US Scraps Climate Rule That Underpinned Emissions Limits

The Trump administration has moved to dismantle the legal foundation of modern US climate policy, finalising a rule that rescinds the 2009 “endangerment finding,” the determination that greenhouse gases threaten public health and therefore can be regulated under the Clean Air Act.

Announced on Thursday, the decision marks the most sweeping environmental rollback of President Donald Trump’s second term. For more than a decade, the finding served as the core legal mechanism behind emissions standards for cars, power plants and major industrial polluters. Removing it does not just erase a single rule; it opens the door to undoing the broader regulatory architecture built on it.

Trump framed the move as an economic correction rather than an environmental shift. Calling climate change a “hoax” and a “con job”, he described the endangerment finding as “one of the greatest scams in history” that “had no basis in fact” or law. “On the contrary, over the generations, fossil fuels have saved millions of lives and lifted billions of people out of poverty all over the world,” he said at a White House ceremony, hailing the repeal as “the single largest deregulatory action in American history, by far”.

EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin cast the measure in similar terms, labelling the finding “the Holy Grail of federal regulatory overreach”. Its removal immediately wipes out federal greenhouse gas standards for cars and trucks and could trigger a wider rollback of limits on stationary sources such as power plants and oil and gas facilities.

Supporters of the repeal argue that the previous framework imposed heavy economic costs. Zeldin said the finding “led to trillions of dollars in regulations that strangled entire sectors of the United States economy, including the American auto industry”, adding that Democratic administrations had used it to impose policies that “assaulted consumer choice and affordability”. As part of the same decision, the EPA also ended tax credits for automatic start-stop vehicle systems, which Zeldin said “everyone hates”.

Critics see the move as an attempt to sever the link between climate science and federal authority. Environmental law professor Ann Carlson warned that overturning the finding would “raise more havoc” than earlier deregulation efforts, while environmental groups called it the most significant attack yet on the government’s ability to address global warming. Gina McCarthy, who led the EPA under President Barack Obama and later served as White House climate adviser, said the agency now “would rather spend its time in court working for the fossil fuel industry than protecting us from pollution and the escalating impacts of climate change”.

The legal fight is almost certain. The endangerment finding was built on a scientific record that has only expanded in the 17 years since it was adopted, and its removal is expected to face immediate challenges in US courts.