NOTE: The EPA Endangerment Finding was officially rescinded on Thursday, February 12, but it is only rescinded for motor vehicles. That reversal should lower vehicle prices and offer more choices. I am hopeful that while President Trump is in office, this change should be used by the administration or call on the Supreme Court to overturn the Massachusetts v. EPA ruling, which was the legal basis for the EPA Endangerment Finding.
What will happen now that President Trump is pulling out the linchpin of environmental overreach.
Now that the Trump administration followed through and formally repealed the EPA’s 2009 Endangerment Finding on carbon dioxide, brace yourself. Not for climate catastrophe, mind you, but for something far more predictable: a coordinated, emotional, and increasingly shrill response from climate activists, their allied NGOs, and a subset of science organizations that long ago traded skepticism for advocacy.
The reaction will unfold in stages. First will come the wailing. Press releases will read like grief counseling brochures. Social media feeds will fill with dire warnings about “children’s futures,” “irreversible harm,” and the usual claims that the sky is falling—again. Expect solemn faces on cable news, breathless editorials, and carefully staged outrage. The crying baby phase is inevitable.
Then comes the second phase: wounded animal behavior. Lawsuits. Emergency petitions. State-level end runs. Blue-state legislatures rushing to pass carbon-copy “climate emergency” statutes, hoping quantity will substitute for legal authority. The goal won’t be good policy or sound science. It will be to make repeal as painful, slow, and politically costly as possible—hoping that a future administration will reverse course and put the keystone back in place.
Why such panic? Because the Endangerment Finding (EF) is not just another EPA rule. It is the load-bearing wall of the entire federal climate regulatory structure. Remove it, and the entire edifice starts to wobble.
For nearly two decades, I’ve argued that the EF was never about dispassionate science. It was about power—specifically, giving EPA authority Congress never clearly granted, using carbon dioxide as the lever. CO₂, a colorless, odorless trace gas essential to plant life, was rebranded a “pollutant” through a process that was portrayed as scientific but operated politically.
Now we know just how pre-cooked that process really was.
As documented in Breaking: The Evidence is in: Endangerment Finding was Pre-cooked, internal EPA emails and memoranda show Obama-era political appointees treated the EF as a foregone conclusion almost immediately after taking office. The language is revealing: “decision ready to go,” “basic fact,” “nothing more than science and common sense.” There was no genuine deliberation over whether greenhouse gases endangered public health or welfare—only discussion of timing, optics, and how to rush the rule through notice-and-comment without tripping legal alarms.
That matters because under the Administrative Procedure Act and long-standing DC Circuit court precedent, agencies are not allowed to fake the process. Policymakers must be open to evidence, arguments, and contrary views. Predetermination—what courts call an “unalterably closed mind”—is disqualifying. And the documentary record here doesn’t just hint at predetermination; it practically shouts it.
This is why repeal has climate activists so rattled. If the EF falls not merely on policy grounds but on procedural and constitutional ones, reviving it becomes vastly more difficult. You can’t just dust off a corrupted administrative record and pretend nothing happened.
Expect activists to avoid this point entirely. Instead, they’ll frame repeal as “anti-science,” because that’s the only argument they’ve practiced. But calling something “science” does not make it immune from scrutiny—especially when the process used to enshrine it violated due process.
The irony, of course, is rich. The same groups that endlessly invoke “trust the science” will fight tooth and nail to preserve a finding that internal emails show was insulated from scientific dissent. Recall how EPA economist Dr. Alan Carlin was sidelined in 2009 when he raised substantive objections to the Endangerment Technical Support Document. His comments, we were told, “did not help the legal or policy case.” Translation: the decision had already been made.
Layered on top of this fight will be the next IPCC assessment cycle, which by all indications will lean less on basic physical science and far more on “attribution.” That is, not whether the climate changes—which it always has—but assigning blame for every heat wave, hurricane, flood, drought, or wildfire to human influence, usually with a confidence level that far exceeds the underlying data. Expect this report to be weaponized. Carefully caveated attribution studies will be distilled into headlines claiming severe weather is “worsening due to climate change,” full stop. The press will go into hyperdrive, blaming every unusual weather event—indeed, every weather event—on climate change, regardless of historical context or long-term trend data. This will be used as emotional ammunition to argue that repealing the EF is reckless, even as the empirical evidence for worsening extremes remains mixed at best.
So, what happens next?
First, litigation. Blue states, green NGOs, and activist attorneys general will rush to friendly courts, particularly the DC Circuit, hoping to stall repeal long enough to survive the next election cycle. They’ll lean heavily on Massachusetts v. EPA (2007), despite the fact that subsequent Supreme Court decisions—Utility Air Regulatory Group, Michigan v. EPA, West Virginia v. EPA, and the dismantling of Chevron deference—have steadily narrowed the scope of agency adventurism.
Second, state-level patchworks. California will double down, as it always does. Other blue states will follow, attempting to impose de facto national standards through market size and regulatory bullying. This will be sold as “leadership,” but it’s really regulatory desperation: if you can’t control the federal lever, grab whatever local ones you can.
Third, reputational pressure campaigns. Expect boycotts, shareholder activism, and performative “scientist letters” warning of doom. These are designed less to persuade than to intimidate, especially corporations that would prefer regulatory certainty over ideological warfare.
But here’s the problem for the activists: none of this fixes the underlying legal rot.
If the Endangerment Finding is rescinded with a full accounting of its unlawful predetermination, future administrations won’t just face political opposition, they’ll face a poisoned well. Any attempt to reimpose CO₂ regulation under the Clean Air Act will have to confront not only scientific debate, but a documented history of procedural abuse.
And that’s long overdue.
Climate policy in the United States has operated for years on a kind of regulatory sleight of hand: use vague statutory language, amplify worst-case model projections, declare “emergency,” and dare anyone to object without being labeled a heretic. The EF was the masterstroke that made this possible. Its repeal would force an honest reckoning about what EPA can and cannot do, as well as what Congress must actually vote on if it wants sweeping energy transformation.
That’s why the coming squall will be loud. Not because repeal endangers the public, but because it threatens a regulatory shortcut that should never have existed in the first place.
So let them cry. Let them rage. Let them file lawsuits and pass symbolic resolutions. In the end, none of that changes the core fact now firmly on the record: the 2009 Endangerment Finding was not the product of open scientific inquiry, but of a predetermined political agenda.
And agendas, unlike science, do not age well when exposed to sunlight.
Thanks and apologies to Ludolf Backhuysen for the title.
