The Trump administration on Thursday revoked the basis for federal climate regulations, undermining the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to protect the environment and public health. 

Here’s what every U.S. resident should know about what just happened. 

The EPA determined in 2009 that climate pollution endangers public health and welfare. 

Mainstream, peer-reviewed scientific research shows that climate-warming greenhouse gases are increasing the number of extreme heat waves, severe storms, and other dangerous weather events. 

Under former President Barack Obama, the EPA reviewed the evidence, and the agency’s “scientific conclusion, known as the endangerment finding, determined that greenhouse gases threaten public health and welfare,” The New York Times reports. “It required the federal government to regulate these gases, which result from the burning of oil, gas and coal.” 

Among scientists, that perspective has not changed. Just the opposite: “The scientific understanding of human-driven climate change is much stronger today than it was in 2009 when the EPA first issued the endangerment finding,” climate scientist Zeke Hausfather wrote on Bluesky. “There is no scientific basis for the Trump administration’s decision to repeal it.” 

The Trump administration is revoking standards for the two biggest sources of U.S. climate pollution. 

Together, transportation and electric power plants generate over half the country’s climate-warming emissions. 

Administration officials told the Wall Street Journal this week that the new rule revokes climate emissions standards for motor vehicles. Separately, the administration is working to gut or repeal standards for power plants, Mother Jones reports. 

Repealing climate standards will hurt our health and our wallets. 

Burning fossil fuels isn’t just heating up the climate. It’s generating other air pollution that makes us sick. In fact, air pollution causes about 100,000 premature deaths a year, “more deaths than traffic accidents and homicides combined,” as Yale Climate Connections contributor Karin Kirk has explained. 

The administration is misleadingly claiming that climate regulations increase the cost of cars and trucks. In fact, as Dana Nuccitelli reported last fall, “This argument neglects the cost savings from reduced vehicle fueling bills and lessened climate damage. The Biden EPA estimated that its 2023 vehicle tailpipe rules would have generated about $1 trillion in net benefits over the next three decades.” 

Regulating climate pollution is wildly popular with the U.S. public. 

The White House’s actions are at odds with what the public actually wants. Americans overwhelmingly support regulating carbon dioxide as a pollutant, according to the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, the publisher of this site. In fact, as you can see in this map, a majority in every U.S. county supports regulations on carbon dioxide. 

Environmental groups will sue, but this Supreme Court might side with the White House. 

The EPA moved with extraordinary haste to repeal the endangerment finding once Trump took office, The New York Times reports: “Legal experts said the speed would be no accident: It could allow the Supreme Court to consider related legal challenges while Mr. Trump is still in office. There, the conservative majority with an anti-regulatory bent could chip away at the federal government’s power to limit the greenhouse gas emissions that are dangerously warming the Earth.” 

The Times added, “And in an extreme scenario, the court could sharply curtail a future Democratic administration’s efforts to fight global warming.

“They’re swinging for the fences,” Jody Freeman, the director of Harvard Law School’s Environmental and Energy Law Program, told the Times. “They want to not just do what other Republican administrations have done, which is weaken regulations. They want to take the federal government out of the business of regulation, period.”

All this could backfire on oil companies. 

Julia Kane and Josh Voorhees report at Heated that the administration’s actions seem to be making fossil fuel companies nervous about the dozens of lawsuits they’re facing over climate change. 

“A critical part of their legal defense has been that, because the federal government already regulates greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Air Act, any claims under state law are preempted. Therefore, they say state and local lawsuits should be thrown out of court, and state laws should be struck down,” Kane and Voorhees write. 

“That defense is now being threatened by the Trump EPA’s actions. If the administration’s final rule says the Clean Air Act doesn’t give EPA authority to regulate greenhouse gases, then it will be considerably more difficult for Big Oil to contend state efforts are federally preempted.”