https://www.politico.com/news/2026/02/10/trump-revoke-climate-change-rules-00773418
With its plans to revoke the endangerment finding, the administration is gambling that the Supreme Court will allow it to completely avoid regulating the nation’s top greenhouse gas sources.
By ALEX GUILLÉN
02/10/2026 02:41 PM EST
The Trump Environmental Protection Agency is set to cut the legs out from under U.S. climate change rules this week, revoking its own authority to regulate carbon dioxide and other pollutants heating the planet.
EPA’s plan to repeal the 16-year-old endangerment finding that said greenhouse gases pose a threat to public health and welfare represents the most aggressive step yet by President Donald Trump to reverse the policies and regulations aimed at slowing the pollution driving climate change.
The repeal, which White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said will be released Thursday, will erase the regulatory foundation for many of EPA’s climate rules under the Clean Air Act. It could also handcuff future Democratic presidents from using EPA to transition the nation’s fleets of automobiles and power plants to clean energy — even as experts around the world warn ever more significant action is needed to stave off the worst effects of climate change.
“I think it’s a historic low, frankly, for EPA to be taking this stance now,” said Benjamin DeAngelo, a former EPA official who played a key role in writing the 2009 finding that is set to be repealed.
The move is part of the administration’s broader energy agenda to prop up what had been a financially ailing coal industry and secure the position of the oil and gas industry even as it takes aggressive steps to stymie wind and solar projects and electric vehicles that had been the focus of the Biden administration. The administration is actively seeking to ease the regulatory costs and open up new federal lands and waters for fossil fuel production and withdraw the United States from international climate treaties.
“This will be the largest deregulatory action in American history, and it will save the American people $1.3 trillion in crushing regulations,” Leavitt said Tuesday. “This is just one more way this administration is working to make life more affordable for everyday Americans.”
The nation’s environmental regulator is expected to assert that EPA’s 2009 assessment of the threat greenhouse gases posed to public health and welfare was overblown, an opinion clashing with the vast majority of scientists.
It’s not clear to what extent EPA will hew to arguments made in the proposal it released last year that criticized mainstream climate science, highlighting uncertainties over the precise extent of future extreme weather and focusing instead on some narrow benefits of carbon dioxide. Those arguments were assailed by most scientists, and an Energy Department draft report challenging accepted climate science that EPA had based part of its proposal on ran into legal trouble for being written in secret by hand-picked contrarians.
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“This is the culmination of a lot of effort over a lot of time by a lot of people who didn’t give up, unlike people in industry and business, in the oil industry,” said Ebell.
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Steve Milloy, a former Trump transition adviser who disputes consensus climate science, said prior to the release of the repeal that he expected the administration to rely on legal arguments only. The administration didn’t have time to construct a new basis on which to challenge the 2009 finding’s scientific assertions, he said, after the DOE report became embroiled in procedural “controversy.”
“I think the legal rationale should be enough, and everybody should understand that,” he said.
But he said officials at the White House Office of Management and Budget would have preferred to move a repeal that took on science head-on, even if it took longer. Regulatory office staff was concerned, he said, that courts might agree that EPA lacked legal authority to regulate greenhouse gases, but still strike down the repeal because “they don’t want to be responsible for millions of people being killed or the destruction of the planet.”
