EPA administrator Lee Zeldin looks on as Donald Trump announces the repeal of a rule that allows the agency to regulate greenhouse gases. February 11, 2026.Evan Vucci/AP
On February 12, Donald Trump dropped the climatic equivalent of an atomic bomb. He announced the repeal of the US Environmental Protection Agency’s 2009 endangerment finding, the basis of the EPA’s ability to regulate climate-warming emissions. “This will be the largest deregulatory action in American history,” proclaimed White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt.
“This is corruption, plain and simple,” countered Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.).
It also will likely end up costing Americans money, reports Dharna Noor of Guardian US, who, along with Grist reporter Jake Bittle, is featured in this explainer video from our Climate Desk collaboration and the talented team at Reveal.
In short, the administration’s move is an attempt to subvert reality. The Obama-era finding established that atmospheric greenhouse gases are bad for human health and welfare, allowing them to be regulated under the Clean Air Act. In 2025, a panel of scientists affirmed the finding, writing: “The evidence for current and future harm to human health and welfare created by human-caused [greenhouse gases] is beyond scientific dispute.”
Condemnation was swift and plentiful, and called out the administration’s baldly transactional relationships with oil and gas producers. “Put simply, this is a gift-wrapped package for the fossil fuel industry,” Manish Bapna, CEO of the nonprofit Natural Resources Defense Council, told Inside Climate News. “It is unscientific, it is bad economics, and it is illegal. So we’re gonna fight it.”
They already are, as Noor reports in this Guardian follow-up.
Legal experts say the administration may be biting off more than it can chew. “It seems to me unlikely that the [US Supreme Court] would say that the EPA has no power to regulate carbon,” Michael Lewyn, a professor of environmental law at Touro Law Center and critic of environmental regulations, told Grist.
Pat Parenteau, a professor of environmental law at Vermont Law and Graduate School, didn’t mince words when talking to Wired’s Molly Taft. “I don’t see any plan, any strategy, any end game…just fuck everything up as much as you can.”
