Trump, EPA Announce Termination of Obama’s Climate Change Regulations
Cue the MSM and leftist (but I repeat myself) outrage.
President Donald Trump and Environmental Protection Agency Administrator (EPA) Lee Zeldin announced that they had repealed Obama’s 2009 Endangerment Finding, which found six greenhouse gases to be “dangerous.”
“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,” said Trump. “Prices went up incredibly for a worse product. This action will eliminate over $1.3 trillion of regulatory costs and help bring car prices tumbling down dramatically. You’re going to get a better car. You’re going to get a car that starts easier, a car that works better for a lot less money.”
Leslie summed up that finding on Wednesday, stressing the gases are life-sustaining:
The agency decided that six key greenhouse gases (including carbon dioxide, methane, and others) endanger both public health and welfare, laying the groundwork for hyper-regulation that restricted both prosperity and personal liberty. Subsequent rules promulgated by the EPA allowed the agency to essentially wage a “War on Fossil Fuels,” a “War on Appliances,” and a “War on Meat.” Biden’s ludicrous “Inflation Reduction Act” further fueled this inanity by codifying the “Green New Deal.”
Leslie is not wrong. I don’t want an electric car. I don’t want to eat bugs. I don’t want to use unreliable energy.
I love my Toyota 4Runner. I love my steaks and bacon. I love regular light bulbs.
It’s bad enough that you have to flush twice with these new toilets and take twice as long to rinse dishes because of restricted water flow.
Anyway. Trump continued:
In 2009, Barack Hussein Obama, his EPA designated fossil fuels such as oil, gas and other things that actually make factories rock and roll and other things drive very nicely as a threat to health and human welfare. Known as the endangerment finding, this determination had no basis in fact, had none whatsoever, and it had no basis in law. On the contrary, over the generations, fossil fuels have saved millions of lives and lifted billions of people out of poverty and all over the world…and yet, this radical rule became the legal foundation for the Green New Scam, one of the greatest scams in history. Probably as great, maybe even greater than Russia, Russia, Russia, hoax, etc. which the Obama and Biden administration used to destroy. Countless jobs and the jobs have been just decimated…[I]t raised prices and caused immense harm to the U.S. Auto industry we thought irreparable, but we’ve got them back.
President Trump: “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. Prices went up… pic.twitter.com/KjY32tQ2EW
— Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) February 12, 2026
Zeldan said that the move “will save $1.3 trillion by removing the regulatory requirements to measure, report, certify, and comply with federal GHG emission standards for motor vehicles, and repeals associated compliance programs, credit provisions, and reporting obligations that exist solely to support the vehicle GHG regulatory regime.”
The mainstream media tries hard to disguise their opinion as fact in their questions and articles.
They fail bigly, just like Weijia Jiang from CBS, whose question allowed Trump to tout other successes:
CBS’s @Weijia Jiang on today’s EPA announcement: “What do you tell Americans who are concerned that the $1.3 trillion in savings does come at a cost to public health and the environment, based on science?”
President Trump “I tell them, don’t worry about it, because it has nothing to do with public health. This is all a scam, a giant scam. This was a rip off of the country by Obama and Biden, and let’s say Obama started it and got it rolling and a terrible rip off. They’ll have more money to spend for health care. You look at it now, they can go out and spend it on something that’s meaningful, and nobody’s doing more for health care than the Republican Party. And that starts with the fact that prescription drugs are going to be coming down at numbers that nobody’s ever seen before. They’re falling. You know, we were paying the highest prices in the world by far, sometimes by ten times more than other countries. Now we’re going to be paying whatever the lowest price is anywhere in the world. We’re going to be paying that. It’s called favored nations, most favored nations. And I think it’s the biggest thing to happen in this world, the world of medicine, prescription drugs ever. There’s never been anything like it. You know, if, like, in my third year, first term, I actually got prices down one quarter or one eighth of a percent. And I was so proud of myself because they were like that for years and years. And since under Biden, they went up very, very substantially. And now they’re coming down by depending on, you could say 500, 600, 700 percent, or you could say 80 percent. It doesn’t matter.”
CBS’s @Weijia Jiang on today’s EPA announcement: “What do you tell Americans who are concerned that the $1.3 trillion in savings does come at a cost to public health and the environment, based on science?”
President Trump “I tell them, don’t worry about it, because it has… pic.twitter.com/QCEIxi3miL
— Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) February 12, 2026
The headlines on some of the articles published online made me giggle:
- Trump’s EPA repeals landmark climate finding in gift to ‘billionaire polluters’
- Trump Administration Erases the Government’s Power to Fight Climate Change
- EPA reverses long-standing climate change finding, stripping its own ability to regulate emissions
The first four paragraphs in The New York Times:
President Trump on Thursday announced he was erasing the scientific finding that climate change endangers human health and the environment, ending the federal government’s legal authority to control the pollution that is dangerously heating the planet.
The action is a key step in removing limits on carbon dioxide, methane and four other greenhouse gases that scientists say are supercharging heat waves, droughts, wildfires and other extreme weather.
Led by a president who refers to climate change as a “hoax,” the administration is essentially saying that the vast majority of scientists around the world are wrong and that a hotter planet is not the menace that decades of research shows it to be.
It’s a rejection of fact that had been accepted for decades by presidents of both parties, including Richard Nixon, whose top adviser warned of the dangers of climate change and the first President George Bush, who signed an international climate treaty.
Oh, give me a break.
Their holier-than-thou schtick is nauseating enough, but it leads to actual vomit because we all know the repeal will end up in the courts.
After all, as Leslie pointed out, the Obama administration based its Endangerment Founding on the Supreme Court’s decision in Massachusetts vs. EPA.
Zeldin claimed in his press release that the EPA reviewed “the legal foundation of the 2009 Endangerment Finding and the text of the Clean Air Act (CAA) in light of subsequent legal developments and court decisions.”
It sounds like the EPA would argue “that Section 202(a) of the CAA does not provide statutory authority for EPA to prescribe motor vehicle and engine emission standards in the manner previously utilized, including for the purpose of addressing global climate change, and therefore has no legal basis for the Endangerment Finding and resulting regulations.”
Well, Section 202(a) states that the EPA could develop standards for motor vehicles and engines “which contribute to air pollution and which may reasonably be anticipated to endanger public health or welfare.”
So while Trump and Zeldin boast about the removal and savings, it could be a long time before Americans see any changes.
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Comments
NYT – Fake news, garbage “reporters.”
Don’t sugarcoat it!
I just call it, Izvestia on the Hudson.
As they said in Moscow back in the day, “In Pravda there is no news, and in Izvestiya there is no truth.”
“What do you tell Americans who are concerned that the $1.3 trillion in savings does come at a cost to public health and the environment, based on science?”
I tell them buckle up pookie, it’s going to be a bumpy ride! Put on a helmet, Life comes at you fast. If you can’t take the heat get out of the kitchen. Better yet self-deport yourself to Europe to be with the trash and their soon to be muslim masters.
See here for Jonathan Adler’s pessimistic view about the chance of this succeeding.
Overly pessimistic IMO. It takes four members to grant cert. Roberts, Thomas and Alito all dissented in ’07 in Massachusetts v EPA writing incredibly hostile dissenting opinions. West Virginia gutting clean air act was a 6-3 decision and Loper Bright gutting Chevron was also 6-3. I don’t think the direction SCOTUS has been moving very incrementally to walk back the overreach of Mass v EPA in the 19 years since is gonna result in hesitation to pull the trigger and kill it off.
I could be wrong and we’re all gonna see how it turns out but I’d be surprised if the current composition of SCOTUS refuses to do it.
Milhouse – fwiw I havent read Adlers take on likelihood of success, Though I suspect that it rests on not following either the APA properly or that the study necessary to repeal the endangerment finding was grounded enough in detailed studies to repudiate the endangerment ( I am not commenting on the actual science, only the level of study to satisfy the court).
That being said, from a practical matter, it is probably moot, since the next democrat administration will reinstate the endangerment finding, without any procedural flaws that may have been in the Obama’s admininstration’s original endangerment finding.
Adler’s view is based on the fact that the Supreme Court is usually very reluctant to overturn decisions on statutory interpretation. It values stare decisis above accuracy, because if Congress doesn’t agree with the decision it can always change the law. That makes it very different from constitutional decisions, which they court is willing to overturn when necessary.
I’m assuming that Massachusetts v. EPA was a classic leftist sue and settle in the first place. Otherwise, they wasted a perfectly good name.
No, it wasn’t, because they didn’t settle. They took it all the way to the supreme court, and lost.
Long overdue. A policy grounded in common sense and promoting/conducive to collective prosperity, economic growth and national security, prevails.
Plants need carbon dioxide. Leftists want us to eat more plants.
They also think training should be mandated for gun owners, but have been busy making ammunition (with which much firearms training is conducted) harder to get (limits on purchases) and more expensive (outlawing online purchases).
Leftists have never concerned themselves with reality, there’s no sense in invoking it.
Consider, if you will, that life on this planet actually DEPENDS on the greenhouse gas effect. Carbon monoxide is ESSENTIAL to the function of plants, and as primary producers, essential to all of us. Even the insects they will have us eat.
Also consider that water vapor comprises about 70% of the GHG effect. Will they try to make water vapor illegal as well?
How many acres of carbon dioxide utilizing acreage have they covered with the sacred solar panels? They even cut down some of the very unique, endangered and protected Joshua tree population unique to Commufornica. To save them, we must destroy them?
“California is cutting down thousands of protected Joshua trees in the Mojave Desert for the Aratina Solar Project, a 2,300-acre solar farm near Boron and Desert Lake in Kern County. The project, developed by Avantus, is approved to generate 530 megawatts of renewable energy—enough to power around 180,000 homes—primarily for wealthier coastal communities like Silicon Valley and the Central Coast.
Despite Joshua trees being protected under California law, Avantus received an exemption in 2020 from the state’s Fish and Game Commission to clear the trees. A 2020 survey identified about 4,700 Joshua trees on the site, and while the company claims it will cut down fewer than originally approved, reports indicate that hundreds have already been destroyed, with estimates of up to 3,500 to 4,000 trees expected to be removed.
Local residents and environmental groups are strongly opposed, citing irreversible ecological damage, threats to endangered species like the desert tortoise and Mohave ground squirrel, and health risks from dust that could spread valley fever. A petition against the project has gathered over 52,000 signatures, and protests have been held in defense of the trees, which are considered irreplaceable cultural and ecological icons.
Avantus argues the project supports California’s clean energy goals and includes conservation efforts like the Onyx Conservation Project, which aims to protect over 80,000 acres of Joshua tree habitat elsewhere. However, critics argue the trade-off of destroying pristine desert ecosystems undermines the environmental benefits of renewable energy.”
I presume you were referring to CO2 and not CO in your comment
It takes extremely little effort to imagine the amount of taxpayer money that changed hands to get this ‘agreement’ greased through. Clean energy is the dirtiest when political payoffs are considered.
And this is why I say that they need to enforce the idea that you can’t simply regulate something because the law creating the EPA (or subsequent) gave a vague direction to regulate “things”. If they want to specifically regulate CO2, then THAT needs to be written into law, not merely “you must regulate pollutants, and you get to say what a pollutant is.” Forcing that on the regulatory agencies and Congress would kill a vast amount of executive branch meddling in our lives. And it would also mostly prevent the Executive from simply turning on a dime (like this) with a change in administration.
I am a retired Electrical Engineer but in college I took an elective course that stuck with me through the years. It did not really explain what it taught but the Professor taught about climate, how it was being measured in the 1800s-present and how urban growth affected it, how oil came out of the ground and sea plus results to the earth, and affects of various issues over time such as Volcanic activity changing earth weather patterns and temps.
The push of various EPA and green energy issues onto America has been a problem for the country. Energy companies have been stopping Nuclear and Fossil Fuel energy production and pushing Wind and Solar energy production, which has lead to lower power production and higher cost. The EPA adds on vehicles is cost adding, more mechanical work, and no real saving on pollution.
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