‘The Trump administration’s action in rescinding the Endangerment Finding rights a great wrong’
SCHAUMBURG, IL (July 29, 2025) – The Environmental Protection Agency today will repeal the so-called “Endangerment Finding,” an Obama-era administrative rule that declared greenhouse gas emissions from power plants and vehicles harmful to human health. The rule, which treated carbon dioxide as a pollutant akin to smoke and soot, would stop decades of EPA continually ratcheting up regulations that was leading to a near future in which gasoline-powered cars and any fossil fuel power plants were outlawed.
EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin will make the announcement at an Indianapolis truck dealership. The Supreme Court case Massachusetts v. EPA in 2007 authorized the EPA to regulate greenhouse gases if the agency made the determination that global warming harms human health. In an appearance on the Ruthless Podcast this week, Zeldin said reversing the Endangerment Finding would be the “most significant deregulatory action in U.S. history.”
The following statements from environment and energy experts at The Heartland Institute – a free-market think tank – may be used for attribution. For more comments, refer to the contact information below. To book a Heartland guest on your program, please contact Director of Communications Jim Lakely at [email protected] or call/text 312-731-9364.
“Carbon dioxide clearly does not endanger public health and welfare. Carbon dioxide is essential to life on Earth. Plant and food production increases with more carbon dioxide. None of the alarmists’ climate predictions have come true, but modest warming has brought tremendous benefits. President Trump is doing the right thing for the economy, the environment, and the American people by reversing the unjustifiable Endangerment Finding.”
James Taylor
President
The Heartland Institute
[email protected]
“The Trump administration’s action in rescinding the Endangerment Finding rights a great wrong. The Supreme Court was wrong to label carbon dioxide a regulable pollutant, because it is critical to life on earth, not toxic at any foreseeable level, and Congress did not declare it such in the Clean Air Act. This was legislation from the bench and President Obama took that opening and ran with it, giving a single regulatory agency the power to control the economy without any check.
“Trump’s EPA action puts the power back where it belongs, in Congress. Carbon dioxide poses no threat to human health or welfare, not even indirectly due to long-term climate change, since hard data does not reveal, modest global warming is making weather more extreme.”
H. Sterling Burnett, Ph.D.
Director, Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate & Environmental Policy
The Heartland Institute
Managing Editor, Environment & Climate News
[email protected]
“The obsession over a trace gas is absurd, antiscientific, and has led to pain for Americans in the form of higher energy bills, overregulation of appliances, agriculture, and more. Basically, the Endangerment Finding gave unaccountable government agencies the ability to have a say over whatever they wanted, since every human activity results in the production of carbon dioxide. It never should have happened. The government should never have tried regulating a gas essential for life in the first place.”
Linnea Lueken
Research Fellow
Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy
The Heartland Institute
[email protected]
“Today’s EPA decision to remove the Endangerment Finding for greenhouse gases is a welcome correction for science and public policy. For over a decade, this rule has imposed costly and ineffective regulations, justified mainly by questionable climate models and alarmist rhetoric and not measurable results.
“Despite the claims, these regulations have not lowered global temperatures. The United States has already seen emissions decline from innovation and market shifts, not government mandates. Meanwhile, China continues to surge ahead, building new coal plants and increasing its emissions at a pace that completely offsets any U.S. reductions.
“The only real impact of the Endangerment Finding has been higher costs for American families and businesses, along with needless bureaucratic complexity. Environmental policies should be based on hard evidence and genuine results, not speculation and political agendas.
“The EPA’s move signals a needed shift back to fact-based decision making. It doesn’t mean we abandon environmental care. It means we stop pretending that costly regulations here can control a global issue, especially while the world’s biggest emitter ignores them. This is a step forward for transparency, reason, and affordable energy.”
Anthony Watts
Senior Fellow
The Heartland Institute
[email protected]
The Heartland Institute is a national free market think tank founded in 1984 in Chicago and now located in Schaumburg, Illinois. The Economist magazine called Heartland “the world’s most prominent think-tank promoting skepticism about man-made climate change.”
