WATCH: Trump terminates Obama-era climate change policy

By Andrew Rice
The Center Square

The Trump administration on Thursday terminated the Environmental Protection Agency’s “Endangerment Finding,” a landmark policy that led to sweeping climate change regulations and higher costs across the country.

“This action will eliminate over $1.3 trillion in regulatory costs and help bring car prices tumbling down dramatically,” President Donald Trump said. “This radical rule became the legal foundation for the green new scam.”

Trump also said he will terminate green emissions standards on vehicle models produced between 2012 and 2027.

The finding is based on a 2009 action from the Obama administration that restricted greenhouse gas emissions including carbon dioxide and methane. The finding allowed the federal government to restrict these emissions under the Clean Air Act because it claimed the greenhouse gasses posed a threat to public health and welfare.

America’s Power President and CEO Michelle Bloodworth said in a statement provided to The Center Square that the Endangerment Finding threatened the U.S. electric grid by forcing coal plants to shutter.

“EPA’s Endangerment Finding has been used as the basis for regulations that threaten the reliability of our nation’s electric grid,” Bloodworth said . “These regulations, such as President Obama’s Clean Power Plan and President Biden’s Clean Power Plan 2.0, were designed to force the premature retirement of coal power plants across the U.S. and increase our nation’s reliance on electricity sources that are not as reliable as coal.

“Utilities have announced plans to retire more than 55,000 megawatts of coal-fired generation over the next five years,” Bloodworth said. “Reversing these retirement decisions could help offset the need to build new, more expensive electricity sources and prevent the loss of reliability attributes, such as fuel security, that the coal fleet provides. Forcing the retirement of America’s coal fleet and jeopardizing our electricity supply makes no sense because the U.S. coal fleet is responsible for just 2% of global greenhouse gas emissions while China and India’s emissions account for nearly 40%. The U.S. must take advantage of our coal assets, just as our global competitors are relying on coal to fuel their own economic growth.”

Policies like the electric vehicle and corporate average fuel economy mandates raised consumer costs and hurt the overall economy, said Jason Isaac, CEO of the American Energy Institute.

“Getting rid of the bedrock, this foundation will be absolutely tremendous for our automotive manufacturing sector of our economy, which is a massive part of the economy,” Isaac said.

Isaac said the endangerment finding has led to millions of taxpayer dollars supporting electric vehicle production in the United States. In 2023, each electric vehicle sold in the United States brought in roughly $94,000 from subsidies and tax credits, according to Isaac’s research.

Isaac said without these incentives for electric vehicles, the cost of gas operated vehicles will flourish. He added that gas vehicle production has significantly reduced since incentives for electric vehicles pushed forward.

“It’s going to lower the cost of vehicles because you’re just no longer going to have these over burdensome regulations that really don’t do anything to impact the environment or the climate whatsoever,” Isaac said.

While Isaac applauded the administration’s move to loosen regulations for cars, he said this rule is only the first step in climate deregulation across the federal government.

Isaac argued that the high costs of electricity Americans are experiencing across the country is due to the endangerment finding regulations on stationary sources. He said loosening those regulations will lower energy prices.

Kevin Dayaratna, vice president of statistical modeling at Advancing American Freedom, said the scientific conclusions underpinning the endangerment finding are fundamentally flawed. He pointed out that global warming models overestimate temperature findings.

“The proposed policies aren’t going to meaningfully impact the climate because the United States, compared to other countries or compared to the rest of the world, doesn’t emit that much,” Dayaratna said.

Dayaratna explained that climate change models overstated the impacts of carbon on the global temperatures and natural disasters. One way these models did this was to predict the level of damage up to 300 years in advance.

“It is sheer hubris to believe that you could predict what the economy will look like two decades from now, let alone 300 years into the future,” Dayaratna said. “But these models attempted to make such projections about climate damages that far into the future.”

Isaac explained that these federal regulations have significantly affected operations of independently owned energy companies. He pointed to an oil and gas producer in Texas in 2024 that spent $600,000 on compliance with the greenhouse gas reporting program.

“It should be going to the employees, it should be going to building new job opportunities for more people,” Isaac said. “But instead, it was wasted on federal required compliance.”

Looking ahead, advocates for the Trump administration’s move expect legal challenges from environmental groups.

Meredith Hankins, a federal climate legal director at the National Resources Defense Council, said the organization will challenge the Trump administration’s action in court. Additionally, the Environmental Defense Fund promised to pursue legal action.

“The EPA’s slapdash legal arguments will be laughed out of court – and we are going to win,” Hankins said.

However, Isaac argued previous decisions from the U.S. Supreme Court supported actions limiting the EPA’s authority to regulate state emissions guidelines. In 2022, the nation’s high court struck down the EPA’s ability to regulate emissions under the authority of the Clean Air Act.

The Supreme Court said Congress would need to grant the EPA authority to strike down state emissions standards. Isaac also said he expects the 2007 decision in Massachusetts v. EPA to be overturned as a result of future litigation, a key decision that first upheld the endangerment finding.

Bloodworth said Thursday’s action was a good start.

“Overturning bad EPA regulations is necessary but not sufficient,” she said. “The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, Department of Energy, Congress, state utility commissions, and grid operators must also take action to prevent the closure of more coal power plants.”