EPA head says he'll roll back dozens of environmental regulations, including rules on climate change

WASHINGTON (AP) — In what he called the “most consequential day of deregulation in American history,” the head of the Environmental Protection Agency announced a series of actions Wednesday to roll back landmark environmental regulations, including rules on pollution from coal-fired power plants, climate change and electric vehicles.

“We are driving a dagger through the heart of climate-change religion and ushering in America’s Golden Age,'' EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said in an essay in The Wall Street Journal.

If approved after a lengthy process that includes public comment, the Trump administration's actions will eliminate trillions of dollars in regulatory costs and “hidden taxes,” Zeldin said, lowering the cost of living for American families and reducing prices for such essentials such as buying a car, heating your home and operating a business.

“Our actions will also reignite American manufacturing, spreading economic benefits to communities," he wrote. “Energy dominance stands at the center of America's resurgence.”

In all, Zeldin said he is rolling back 31 environmental rules, including a scientific finding that has long been the central basis for U.S. action against climate change.

Zeldin said he and President Donald Trump support rewriting the agency’s 2009 finding that planet-warming greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare. The Obama-era determination under the Clean Air Act is the legal underpinning of a host of climate regulations for motor vehicles, power plants and other pollution sources.

Environmentalists and climate scientists call the endangerment finding a bedrock of U.S. law and say any attempt to undo it will have little chance of success.

“In the face of overwhelming science, it’s impossible to think that the EPA could develop a contradictory finding that would stand up in court," said David Doniger, a climate expert at the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group.

In a related action, Zeldin said EPA will rewrite a rule restricting air pollution from fossil-fuel fired power plants and a separate measure restricting emissions from cars and trucks. Zeldin and the Republican president incorrectly label the car rule as an electric vehicle "mandate.''

President Joe Biden's Democratic administration had said the power plant rules would reduce pollution and improve public health while supporting the reliable, long-term supply of electricity that America needs.

Biden, who made fighting climate change a hallmark of his presidency, cited the car rule as a key factor in what he called “historic progress” on his pledge that half of all new cars and trucks sold in the U.S. will be zero-emission by 2030.

The EPA also will take aim at rules restricting industrial pollution of mercury and other air toxins, soot pollution and a “good neighbor” rule intended to restrict smokestack emissions that burden downwind areas with smog. The EPA also targeted a clean water law that provides federal protections for rivers, streams and wetlands.

None of the changes take effect immediately, and nearly all will require a long rulemaking process. Environmental groups vowed to oppose the actions, which one said would result in "the greatest increase in pollution in decades'' in the U.S.

Amanda Leland, executive director of the Environmental Defense Fund, made the claim as she denounced Zeldin's "unlawful attack on the public health of the American people.''

The EPA has also terminated its diversity, equity and inclusion programs and will shutter parts of the agency focused on environmental justice, Zeldin said. The effort strived to improve conditions in areas heavily burdened by industrial pollution, mostly in low-income and majority-Black or Hispanic communities.

“This isn’t about abandoning environmental protection — it’s about achieving it through innovation and not strangulation,” Zeldin wrote. “By reconsidering rules that throttled oil and gas production and unfairly targeted coal-fired power plants, we are ensuring that American energy remains clean, affordable and reliable.”

University of Pennsylvania climate scientist Michael Mann called the EPA’s action “just the latest form of Republican climate denial. They can no longer deny climate change is happening, so instead they’re pretending it’s not a threat, despite the overwhelming scientific evidence that it is, perhaps, the greatest threat that we face today.”

The directive to reconsider the endangerment finding and other EPA rules was a recommendation of Project 2025, a conservative blueprint for Trump’s second term. Russell Vought, director of the White House Office of Management and Budget and co-author of Project 2025, called the actions long overdue.

“EPA’s regulation of the climate affects the entire national economy — jobs, wages and family budgets,″ Vought said Wednesday.

“The Trump administration’s ignorance is trumped only by its malice toward the planet,” countered Jason Rylander, legal director at the Center for Biological Diversity’s Climate Law Institute. “Come hell and high water, raging fires and deadly heatwaves, Trump and his cronies are bent on putting polluter profits ahead of people’s lives."

Reconsidering the endangerment finding and other actions “won’t stand up in court,'' Rylander said. ”We’re going to fight it every step of the way.”

The United States is the second largest carbon polluter in the world, after China, and the largest historical emitter of greenhouse gases.

The moves to terminate environmental justice staff follows an action last week to drop a case against a Louisiana petrochemical plant accused of increasing cancer risk in a majority-Black community. Zeldin called environmental justice a term that “has been used primarily as an excuse to fund left-wing activists instead of actually spending those dollars to directly remediate environmental issues for those communities.”

Matthew Tejada, who once led EPA’s environmental justice office, said Trump and Zeldin were "taking us back to a time of unfettered pollution across the nation, leaving every American exposed to toxic chemicals, dirty air and contaminated water.” Tejada now works at the NRDC.

Anne Bradbury, CEO of the American Exploration & Production Council, an oil industry group, hailed Zeldin's actions and said the U.S. is “stronger and more secure when we are energy dominant."

Her group has long called for changes to EPA rules so they are “workable, effective and build on the significant emissions reductions" made by oil and gas producers, Bradbury said. “We support updating these rules so the American people can continue to benefit from affordable, reliable and clean American energy.”

New Jersey Rep. Frank Pallone, the top Democrat on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, called Zeldin's actions “a despicable betrayal of the American people.”

Every day, more Americans lose their jobs, homes and even their lives to worsening climate disasters, Pallone said. Trump and Zeldin “are making a mockery of those people’s pain,” Pallone said, adding that "will have swift and catastrophic ramifications for the environment and health of all Americans.''

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Associated Press writer Michael Phillis in St. Louis contributed to this report.