A White House official says Trump intends to roll back US climate change policy and environmental regulations

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Trump administration is expected this week to rescind a scientific discovery that has long been the central basis of U.S. work to regulate greenhouse gas emissions and combat climate change, according to a White House official.

The EPA will issue a final rule rescinding the government’s 2009 declaration known as the hazard finding. Obama-era policy has determined that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases endanger public health and well-being.

A White House official, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly before the official announcement, confirmed the plans, which were first reported by The Wall Street Journal.

“This week at the White House, President Trump will take the most significant regulatory actions in history to unleash America’s energy dominance and drive down costs,” White House press secretary Carolyn Leavitt said in a statement Tuesday.

The hazard finding is the legal basis for nearly all climate regulations under the Clean Air Act for cars, power plants, and other sources of pollution that heat the planet. It is used to justify regulations, such as automobile emissions standards, that aim to protect against increasingly dire threats from climate change — deadly floods, extreme heat waves, catastrophic wildfires and other natural disasters in the United States and around the world.

Legal challenges would be certain for any measure that would effectively repeal these regulations, with environmental groups calling the shift the largest single attack in US history on federal efforts to address climate change.

An EPA spokesperson did not clarify when the finding would be overturned, but reiterated that the agency is finalizing a new rule on it.

Brigitte Hirsch said via email that the Obama-era ruling was “one of the most damaging decisions in modern history” and said the EPA was “actively working to deliver historic action to the American people.”

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President Donald Trump, who has called climate change a “hoax,” earlier issued an executive order directing the EPA to report on the “legality and enforceability” of the hazard finding. Conservatives and some Republicans in Congress have long sought to repeal what they view as overly restrictive and economically harmful rules to limit greenhouse gases that cause global warming.

Lee Zeldin, the former Republican congressman appointed by Trump to lead the Environmental Protection Agency last year, criticized his predecessors in Democratic administrations, saying they were “willing to bankrupt the country” trying to combat climate change.

Democrats “came to this conclusion of danger and then were able to put all these regulations on vehicles and airplanes and stationary sources to basically regulate sectors of our economy out of existence,” Zeldin said in announcing the proposed rule last year. “It cost the Americans a lot of money.”

Peter Zalzal, an attorney and associate vice president of the Environmental Defense Fund, responded that the EPA would encourage more climate pollution, higher health insurance and fuel costs and thousands of avoidable premature deaths.

He said Zeldin’s effort is “deeply cynical and harmful, given the body of scientific evidence supporting this finding, the devastating climate damage Americans are currently experiencing, and the EPA’s clear commitment to protecting the health and well-being of Americans.”

Zalzal and other critics point out that the Supreme Court ruled in a 2007 case that planet-warming greenhouse gases, caused by burning oil and other fossil fuels, are air pollutants under the Clean Air Act.

Since the Supreme Court’s decision, in the case known as Massachusetts v. EPA, courts have uniformly rejected legal challenges to the hazard finding, including a 2023 decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

After Zeldin’s proposal to rescind the rule, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine re-evaluated the science underlying the 2009 discovery and concluded that it was “rigorous, has stood the test of time, and is now supported by stronger evidence.”

A panel of NAS scientists said in a September report that much of the understanding of climate change that was uncertain or tentative in 2009 is now resolved. “The evidence of the current and future harm caused by human-caused greenhouse gases to human health and well-being is beyond scientific dispute,” the committee said.

Associated Press reporter Bill Barrow in Atlanta contributed to this report.