Trump EPA Moves To Formally Declare Greenhouse Gases Harmless, Resolving Long-Standing Concern That The Legal Basis For Climate Regulation Still Existed

WASHINGTON. Citing a bold new commitment to unencumbered industry, the Environmental Protection Agency announced Wednesday that it would formally reconsider the 2009 endangerment finding, the scientific determination that greenhouse gases threaten public health and welfare, thereby addressing the long-standing federal concern that the government still possessed a legal reason to limit them.

The endangerment finding, issued in 2009 after the Supreme Court instructed the agency to determine whether carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases endanger Americans, serves as the constitutional and statutory foundation for essentially every federal rule governing tailpipe emissions, power-plant pollution, and industrial methane. By reopening it, officials noted, the administration could dismantle the entire apparatus of climate regulation at the root rather than one inconvenient rule at a time, a step described internally as efficient.

Administrator Lee Zeldin unveiled the reconsideration as the centerpiece of a broader deregulatory push he has publicly characterized as driving a dagger through what he termed the climate change religion, and which he has described as the Holy Grail of that religion. Agency materials framed the review not as a rejection of the underlying science, which remains unchanged, but as an acknowledgment that the science had become an obstacle.

“The previous administration weaponized the finding that pollution is bad for people,” said one source within the administration, who added that decades of accumulating atmospheric carbon represented, at most, a difference of opinion. “We are simply restoring balance by determining that the thing causing the harm may not, upon further review, be causing it.”

The President, who has repeatedly described climate change as a hoax and once suggested the concept was invented by China, praised the effort as a tremendous win for clean, beautiful coal and for the many patriots who had asked him for exactly this. In 2024, Mr. Trump reportedly told oil and gas executives at a Mar-a-Lago dinner that they should raise one billion dollars for his campaign, a sum he framed against the value of the environmental rules he intended to reverse.

Experts noted that finalizing the reversal would require the agency to argue, in formal rulemaking, that the warming already reshaping American coastlines, crops, and wildfire seasons does not endanger the Americans living among it. Officials expressed confidence that the paperwork would hold.

At press time, the atmosphere had declined to participate in the reconsideration and was continuing to trap heat at the same rate as before.