On July 29, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin announced the Trump administration’s intention to revoke the endangerment finding — a landmark change ending the EPA’s authority to regulate harmful emissions, and the culmination of 16 years of lobbying and media campaigning by right-wing news networks, think tanks, and other organizations, including some involved in Project 2025. 

Established in 2009, the endangerment finding is an essential scientific determination that provides the legal framework for the EPA to regulate greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Air Act. Even before the finding was officially established, right-wing media allies of the fossil fuel industry’s  climate denial machine began fighting against the EPA’s authority to regulate greenhouse gases by claiming that climate science is uncertain or exaggerated, that the cost of climate action is greater than its benefits, and that government regulation, especially by agencies like the EPA, is bureaucratic overreach. 

The Trump administration’s legal challenge to the endangerment finding would not only hobble current climate regulations but will also make it difficult for future administrations to take meaningful action against climate change.

• In its latest assessment, the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found with “very high confidence” that climate change “has adversely affected physical health of people globally … and mental health of people in the assessed regions,” reporting that “climate-related illnesses, premature deaths, malnutrition in all its forms, and threats to mental health and well-being are increasing.” To rescind the endangerment finding, which Zeldin has referred to as “the holy grail of the climate change religion,” Vox reports that he will have to “establish a factual record that climate change isn’t happening due to burning fossil fuels, and that even if it is, it doesn’t hurt anything.” [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2/28/22, February 2023; Vox, 3/13/25; Carbon Brief, 7/6/15; Twitter/X, 3/12/25]
   
• A landmark 2007 Supreme Court case set the stage for the endangerment finding by giving the EPA authority to regulate greenhouse gases. The Supreme Court ruled in Massachusetts v. EPA that the agency has the responsibility to regulate carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions that can be qualified as air pollutants under the Clean Air Act. Specifically, “the court remanded to EPA, instructing the agency to either issue an endangerment finding for GHGs or provide a basis for not issuing the endangerment finding that is grounded in the statute.” [Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia Law School, 4/2/07]
   
• 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] 
   
• A network of conservative organizations and think tanks have spread misinformation about climate science for decades, laying the ideological groundwork to eliminate the endangerment finding and the regulations that rely on it. The Heritage Foundation (which led Project 2025), CEI, The Heartland Institute, the American Legislative Exchange Council, the Cato Institute, the Pacific Legal Foundation, the CO2 Coalition (previously called the George C. Marshall Institute), and the Texas Public Policy Foundation have spread climate misinformation for decades to undermine the science underpinning the endangerment finding. Many of these groups are part of the broader disinformation network led by the Koch brothers — fossil fuel billionaires who, according to Duke University professor Nancy MacLean, have worked to “transform American governance though the step-by-step imposition of a radical libertarian agenda that is taking aim at a century’s worth of public policy,” particularly in the areas of climate action and environmental protection. [The New York Times, 1/16/24; Union of Concerned Scientists, 10/23/19; Public Citizen, 7/25/19; Orion Magazine, 10/24/22; Media Matters, 2/22/19; Greenpeace, accessed 8/8/25]
   
• During President Donald Trump’s first term, some right-wing organizations petitioned the EPA to reconsider the endangerment finding, claiming that the finding would “be economically detrimental to the American people” and “have no impact on whatever the climate will do.” In 2017, the Competitive Enterprise Institute and the Texas Public Policy Foundation submitted petitions for “Reconsideration, Rulemaking, or Reopening of the Endangerment and Cause or Contribute Findings for Greenhouse Gases Under Section 202(a) of the Clean Air Act.” TPPF wrote in its petition that “nationwide economic impacts are directly traceable to the Endangerment Finding.” [Competitive Enterprise Institute, 2/17/17; Texas Public Policy Foundation, 5/1/17; Environmental Protection Agency, accessed 7/31/25]
   
• On the first day of his second administration, Trump’s executive order “Unleashing American Energy” warned that he would seek to review the “legality and continuing applicability” of the finding. This marked a departure from Trump’s first term, when the EPA declined to reconsider the finding. [The White House, 1/20/25; Politico, 5/20/21]

Even before the endangerment finding was officially established, the right-wing climate denial machine began a three-pronged campaign against regulating greenhouse gases: attacking the overwhelming scientific consensus on climate change; falsely portraying climate regulations as economic “poison” while ignoring the devastating costs of inaction; and challenging the EPA’s legal authority by framing career scientists as “unelected bureaucrats” overstepping their constitutional bounds. 

• In 2006, several groups filed amicus briefs urging the Supreme Court to limit EPA authority claiming Congress “did not intend” the agency to regulate greenhouse gases. Before Massachusetts v. EPA and the endangerment finding, fossil fuel-linked think tanks and organizations tried to prevent the implementation of policy decisions that could be used to reduce greenhouse gas emissions through legal means. The Cato Institute, some individuals affiliated with CEI, and Pacific Legal Foundation filed 2006 amicus briefs urging the Supreme Court not to give the EPA more regulatory authority. CEI’s brief included contributions from noted climate deniers like Patrick Michaels, Roy Spencer, and John Christy. [Cato Institute, 10/24/06; Competitive Enterprise Institute, 10/23/06; Pacific Legal Foundation, 10/24/06; Supreme Court of the United States, 10/30/07; SCOTUS Blog, 11/28/06; Pacific Legal Foundation, 2/2/21]
   
• After the endangerment finding was established, the American Legislative Exchange Council suggested that “states should pursue all available legal means for opposing EPA regulation.” In its “Train Wreck” series, ALEC noted that 18 states were already party to a case to appeal “the EPA endangerment finding and GHG rules” as of late 2010. [American Legislative Exchange Council, 11/1/11, February 2011]
   
• Opponents of the endangerment finding have argued that the costs of regulating greenhouse gas emissions outweigh the benefits, but economists have found that this is not the case. Yale Climate Connections has pointed to a 2024 study that predicts “climate damage costs by 2050 will be six times larger than the cost of reducing carbon pollution consistent with world’s targets under the Paris climate agreement over the same time frame.” [Yale Climate Connections, 7/1/24; Nature, 4/17/24]
   
• Recent Supreme Court decisions have shifted the power away from federal agencies to judges, a victory for EPA opponents who claim the agency represents “unelected bureaucrats" overstepping their authority. In the 2022 Supreme Court case West Virginia v. EPA, the majority-conservative court made it more difficult for agencies to make sweeping policy changes on major issues like climate change without explicit authority from Congress. In the 2024 Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo decision, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote, “Courts must exercise their independent judgment in deciding whether an agency has acted within its statutory authority.” Both decisions could limit the EPA’s ability to implement regulations. [Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance, 7/4/24; U.S. Supreme Court, Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, 6/28/24; Vox, 6/30/22; Inside Climate News, 3/2/25; Environmental Protection Agency, 8/1/25]
   
• In the aftermath of the 2024 court decision, Project 2025 partners celebrated the demise of “the administrative state.” Former Heritage Foundation senior legal fellow Sarah Parshall Perry wrote that “SCOTUS overrules the judicially created Chevron doctrine - which has for years given federal executive agencies authority never congressionally delegated to them. … This is a massive shift in judicial dynamics that will curb the advances of the administrative state.” [Media Matters, 6/28/24; Twitter/X, 6/28/24]

• In 2006, Fox News featured fringe climate deniers, presenting them as credible experts. In a 2006 special called Global Warming: The Debate Continues, Fox News’ David Asman interviewed several well-known climate deniers, including Patrick Michaels, Roy Spencer, Bjorn Lomborg, and John Christy. All four would go on to appear frequently on conservative media to discuss the endangerment finding and have testified before Congress to delegitimize climate science. Spencer and Christy were hired in 2025 to write a report for the Department of Energy that, according to The New York Times, was “meant to support the Trump administration’s sweeping efforts to roll back climate regulations” and “contends that the mainstream scientific view on climate change is too dire and overlooks the positive effects of a warming planet.” [The New York Times, 7/8/25, 7/31/25; Department of Energy, 7/23/25; Media Matters;  5/19/06, 10/24/12, 7/10/13, 2/20/14, 11/10/21, 7/28/22; Competitive Enterprise Institute, accessed 8/5/25; Congress.gov, 4/25/13, 11/17/10; The Guardian, 12/26/13; U.S. Senate Committee on Environment & Public Works, 7/18/13]
   
• Glenn Beck, founder of right-wing TV and radio network TheBlaze, spread debunked conspiracy theories about climate change from “serial misinformers,” as Media Matters wrote in 2007. As a CNN host, Beck moderated a one-sided special called Exposed: The Climate of Fear, which featured Christy and figures associated with the Koch-funded Competitive Enterprise Institute, including Michaels, Chris Horner, and Marlo Lewis Jr. [Media Matters, 5/3/07, 3/31/10, 12/18/09; Orion Magazine, 10/4/22]
   
• In a leaked 2007 congressional draft resolution, ALEC’s Energy, Environment, and Agriculture task force argued that carbon dioxide is not a pollutant and that climate change is actually good for humans. The resolution in response to the Massachusetts v. EPA Supreme Court case stated that higher temperatures associated with greenhouse gases were not linked to “a decline in welfare or public health.” It also claimed that increased greenhouse gas emissions have led to “moister soil and less frequent and less severe drought than in centuries past.” Finally, the resolution claimed that regulating greenhouse gas emissions would provide “zero environmental benefits.” [ALEC Exposed, 7/13/11; American Legislative Exchange Council, 1/9/14]
   
• In 2017, Climate Investigations Center revealed that high-profile climate deniers appeared on a list given by the Heartland Institute to Trump’s EPA for the purpose of reviewing the endangerment finding. Many of the individuals on the list — which included climate-denying meteorologist Joe Bastardi, John Christy, Larry Bell, Judith Curry, William Happer, and others — have appeared extensively in right-wing media to challenge the science underpinning the endangerment finding. [Climate Investigations Center, 10/25/17; Media Matters, 11/28/12, 12/22/19, 8/30/23; 7/31/25]
   
• In March, CEI published a “blueprint for Congress” on “modernizing the EPA,” which argued that the agency “fosters obtuseness” about whether the endangerment finding’s “benefits are worth the costs.” In a full circle moment, one of the paper’s editors was Marlo Lewis Jr., who appeared in Glenn Beck’s 2007 special. One of the paper’s contributors, CEI senior fellow Ben Lieberman, has often defended energy efficiency policy rollbacks and previously accused U.N. scientists of conspiring to “manufacture a global warming crisis.” [Competitive Enterprise Institute, 3/6/25; Media Matters, 7/27/23, 11/28/12]
   
• On One America News, Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow director of communications Marc Morano falsely claimed that the endangerment finding is “regulating human breath as a pollutant” and said that “you’re the real problem if you’re exercising.” Morano’s claim that the EPA is regulating human breath is unfounded, but appears to be derived from the fact that humans exhale carbon dioxide. The EPA’s regulatory strategy under the Clean Air Act focuses on controlling pollution from its major industrial sources — not human breath. [One America News Network, Real America with Dan Ball, 3/14/25; The Heartland Institute, accessed 7/24/25; Environmental Protection Agency, accessed 7/24/25; Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, accessed 8/8/25]
   
• Morano attempted to delegitimize the endangerment finding by once again claiming that it is somehow anti-breathing, saying, “The EPA endangerment finding says that carbon dioxide is a pollutant that must be regulated under the Clean Air Act … Human breath, under the current policy of both the Biden and the Obama administrations, was that we exhale a pollutant that needs to be regulated.” [OANN, The Real Story with Riley Lewis, 4/4/25]
   
• The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board claimed, “Most of the science cited in the Obama endangerment finding—e.g., climate change will harm U.S. agriculture and increase the size and frequency of wildfires—is debatable. The finding that U.S. CO2 emissions will directly harm Americans is even more tenuous.” [The Wall Street Journal, 3/13/25]
   
• Heritage Foundation chief statistician Kevin D. Dayaratna wrote, “Wonderful decision by @epaleezeldin to reconsider the endangerment finding. It’s time for lawmakers to look at these things with a realistic lens.” He also shared a video in which he claimed, “Nobody denies that the climate is changing, but the bottom line is there’s a vast amount of uncertainty regarding this.” [Twitter/X, 3/12/25]
   
• Right-wing influencer and climate denier Chris Martz argued that there is not enough evidence to claim that carbon dioxide is a pollutant that is dangerous to human health: “The claim that carbon dioxide (CO₂) is pollution [at levels experienced in Earth's atmosphere] isn't based on any hard lines of scientific evidence.” [Twitter/X, 2/19/25]

• Former Trump EPA chief of staff and Heritage Foundation fellow Mandy Gunasekara, who recommended a review of the endangerment finding as part of Project 2025, claimed on Fox Business that the finding “benefited countries like China and India to the detriment of our economic opportunity here at home.” Gunasekara, who contributed the chapter on the EPA to Project 2025’s policy book, wrote that a “consequence” of Obama and Biden’s “coercive approach” to the EPA was “the return of costly, job-killing regulations that serve to depress the economy.” Gunasekara has also been involved with the Texas Public Policy Foundation, and she has appeared frequently on Fox News and Fox Business over the years to espouse climate denial. [Fox Business, Varney & Co., 7/30/25; Project 2025, Mandate for Leadership, 2023; Media Matters, 8/19/19]
   
• In 2012, ALEC published a report claiming EPA regulation would “derail” the economy in each state and lead to a decline in public health. The report was part of a series on the “EPA’s Regulatory Train Wreck,” which purported to highlight “onerous regulations that will hit all Americans in the next few years.” One of the 2012 report’s key findings claimed that fossil fuels had “directly led to a high standard of living by allowing Americans to devote more resources to health-promoting activities such as diet, health care, and exercise rather than heating, cooling, and transportation costs.” The report did not mention that oil, coal, and gas directly harm human health, instead describing them as “affordable and reliable energy.” [American Legislative Exchange Council, 11/1/11, April 2012]
   
• In April 2009, The Heritage Foundation published a report claiming, “Above anything else, any attempt to reduce carbon dioxide would be poison to an already sick economy.” Ignoring the enormous economic and health risks associated with air pollution and a rapidly warming climate, the brief also claimed that “the extraordinary perils of CO2 regulation for the American economy come with little, if any, environmental benefit.” But according to a recent report from the U.K.’s Energy & Climate Intelligence Unit, “Climate change-induced food price shocks are on the rise and could lead to more malnutrition, political upheaval and social unrest as the world’s poorest are hit by shortages of food staples.” [The Heritage Foundation, 4/23/09; The Guardian, 7/20/25]

• Climate change denier Steve Milloy falsely claimed that the endangerment finding “is illegal under the 2022 SCOTUS decision in West Virginia v. EPA” and should “be terminated without notice and public comment.” In reality, the court’s decision was much narrower and the endangerment finding still remains valid. As the Clean Air Task Force explained, “The finding that greenhouse gases endanger public health and the environment was not undermined.” In fact, the group wrote, that ruling actually “strengthened” support for the endangerment finding, “as the Court yesterday affirmed its holding in American Electric Power v. Connecticut, that EPA has authority to regulate carbon dioxide from power plants.” [Twitter/X, 7/23/25; Clean Air Task Force, 7/1/22]
   
• Writing for Newsmax, Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow co-founder Craig Rucker called the endangerment finding “the pinnacle of government control.” He continued, “Never before had so few bureaucrats exerted so much power over so many lives, with so little oversight by the Legislative or Judicial Branch.” [Newsmax, 4/17/25; DeSmog, accessed 8/6/25]
   
• Tea Party Patriots co-founder Jenny Beth Martin complained that the finding is unfairly putting pressure on the private sector. Writing for The Daily Caller, Martin argued that overturning the legal framework would not only “unleash the economy,” but “would also restore the rule of law, and right the wrongs committed by the Obama and Biden administrations when they used the endangerment finding to bypass the Congress and enact their anti-fossil-fuels agenda via regulation instead of legislation.” [The Daily Caller, 3/23/25]
   
• On Steve Bannon’s War Room, energy consultant and former executive of Mitsubishi Hitachi Power Systems America Dave Walsh called the endangerment finding “the centerpiece” and “the heart and soul of all of these overreach actions of both administrations.” Walsh predicted that the endangerment finding is going to “go away” and called it a “big, big deal.” [Alachua Chronicle, 2/3/25; Real America’s Voice, War Room, 3/15/25]
   
• Fox Business host Dagen McDowell called targeting the endangerment finding “arguably the most important thing that Lee Zeldin is doing.” McDowell said that the finding was “the basis that Obama and Biden used to bypass Congress in regulating everything to do with energy and greenhouse gases, where they have done a bend around to the legislative body. And if you can change that and end that, it takes away all of that power.” [Fox Business, The Big Money Show, 3/13/25]

Trump’s effort to repeal the endangerment finding represents the most serious threat yet to U.S. climate policy. Its success depends on whether legal precedent and scientific reality can withstand a coordinated assault on the regulatory basis for climate action — a decades-long campaign backed by the fossil fuel industry with the powerful influence of right-wing media, the courts, and the president.