Deregulation Won’t Protect Us from Climate Change

The Administration on Tuesday, July 29, 2025, proposed to reject decades of scientific knowledge about the harms of greenhouse gases and undercut its own authority to regulate climate-altering pollution. Though this is just the latest of many actions that together amount to a deregulatory freefall in America, this action could have significant impact on the federal government’s range of current and future ambitions on climate change, if it’s allowed to stand.

The Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Lee Zeldin, announced on July 29 that he would reverse the “Endangerment Finding”—a regulatory and scientific statement the agency made in 2009 that greenhouse gases (GHGs) endanger public health and welfare. The EPA made this determination after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2007 that carbon dioxide and other GHGs are pollutants under the Clean Air Act.

This ruling triggered an obligation on the part of the EPA to determine whether, under the Act, the pollutants create a danger to the public. After making the official Endangerment Finding in 2009, the EPA then became obligated to regulate GHGs, and it has been proposing and reversing ways to do that ever since.

What does the Endangerment Finding say about greenhouse gases?

The 2009 Endangerment Finding stated: “…the body of scientific evidence compellingly supports this finding” and “[t]the major assessments by the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP), the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and the National Research Council (NRC) serve as the primary scientific basis supporting the Administrator’s endangerment finding.”

The EPA cited public health effects of greenhouse gas pollution including: direct temperature changes like increasingly severe and frequent heat waves; increased harmful air pollution like smog; increasingly frequent and intense extreme weather events that put people at risk of death, injury, or disease; and increased spread of food-, water-, and insect-borne illnesses.

Other welfare effects cited by the EPA’s 2009 finding included: net negative effects on U.S. agriculture and forestry; reduced snowpack and precipitation in some areas; more frequent flooding; sea level rise; increased demand on and vulnerability of the U.S. energy system; damage to other vital infrastructure; and alteration of plant and wildlife life cycles and ranges, changing U.S. ecosystems that we rely on.

Yet, the current EPA and Administration appear ready to double down on the energy sources of the past while throwing up roadblocks to the solutions already available to reduce GHGs—including wind and solar power, electric vehicles, battery storage, energy efficiency—while simultaneously defunding programs that protect us from increasingly severe unnatural disasters and help us rebuild.

Rejecting the 2009 Endangerment Finding not only fits this trend, but it potentially accelerates our race to the bottom by attempting to halt the ongoing, job-creating push to expand affordable clean energy in America. This embrace of the past will only leave the U.S. more unprepared for worsening extreme weather and shifting economic winds.

Climate change is threatening public health, safety, and welfare

Natural disasters have caused more than $131 billion in global losses so far this year, and disasters in the U.S.—which have been fueled by climate change—have made up more than one-third of these losses. The Los Angeles wildfires earlier this year were the costliest unnatural disaster this year, estimated to cause $53 billion in overall losses, as well as more than 30 deaths and untold damage to wildlife habitat. These fires were also the largest insured losses from natural disasters since 1980. Climate change is playing a role and leaving a toll.

Meanwhile, more than 75 million people in the U.S. were under heat advisories in June. Climate change is making extreme heat more intense, prolonged, and deadly. Americans are experiencing the extreme heat season sooner and for longer—by 46 days—claiming more than 2,000 lives annually.

Extreme heat worsens underlying medical conditions and contributes to deaths from stroke, heart attack, and other heart diseases. Indigenous, rural and immigrant communities, communities of color, low-income communities, pregnant people, outdoor workers, and the elderly suffer most. And no one is immune.

Solving the climate crisis benefits us all

The American people deserve better protection from these risks, as do our wildlife and ecosystems upon which we all depend. When it comes to a global threat like accelerating climate change, the federal government must play an active role to address it head-on.

Globally, clean energy technologies are attracting twice as much investment as do fossil fuels—and they are on track to hit a record $2.2 trillion dollars this year. This growth in clean energy demand worldwide reflects the global commitment to reduce emissions, plus increasing interest in energy security and an acknowledgment of the cost-competitiveness of clean electricity.

Over the past decade, China’s proportion of global clean energy investment has grown from one-quarter to almost one-third. For a nation so eager to compete more forcefully with China, how can doubling down on fossil fuel production possibly prepare the U.S. to do so?

We have the solutions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and stabilize the climate. Renewable and clean energy, expanded transmission, electrification of transportation and industry, carbon capture and removal, smart agricultural and forestry practices, urban reforestation, and much, much more.

These provide significant local job and business creation opportunities as well. In 2023, clean energy companies added nearly 150,000 jobs—a growth rate more than three times faster than overall U.S. employment. Continuing on this path just takes political will and persistence to transition away from the harmful energy systems of the past to embrace the change needed to realize our clean future. We were already well underway and can be again.

The Trump Administration should abandon its plans to reject the global consensus about the harms of greenhouse gases and recognize what’s best for the American public. Tell the EPA to leave the Endangerment Finding in place.