CNN: ‘The US government has declared war on the very idea of climate change’ – Trump is ‘pulling the rug out from under nearly all environmental regulation related to the climate’
https://www.cnn.com/2025/08/01/politics/us-government-epa-climate-change
Trump administration is “moving to destroy the methods by which his or any future administration can respond to climate change.”
By Zachary B. Wolf
Americans are used to whiplash in their climate policy. The US has been in and out and in and out again of the key Paris climate agreement over the past four presidencies.
But in his second administration, President Donald Trump is not just approaching climate science with skepticism. Instead, his administration is moving to destroy the methods by which his or any future administration can respond to climate change.
These moves, which are sure to be challenge
His Environmental Protection Agency announced plans this week to declare that greenhouse gas emissions do not endanger humans, a move meant to pull the rug out from under nearly all environmental regulation related to the climate.
But that’s just one data point. There are many others:
► Instead of continuing a push away from coal, the Trump administration wants to do a U-turn; Trump has signed executive orders intended to boost the coal industry and has ordered the EPA to end federal limits on coal- and gas-fired power-plant pollution that’s been tied to climate change.
► Tax credits for electric vehicles persisted during Trump’s first term before they were expanded during Joe Biden’s presidency. Now, Republicans are abruptly ending them next month.
d in court, extend far beyond Trump’s well-documented antipathy toward solar and wind energy and his pledges to drill ever more oil even though the US is already the world’s largest oil producer.
His Environmental Protection Agency announced plans this week to declare that greenhouse gas emissions do not endanger humans, a move meant to pull the rug out from under nearly all environmental regulation related to the climate.
But that’s just one data point. There are many others:
► Instead of continuing a push away from coal, the Trump administration wants to do a U-turn; Trump has signed executive orders intended to boost the coal industry and has ordered the EPA to end federal limits on coal- and gas-fired power-plant pollution that’s been tied to climate change.
► Tax credits for electric vehicles persisted during Trump’s first term before they were expanded during Joe Biden’s presidency. Now, Republicans are abruptly ending them next month.
► The administration is also ending Biden-era US government incentives to bring renewable energy projects online, a move that actually appears to be driving up the cost of electricity.
► Republicans in Congress and Trump enacted legislation to strip California of its authority to ban the sale of new gas-powered vehicles beginning in 2035.
► Trump is also expected to overturn national tailpipe standards enacted under Biden’s EPA and is also to challenge California’s long-held power to regulate tailpipe emissions.
► The authors of a congressionally mandated report on climate change were all fired; previous versions of the report, the National Climate Assessment, which showed likely effects from climate change across the country, have been hidden from view on government websites.
► Other countries, large and small, will gather in Brazil later this year for a consequential meeting on how the world should respond to climate change. Rather than play a leading role — or any role at all — the US will not attend.
► Cuts to the federal workforce directly targeted offices and employees focused on climate change.
The list goes on.
But it is the Trump administration’s move to undo the “endangerment finding” that could have the most lasting effect. The 2009 declaration that planet-warming pollution from fossil fuels endangers human health is what allows the EPA to regulate greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Air Act.
The Trump administration is justifying its move to gut the endangerment finding based on a report it commissioned from five climate skeptics.
…
Michael Mann, director of the Penn Center for Science, Sustainability and the Media, sees a hostility to science in the Trump administration.
“Not since Stalin and Soviet Lysenkoism have we seen such a brazen effort to misrepresent science in service of an ideological agenda,” Mann told Nilsen, referring to the disastrous effects of political interference in the scientific process in the Soviet Union.