicles to deal with its historically smoggy skies. California was planning to use that waiver to end sales of internal combustion engine vehicles in 2035, a rule 10 other states and the District of Columbia had planned to follow.
…
…
Some state governors, such as Democrats Kathy Hochul of New York and Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, have vowed to go it alone on climate policy if need be.
But analyses have shown state actions alone are unlikely to achieve the greenhouse gas reductions at the scale and speed needed to avoid baking in catastrophic effects from climate change.
The Sierra Club, for example, has helped shutter nearly 400 coal-fired units across the U.S. since 2010 through its Beyond Coal campaign, which has argued the economic case against fossil fuel generation in front of state utility commissions. While Joanne Spalding, the group’s legal director, said it can continue to strike blows against coal with that strategy, she acknowledged that “gas is a huge problem” — and left no doubt that the Trump administration’s moves would do damage.
