America under Trump is surrendering to the climate crisis

Intensifying changes in the climate are hurting people in many ways, from deadly extreme weather and heat to crop-destroying drought and floods. President Donald Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency is proposing to make things worse by rolling back protections against climate pollution from cars, trucks, and power plants.

The EPA would leave the country defenseless against the existential threat of climate change by pretending there is no such threat.

The Clean Air Act is at the center of this controversy. Since the law was enacted in 1970, it has, quite literally, provided every American with cleaner air. Reducing air pollution has prevented hundreds of thousands of premature deaths every year, the EPA says, and its benefits outweigh its costs by a factor of 30-1.

The act was also written with great foresight, allowing the EPA to set limits for additional pollutants based on new scientific information that emissions of these pollutants “may reasonably be anticipated to endanger public health or welfare.” In 1999, 19 organizations petitioned the EPA to control greenhouse gas pollutants from motor vehicles under this provision — something it had not yet done.

In 2001, with the petition still pending, President George W. Bush asked the National Academy of Sciences to assess the state of climate science. The academy’s report was unequivocal: The earth’s climate is changing, there is strong evidence it is caused by human activity, and harm from climate change is highly likely to be greater in the future.

Bush’s EPA, however, misrepresented the report’s findings. In denying the petition, it said the report concluded that climate science was too uncertain.

The ensuing litigation ended up before the U.S. Supreme Court. I helped represent 18 prominent climate scientists, including two Nobel Prize winners, and many of them authors of this report, in filing an amicus (or friend of the court) brief. We wanted the court to learn the view of the scientists, without filtering, interpretation, or spin.

“As practicing scientists who study the earth’s climate system,” they began, “we and many in our profession have long understood that continued human-caused emission of greenhouse gases … would eventually warm the earth’s surface. Most were skeptical that we would see strong signs of human-induced climate change in our lifetimes.”

“But by the beginning of this decade [2000],” they wrote, “we observed that global temperatures are rising, plant and animal ranges are shifting, glaciers are in retreat globally, and arctic sea ice is retreating. Sea levels are rising and the oceans are becoming more acidic. To the extent that these changes result from human alteration of the atmosphere, we know that they are just the first small increment of climate change yet to come if human societies do not curb emissions of greenhouse gases.”

In a landmark 2007 decision, the Supreme Court took climate science seriously and held that greenhouse gases are air pollutants under the Clean Air Act. The EPA subsequently made a finding that greenhouse gas pollutants may reasonably be anticipated to endanger human health and welfare, and thus were required to be regulated under the law. That led to carbon pollution standards for cars and trucks. The EPA also adopted greenhouse gas limits for fossil fuel power plants.

Since then, “an enormous body of additional data” has made the case for what’s come to be known as “the endangerment finding” even stronger and more compelling, according to a review published in Science. The scientists who contributed to the Supreme Court brief have reached the same conclusion.

Also in the last two decades, clean energy sources like wind, solar, and batteries have become cheaper and more reliable, in many cases, than fossil fuel energy, leading to their rapid growth. Clean energy has provided the fastest-growing jobs sector in the U.S. since 2000, with more than 400,000 new clean energy jobs created since 2022. Around the world, the International Energy Agency says, clean energy is growing faster than fossil fuels.

In spite of this, the EPA, under Trump, has decided to surrender the national effort to reduce greenhouse gas pollutants. This is in addition to Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill,” which dramatically reduces clean energy investments and incentives while further subsidizing fossil fuels.

On June 17, the EPA proposed to repeal its statutory authority to control greenhouse gas pollutants for power plants. It says they are not significant enough to bother, even though they constitute one-fourth of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions.

EPA has now proposed a repeal of the endangerment finding on which greenhouse gas limits for motor vehicles are based. The EPA says the Clean Air Act does not apply to global problems like climate change, even though greenhouse gas pollutants have significant U.S. impacts. And it disputes the scientific reliability of the ever-more-obvious endangerment finding.

The federal government is ignoring long-standing law and decades of science, and weakening our ability to pursue a prosperous, clean energy economy.

John Dernbach is professor emeritus at Widener University’s Commonwealth Law School in Harrisburg.