The Trump administration on Thursday pulled the regulatory cornerstone out from under decades of federal climate policy — revoking the 2009 EPA "endangerment finding" that classified carbon dioxide and five other greenhouse gases as threats to public health and welfare. Without that finding, the legal scaffold supporting a vast regime of emissions regulations, fuel economy mandates, and green energy subsidies loses its footing.

EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin framed the decision unmistakably,

As EPA Administrator, I am proud to deliver the single largest deregulatory action in U.S. history on behalf of American taxpayers and consumers. As an added bonus, the off-cycle credit for the almost universally despised start-stop feature on vehicles has been removed.

President Trump, who has long characterized climate change policies as "a scam," announced the revocation alongside Zeldin.

Under the process just completed by the EPA, we are officially terminating the so-called endangerment finding, a disastrous Obama-era policy that severely damaged the American auto industry, and massively drove up prices for American consumers.

He made clear that the original finding had nothing to do with protecting Americans — and everything to do with empowering a regulatory apparatus that crushed industry and inflated consumer prices.

What the Endangerment Finding Actually Did

The 2009 finding didn't come from Congress. It came from a bureaucratic determination — prompted by the Supreme Court's 2007 ruling in Massachusetts v. EPA — that greenhouse gases qualify as air pollutants under the Clean Air Act and that the EPA must evaluate whether they pose a danger. The Obama EPA concluded they did, and from that single administrative finding flowed an ocean of regulation: tailpipe emission standards, power plant rules, efficiency mandates, and the regulatory infrastructure that made electric vehicle subsidies and wind energy mandates possible.

It was, in effect, an end-run. Congress never passed a comprehensive climate law. Lawmakers never voted to restructure the American energy economy. Instead, unelected regulators at the EPA used a decades-old air quality statute to reshape how Americans drive, heat their homes, and power their businesses.

Courts upheld the finding — including a 2023 decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit that rejected a legal challenge to it, as reported in Newsweek. That legal history is real. But courts upholding a regulation and that regulation being wise policy are two entirely different things. The administrative state has always been better at surviving judicial review than at producing good outcomes for the people it governs.

A Year in the Making

This wasn't a snap decision. President Trump's Day One executive order, "Unleashing American Energy," tasked the EPA with submitting recommendations on the legality and continuing applicability of the 2009 endangerment finding within the first 30 days of his term. On March 12, 2025, Administrator Zeldin announced the agency was formally reconsidering the finding. By July 29, 2025, Zeldin made the formal proposal to reconsider — announced, fittingly, at a truck dealership in Indiana.

This was a deliberate, structured administrative process — the kind that critics of deregulation usually claim to want. Zeldin described the approach as:

Strictly following the letter of the law, returning commonsense to policy, delivering consumer choice to Americans and advancing the American Dream.

The administration estimates the revocation will save over $1.3 trillion and deliver average savings of more than $2,400 on a light-duty car, truck, or SUV. For families already squeezed by years of inflation, that's not an abstraction.

The Europe Warning

Trump used the announcement to draw a sharp contrast with countries that have gone further down the green energy path. He singled out Europe — and wind energy in particular:

Between immigration and because of, you know, environmental things, like the windmills, which are taking over, the people hate them, the energy is by far the most expensive, and we're fighting very hard to make sure that they don't get built. I hope we don't have one bill during my administration.

He went further, offering a blunt assessment of Europe's trajectory:

Europe isn't even recognizable anymore.

That line will provoke howls from the usual quarters. But European energy prices have become a genuine drag on industrial competitiveness across the continent. Germany shuttered nuclear plants to chase renewables and ended up burning more coal. The UK's energy bills have become a political crisis. These aren't right-wing talking points — they're realities that European voters are punishing their own governments over.

The argument that America should follow Europe's energy model looks weaker with every passing quarter.

The Legal Fight Ahead

Environmental groups have already pledged to challenge the revocation in court. The Natural Resources Defense Council's president, Manish Bapna, called it "the single biggest attack in U.S. history on federal authority to tackle the climate crisis." The Environmental Defense Fund has signaled it will join the legal battle.

Notice the framing: the concern isn't about public health outcomes or measurable environmental improvement. It's about "federal authority." That's revealing. The endangerment finding was always less about science than about power — the power of federal agencies to regulate virtually any economic activity that involves energy, which is to say virtually all economic activity.

The legal challenges will be real. Courts have historically deferred to EPA findings, and unwinding a determination that has survived multiple rounds of litigation will require the administration to build a robust administrative record. But the Trump EPA has had a year to do exactly that — and the process Zeldin followed was designed with litigation in mind.

What Conservatives Understand

The endangerment finding was always the quiet engine of the regulatory climate machine. Executive orders come and go. Agency rules get rewritten with each administration. But the finding sat beneath all of it, providing the legal justification that allowed any future administration to ratchet emissions regulations tighter without ever returning to Congress for permission.

Revoking it doesn't just undo one set of rules. It removes the foundation that made the entire architecture possible. That's why the reaction from environmental groups has been so intense — and why Zeldin described the finding as the "Holy Grail of federal regulatory overreach."

When a reporter asked Trump what his message was for Americans concerned about the decision, his answer was characteristically direct:

I tell them, don't worry about it, because it has nothing to do with public health. It just was all a scam, a giant scam.

The courts will have their say. The environmental lobby will spend millions fighting it. But for the first time since 2009, the regulatory assumption that carbon dioxide is a pollutant dangerous enough to justify reshaping the American economy is no longer settled law inside the executive branch. Seventeen years of regulatory gravity just shifted.