By G. Dunkel
August 7, 2025
Youth march for climate justice, Capetown, South Africa, 2019.
For over 15 years, an Endangerment Finding allowed the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate emissions, in particular greenhouse gases, from cars and trucks, power plants and oil and natural gas drilling sites.
According to Earthjustice, “The ‘Endangerment Finding’ is the EPA’s scientific and legal conclusion that the Clean Air Act requires regulation of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions to protect public health and welfare.” (earthjustice.org)
That is about to change.
EPA administrator Lee Zeldin made the announcement that the EPA would rescind this finding while standing next to Chris Wright, Trump’s Secretary of Energy, at a truck dealership in Indiana on July 29. “The proposal would, if finalized, amount to the largest deregulatory action in the history of the United States,” Zeldin said. (New York Times, July 29)
The French newspaper Libération (July 30) described this decision by the Trump administration as “an attack on the struggle against global warming and a pure and simple denial of reality.”
Deregulation will increase global warming
Global warming is a real problem, which is not going to go away if the Trump administration decides not to do anything about it. By the end of 2024, for the first time the average global temperature climbed to more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. This level was set by governments in the Paris Agreement On Climate Change as the point the world temperature increase must not exceed if the worst impacts of global warming are to be avoided. (Nature.com, Jan. 10)
In 2024, there were 58 global weather catastrophes, 27 in the United States, which each cost over a billion dollars. (Yale Climate Connection) Millions of people, impacted by these disasters, lost homes, jobs and even their lives. But these are not the people Trump seems interested in.
During the last presidential campaign, Trump made a pitch to oil and gas executives who he invited to a hamburger dinner at Mar-a-Largo. If they ponied up a billion dollars in campaign contributions, he would make sure they saved more than that in taxes and legal fees.
According to the Joint Committee on Taxation, which analyzes tax policies for Congress, his recent “big, beautiful bill” will put $18 billion in the treasuries of the oil oligarchs. These payments are on top of the “Oil Depletion Allowance” and “Intangible Drilling Costs Allowance” that oil companies have “enjoyed” for nearly 100 years.
In his inauguration address, Trump said, “We will drill, baby, drill,” noting that the U.S. has the “largest amount of oil and gas of any country on Earth — and we are going to use it.” (WorldEconomicForum.com, March 3) Trump’s recent tariff negotiations with the European Union included a commitment from the EU to purchase $750 billion of energy products, including liquefied natural gas, oil and nuclear fuels, over the next three years.
All these payments to the oil companies and their few rich owners come from the taxes paid by working people, who will also bear the burden of increased weather catastrophes. Methane released in natural gas production is a major contributor to global warming.
