In what is likely the most consequential decision of his administration, Trump has allowed the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to repeal its “endangerment” policy. That policy codified a 2009 scientific conclusion that greenhouse gas emissions pose a danger to Americans’ health and welfare, allowing the EPA to regulate those gases. The repeal of the policy means that these gases can no longer be regulated by the Agency. The endangerment finding is pretty straightforward:
“The endangerment finding is a 2009 EPA ruling that determined greenhouse gases were a threat to public health. The finding originated from a 2007 Supreme Court case, Massachusetts v. EPA, in which the Court ruled that greenhouse gases qualify as pollutants under the Clean Air Act. Following the ruling, the Court ordered the EPA to determine whether greenhouse gasses endanger public health and welfare. The EPA concluded in the 2009 endangerment finding that six greenhouse gases—including carbon dioxide, methane, and hydrofluorocarbons—posed a threat to the public. The agency was then able to use those findings to regulate emissions from cars, trucks, and power plants.”
The repeal of the finding will have a direct effect on the health of American citizens but also on people all over the world. According to the New York Times:
“By repealing the endangerment finding, the United States is likely to add up to 18 billion metric tons of emissions to the atmosphere by 2055, according to the Environmental Defense Fund, an advocacy group. That is about three times the amount of climate pollution the country emitted last year.
“The added pollution could lead to as many as 58,000 premature deaths and an increase of 37 million asthma attacks between now and 2055, the group said.”
President Trump has called climate change a hoax, and he has stopped projects designed to promote alternative sources of energy and has ordered the Pentagon to increase its reliance upon coal-fired power plants. Coal is unquestionably the most damaging fuel for the environment. ABC News documents the significance of coal in climate change: “According to the EPA, ‘coal combusting is more carbon-intensive than burning natural gas or petroleum for electric power production.’ The EPA reported that in 2022, coal was responsible for 55% of CO2 emissions but only represented 20% of the electricity generated in the U.S.” Scientific American outlines Trump’s wrecking of the institutional mechanisms for restraining greenhouse gases:
“Trump has long referred to climate change as a ‘hoax’ despite decades of rigorous research and evidence in support of global warming. He began his second presidency by once again removing the U.S. from the Paris climate agreement to limit warming to below 1.5 degrees Celsius. Trump also in 2025 withdrew the U.S. from the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, the treaty under which the Paris agreement was negotiated.
“The current Trump administration has also sought to hobble the buildout of renewable energy in the U.S., particularly offshore wind turbines, which the president has falsely linked to the deaths of whales. The administration has also sought to bolster fossil fuels, opening more federal lands to drilling and ordering coal plants marked for retirement to stay open.”
Despite the overwhelming scientific evidence supporting the dangers of climate change, Trump relied upon a hand-picked panel of 5 researchers to support his contention that climate change is a hoax. That panel released a report entitled “A Critical Review of Impacts of Greenhouse Gas Emissions on the U.S. Climate”. That report has been resounding rejected by most climate scientists, as reported by the Sierra Club:
“The larger climate science community has resoundingly criticized the DOE’s report, which was not peer reviewed. Some scientists say their work was misrepresented by the report authors. A recent Carbon Brief analysis revealed that the report contains over 100 false or misleading statements.
“’This assessment appears to be manufacturing uncertainty and stoking controversy where there is none,’ Carlos Martinez, a senior scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, told Sierra….
“Martinez also noted the stark contrast between the DOE report and the congressionally mandated National Climate Assessment reports, the latter of which are peer reviewed and offer multiple opportunities for public comment, involve hundreds of scientists and take several years to produce. ‘In terms of the credibility here, the contrast is clear as day,’ he said.”
The repeal of the endangerment finding will be contested in court, so this is hardly the end of the story. The urgency of the danger posed by climate change is only increasing. The Washington Post ran an article on the possibility that climate change may in fact be accelerating. The article is worth reading since it has a number of graphs that I cannot reproduce on this medium. The article holds that:
“For about 40 years — from 1970 to 2010 — global warming proceeded at a fairly steady rate. As humans continued to pump massive amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, the world warmed at about 0.19 degrees Celsius per decade, or around 0.34 degrees Fahrenheit.
“Then, that rate began to shift. The warming rate ticked up a notch. Temperatures over the past decade have increased by close to 0.27 degrees C per decade — about a 42 percent increase.
“Those data — combined with the last few years of record heat — have convinced many researchers that the world is seeing a decisive shift in how temperatures are rising. The last 11 years have been the warmest years on record; according to an analysis by Berkeley Earth, if we assume a constant rate of warming since the 1970s, the last three years have a less than 1-in-100 chance of occurring solely due to natural variability.
“’There is greater acceptance now that there is a detectable acceleration of warming,’ said Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist and the research lead at the payments company Stripe.”
Trump’s decision is fateful for the vast majority of the global population, who have no voice in this decision. The US is by far the country most responsible for greenhouse gases since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, but it only accounts for about 4% of the global population. The following chart gives an idea of how unfair the US position on climate change is to the rest of the world.
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