On Feb. 12 the Trump administration repealed the Obama EPA's politically contrived, scientifically vacuous, economically destructive 2009 "Endangerment Finding" that six greenhouse gases with leafy plant-nourishing CO2 serving as de facto public enemy number one by "polluting the climate."
This claim served as a political premise for imposing regulatory restrictions on internal combustion vehicles including vehicle emission standards, a "Clean Power Plan," and other limits on methane, oil and natural gas.
Even some of EPA's scientific staff disputed the finding.
In March 2009, EPA withheld release of a 98-page study conducted by their senior scientist and 38-year veteran Dr. Alan Carlin that severely criticized the agency's scientific basis for claiming endangerment under the Clean Air Act. Dr. Carlin said, "Federal law requires that regulations be based on scientific information that is 'accurate, clear and unbiased'; the most recent available; and collected by the 'best available methods.'"
Carlin's report concluded that "The EPA's TSD [technical support document] on carbon emissions violates all of these requirements."
A blistering series of emails to Dr. Carlin from EPA's National Center for Environmental Economics director Al McGartland stated not only that his study would not be disclosed, but also that he was to stop working on global warming issues because criticizing EPA's position caused trouble.
And please don't conflate those of us who applaud this reversal as depicted in a New York Times article on the subject representing those who favor the Trump EPA action as a small group of deniers arguing that "climate change isn't real."
This writer isn't aware of any sane adult who doesn't recognize that climate changes, and has endlessly done so for many reasons occurring long before humans invented smokestacks and SUVs – sometimes for the better – sometimes, regularly occurring ice ages for example, not so much.
As for frequent claims that climate change is causing extreme weather events to become more frequent or severe, records definitively show otherwise.
Addressing the U.N. General Assembly in Sept. 2025, President Trump said, "The carbon footprint is a hoax made up by people with evil intentions, and they’re heading down a path of total destruction."
"The entire globalist concept of asking successful industrialized nations to inflict pain on themselves and radically disrupt their entire societies must be rejected completely and totally, and it must be immediate."
Accordingly, Trump declared at a White House press briefing that, "Effective immediately, we are repealing the ridiculous endangerment finding and terminating all additional green emissions standards imposed unnecessarily on vehicle models and engines between 2012 and 2027 and beyond."
"These crippling restrictions," he said, "were a major factor driving up car prices to unprecedented levels, and the car you were getting was not nearly as good," pointing out that vehicle costs had increased approximately 22% under the Biden administration "without achieving any meaningful impact on the environment but making the car worse."
Trump added, "This determination had no basis in fact, none whatsoever, and had no basis in law . . . Yet this radical rule became the legal foundation for the green new scam . . . which the Obama and Biden administrations used to destroy countless jobs."
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters during a Feb. 10 briefing that reversing the Endangerment Finding "will be the largest deregulatory action in American history, and it will save the American people $1.3 trillion in crushing regulations."
She said that those savings are expected to come from lower automobile cost reductions averaging about $2,400 per vehicle.
Referring to the Endangerment Finding as "the holy grail of regulatory overreach,” EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin declared on Fox News "we finally demolished the Democrat climate insanity."
Zeldin notes that, "The regulations built on the Endangerment Finding placed new vehicles further out of reach for American families.
"The Obama and Biden administrations' push toward EV mandates pressured automakers to scale back traditional gasoline and diesel trucks and reengineer fleets toward technologies they argue are uneconomic and infeasible.
"The cost of these climate policies fell hardest on Americans who could least afford it."
He added, "The era of government-knows-best climate regulation is over. The American Dream is back. Promises made, promises kept."
EPA emphasizes that the Endangerment Finding rollback is specifically limited to greenhouse gases and does not affect regulations on traditional health-based air pollutants from stationary sources such as power plants, including sulfur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide, ground-level ozone, particulate matter, lead, and carbon monoxide (not CO2).
The Trump administration argues that the former EPA Endangerment Finding violated the Supreme Court's major questions doctrine set forth in a 6-3 majority ruling invoked in West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency, 597 U.S. 697 (2022), that had previously struck down Obama-era CO2 emission limits for power plants.
Truth is, the greatest endangerment of all in that finding was perpetrated as a partisan power play upon American energy users who have witnessed their rates go up and their choices of affordable vehicles diminish premised upon fictional climate benefits.
Larry Bell is an endowed professor of space architecture at the University of Houston where he founded the Sasakawa International Center for Space Architecture and the graduate space architecture program. His latest of 12 books is "Architectures Beyond Boxes and Boundaries: My Life By Design" (2022). Read more Larry Bell Insider articles — Click Here Now.
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