On February 12, the Trump administration finalized repeal of the endangerment finding – the landmark legal determination that protected Americans by limiting greenhouse gases and carbon pollution from cars, power plants, and other industries. The Associated Press reported last year that the protections mandated by this finding were projected to “prevent an estimated 30,000 deaths and save $275 billion each year they are in effect.”  

Ignoring these benefits, Fox News and Fox Businesses personalities celebrated the repeal while pushing climate denial talking points to bolster support for this huge rollback of pollution safeguards — including dismissing the overwhelming scientific evidence that underpins the endangerment finding, suggesting that cold weather in winter somehow disproves climate change, or outright calling climate science a “hoax.” 

Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin has referred to the endangerment finding as “the holy grail of the climate change religion,” while The New York Times reports that “dozens of conservative activists, lawyers, scientists and others had worked for years to prepare the case against the endangerment finding,” including a secretive campaign underwritten by The Heritage Foundation. As documented by Media Matters, this effort has also relied on a decades-long right-wing media campaign to undermine climate science.

• In 2009, the EPA’s endangerment finding established that greenhouse gases must be regulated because they “cause or contribute to air pollution that may reasonably be anticipated to endanger public health or welfare.” Lisa Jackson, the agency’s first Black administrator, formally “announced an endangerment finding on greenhouse gases, setting the stage for EPA action on climate change. Under her leadership, EPA issued clean air standards designed to reduce emissions from large facilities without burdening small businesses, and a clean cars program.” [Environmental Protection Agency, accessed 7/30/25, accessed 7/30/25] 

• The Trump administration’s proposed repeal of the endangerment finding, issued in July, was based on arguments made by a handpicked working group of climate contrarians. NBC News reported that “it’s not clear whether the final rule will rely on the same arguments or change its justifications in response to public comments,” while also pointing out that “a judge ruled last month that (Energy Secretary Chris) Wright and the Energy Department had violated transparency laws in the way it formed and operated the working group behind the report.” [Media Matters, 7/31/25, 8/14/25; NBC News, 2/10/26]

• EPA regulations reducing greenhouse gases, based on the agency’s own assessment, were projected to “prevent an estimated 30,000 deaths and save $275 billion each year they are in effect.” AP further noted that “experts say the numbers are conservative and that even a partial dismantling of the rules would mean more pollutants such as smog, mercury and lead — and especially more tiny airborne particles that can lodge in lungs and cause health problems.” [The Associated Press, 6/5/25]

• The Trump administration claims that repealing the endangerment finding will benefit the economy — including bringing down the cost of “light-duty cars, S.U.V.s and trucks” — are dubious. The New York Times reported the administration has declined to explain how it assessed the benefits of repealing the finding, with one expert noting, “‘It’s hard to find any math in their assessment that doesn’t seem, frankly, a little bit ridiculous.” On CNN News Central, correspondent Renee Marsh pointed out that by “the EPA’s own data” under the Clean Air Act, “between 1970 and 2023 combined emissions of six common pollutants dropped some 78% and that all happened while the U.S. economy continued to grow,” with a 321% increase in gross domestic product. Marsh continued, “So it's not an either or — you don't have to pick dirty air in order to have a strong economy.” Later in the program, author and climate expert Porter Fox pointed out that “back when the endangerment finding was adopted in 2009, we were looking at a billion-dollar climate disaster roughly every month or so. Now it's every three weeks. So, you know, if Trump is going to claim that $1.3 trillion will be saved by easing these regulations, just do the math. In less than 10 years, we're already going into the red, and those billion-dollar disasters are getting more and more expensive and more and more frequent every year.” [The New York Times, 2/12/26; CNN, CNN News Central, 2/12/26, 2/12/26]

• The scientific evidence supporting the endangerment finding has only strengthened since 2009. As reported by Stanford University, “evidence for climate change’s damaging impacts – such as food insecurity, mass migration, and health problems – has only grown since the finding was established.” Meanwhile, the Earth just experienced its hottest decade ever recorded, “the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide – as well as methane and nitrous oxide – are at the highest levels in the last 800,000 years,” and in the U.S. alone there were “two dozen billion-dollar weather and climate disasters in 2025, causing at least 276 fatalities and costing a total of $115 billion in damages.” [Stanford Report, 9/19/25; AccuWeather, 3/19/25; ABC News, 1/8/26]

• Fox Business host Stuart Varney celebrated news that the Trump administration would end the endangerment finding: “Wave goodbye to the Green New Deal — the energy policies of Obama and Biden are going, going, gone.” Varney said, “If you questioned that finding, the climate crowd called you a denier as if you were denying the Holocaust — the science is in, they said, the argument is over. Not so fast.” [Fox Business, Varney & Co., 2/10/26]

• On Fox Business’ The Evening Edit, the Federalist’s Brianna Lyman said: “All we’ve been doing for the past 15 years or so is saddling American consumers and businesses with these regulatory burdens that are expensive and ineffective in the grand scheme of things.” She claimed, “China is responsible for a third of the world's global emissions and a third of the world's greenhouse gas emissions. The United States on its own accounts for about 10% of CO2 emissions, 10% of greenhouse gases, which means 90% of these emissions are coming from other countries. So at the end of the day, no matter what we do here, it is ultimately negligible until countries like China, and India and Russia abide by the same set of standards that we are abiding by, and they don't.” The argument that the U.S. shouldn’t act to regulate pollution because of the emissions output of other countries has been employed by climate deniers for more than a decade. It discounts the domestic benefits of climate action and the role of U.S. leadership in driving solutions, and also falsely suggests that other countries are not taking action. For example, according to a new analysis, China’s emissions fell by 1% in the last three months of 2025, and the drop “extends the ‘flat or falling’ trend in China’s CO2 emissions that began in March 2024 and has now lasted for nearly two years.” [Fox Business, The Evening Edit, 2/10/26; Newsweek, 12/1/23; Carbon Brief, 12/2/26]

• The Bottom Line host Dagen McDowell called the endangerment finding “an Obama-era rule — shocker — that has been used for years as the foundation to push its climate religion up our wazoo.” McDowell said: “Oh, this is so delicious — the Trump administration about to mark its most sweeping rollback yet. Get 'er done. An Obama-era rule — shocker — that has been used for years as the foundation to push its climate religion up our wazoo.” [Fox Business, The Bottom Line, 2/10/26]

• Fox Business host and former Trump economic adviser Larry Kudlow: “The whole climate change crowd never proved their case” behind the endangerment finding. Kudlow said, “We can argue till we are blue in the face but I will say the whole climate change crowd never proved their case. Or let me put it to you this way. It never proved the existential risk, what I would call the extremist case. I’m not denying that there’s emissions in the air. The question is how much and how bad is it for your everyday health.” [Fox Business, The Big Money Show, 2/10/26]

• In the same segment about President Donald Trump’s end to the endangerment finding, Fox Business host Jackie DeAngelis claimed: “There is no global warming here. Maybe the president is right.” She said, “This idea that the climate is changing — it was negative 8 degrees here on Sunday. There is no global warming here. Maybe the president is right that this is moving, this is the climate doing what it does and that it goes in cycles.” [Fox Business, The Big Money Show, 2/10/26]

• Describing the endangerment finding as “a regulatory wet blanket on the economy,” Fox contributor Marc Thiessen said, “We've got to recognize climate change isn’t an existential crisis. It is a problem that can be managed. … AI will help us find lots of ways to adapt to a warming climate so we can live with it.” Thiessen: “First of all, the regulations were a regulatory wet blanket on the economy that’s now being taken off, which is good for Trump and good for Americans. … We've got to recognize climate change isn’t an existential crisis. It is a problem that can be managed. And the answer is adaptation. … Air conditioning is cheaper than heat. AI will help us find lots of ways to adapt to a warming climate so we can live with it. Because we can't destroy the free market economy in order to stop the planet from warming.” [Fox News, Special Report with Bret Baier, 2/12/26]

• New York Post columnist Miranda Devine cheered Trump’s repeal of the endangerment finding as “the final nail in the coffin of the climate hoax that we’ve all been laboring under all around the world.” Devine: “Look, it’s absolutely huge. This is really the final nail in the coffin of the climate hoax that we’ve all been laboring under all around the world since at least 20 years ago when Al Gore brought out that piece of propaganda, that apocalyptic movie An Inconvenient Truth that scared, you know, a generation of kids to thinking that really planet would be all burned up by now. You know, their deadlines have kept on have come and gone and nothing has changed. So I think people are now waking up to the fact that it was a hoax.” [Fox Business, Kudlow, 2/12/26]

• Fox & Friends co-host Brian Kilmeade said the rollback is “really going to be jet fuel for the economy,” adding, “You will be surprised about the impact because they can't back up the science when it comes to the new green mania.” Kilmeade: “It’s really going to be jet fuel for the economy. Cover of the New York Post, cars will cost $2,400 less. You will be surprised about the impact because they can't back up the science when it comes to the new green mania.” [Fox News, Fox & Friends, 2/13/26]