Trump’s EPA is reportedly seeking to repeal the historic air pollution rule

Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin is looking to rescind a 2009 “hazard finding” that found greenhouse gases pose a threat to human health and well-being, possibly as early as this week, the Wall Street Journal reports.

The EPA’s findings laid the legal foundation for federal regulation of six greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide and methane, and have been unsuccessfully challenged since they were first developed.

The move will almost certainly attract a number of lawsuits, and it could take years before the matter is settled. The EPA’s move will only affect tailpipe emissions from cars and trucks, though the Trump administration is expected to use it to roll back regulations in other sectors such as power plants and industrial facilities.

Legacy automakers, which pushed Trump to weaken fuel efficiency rules, did not particularly pressure the EPA to overturn the hazard finding. Tesla went further, asking the EPA to stand by the findings, saying they were “based on a solid factual and scientific record.”

If the Trump administration succeeds, the United States will become far removed from the regulations of other advanced economies. Companies doing business across borders will need to develop different approaches for each market, resulting in increased costs.

Automakers, in particular, face a future in which they will have to serve divergent markets, at least in the near term. Regulatory strikes in the United States, coupled with increasing competition from China, have cost automakers tens of billions of dollars.

US automakers’ reliance on fossil fuel-powered trucks, in particular, has put the domestic industry in a bind, providing addictive profits that distract from future-proofing their fleets ahead of seemingly inevitable competition from Chinese brands.

The Trump administration told the Wall Street Journal that it expects the policy change to save more than $1 trillion, although it did not provide any evidence to support that number.

Climate change is expected to cost much more. The Congressional Budget Office found that nearly $1 trillion worth of real estate is threatened by rising sea levels, and that U.S. death rates could rise by 2% if global warming is not mitigated. Another study, published in 2024, found that climate change could reduce global GDP by 17% by 2050, equivalent to $38 trillion annually.