President Trump has previously called climate change a “hoax” and a “scam.” But last month, when the Environmental Protection Agency proposed rescinding the conclusion that greenhouse-gas emissions from the power sector “may reasonably be anticipated to endanger public health or welfare,” it did not question the reality of climate change. Instead, it claimed that large emissions reductions will not be enough to avert harm, and the country is better off doing nothing at all. This is utter nihilism. It is also completely wrong.
The power sector is the second largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the United States (only transportation emits more), accounting for approximately 24 percent of the country’s emissions. The U.S., in turn, is the second largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world, after China, accounting for approximately 12 percent of the global total. If the U.S. power sector were a country, it would be the sixth largest emitter of greenhouse gases (fifth if European Union countries were counted individually rather than as a single jurisdiction).
The EPA’s argument is similar to one the agency made in February, when it said that eliminating such emissions from the transportation sector would likewise not make an appreciable difference. Putting these two claims together magnifies the brazenness: The EPA argues that eliminating or substantially reducing about half of U.S. greenhouse-gas emissions would be futile and would not meaningfully slow the pace of climate change. It follows from the EPA’s logic that eliminating or substantially reducing the greenhouse-gas emissions of any other sector of the economy would be even more pointless. And the same goes for the emissions of any sector of any country, anywhere in the world.
In fact, according to the EPA’s reasoning, nothing anyone could do anywhere would make any difference. (It also, relatedly, makes a legal claim that it doesn’t have the authority to regulate greenhouse-gas emissions in the first place.) The agency’s approach is akin to saying that eating a whole loaf of bread is calorie-free as long as the bread is cut in sufficiently thin slices—they’re all so thin that they can’t possibly matter.
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These are standards I know well. From January 2023 to January 2025, when I served as the administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, I was responsible for the review of all significant executive-branch regulations, including this one. The fact is that some of those slices are not thin at all. The U.S. power sector’s greenhouse-gas emissions create enormous damage. In 2022, the power sector emitted more than 1.5 billion tons of carbon dioxide, more than 68,000 tons of nitrous oxide, and more than 35,000 tons of methane, all three of which are powerful greenhouse gases. Reducing this pollution—and the climate and health damages it creates—would greatly benefit life on Earth. The global advantages of the EPA’s carbon-pollution standards, which the Biden administration announced in 2024 and the Trump administration now seeks to repeal, were estimated to be $20 billion a year—a total that includes savings both from avoiding climate change and from reducing localized pollution that harms human health. Of this total, several billion dollars’ worth of avoided economic damages would accrue to Americans specifically.
A report by the Institute for Policy Integrity estimated that one year’s worth of greenhouse-gas emissions from the U.S. power sector would produce roughly 5,300 additional yearly premature deaths from heat waves and wildfires in the U.S. alone. This figure does not include the significant number of additional deaths from co-pollutants, such as particulate matter, that power plants emit. Putting the magnitude of this effect in context, the report noted that 5,300 deaths are “more than the annual U.S. deaths caused by kidney infections, the flu, firearm accidents, meningitis, bronchitis, appendicitis, and salmonella combined.”
In its proposed repeal of emissions limits, the EPA ignores these effects. Instead, the agency presents an estimate showing that even if the greenhouse-gas emissions of the U.S. power sector were eliminated, the impacts on global mean surface temperature and sea-level rise would be small. The agency wholly ignores the scientific evidence that increased weather-pattern volatility, such as storm surges, not averages of measurements such as temperature, drives most negative impacts of climate change. The EPA’s approach is like saying that an office building is comfortable if its mean temperature is 70 degrees, without checking whether some rooms are at 90 degrees and others at 50 degrees.
The EPA has no good arguments to call the existing evidence into question. The Biden administration’s process to determine the economic damages from greenhouse gases unfolded over several years, and included robust public input and peer review. The EPA casts all of this aside in three steps: First, it acknowledges (against its own interest) that, under the relevant provision of the Clean Air Act, “the appropriate indicator of impact is not emissions or concentrations, but public health and welfare impacts.” Second, although this would suggest that negative consequences of rescinding endangerment findings would be measured by additional forecasted deaths, for example, the EPA in fact does not consider any such impacts. Third, the EPA waves aside all estimates of such consequences using just one word: uncertainties. In its view, uncertainty renders careful estimates of future damages completely invalid.
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Hiding behind uncertainties is a cruel trick that the Trump administration has used with abandon. In multiple proceedings from February onward, it has cited “uncertainties” as a reason to stop estimating the local damage from dangerous air pollutants, such as particulate matter and ozone. For decades, those estimates had been provided on the basis of extensive peer-reviewed scientific literature, but the EPA now essentially assumes that this pollution causes no negative health effects, because whatever consequences existed were too “uncertain.”
One curiosity: In proposing the rescission of the endangerment finding, the agency does not dispute the seriousness of climate change. The proposal discusses at some length a July study by the National Academy of Sciences on the attribution of extreme weather events to global climate change—a study well within the mainstream of climate science. The EPA does not take issue with the academy’s study and is therefore implicitly saying that climate change is a serious problem, but that it can do nothing to ameliorate the severely negative consequences.
But this too is wrong. Of course, the benefits of U.S. emissions reductions would be augmented if they were accompanied by correspondingly ambitious actions by other countries. If the U.S. believed that other countries were not doing enough on that front, instead of rescinding its own restrictions, it could use its considerable power on the world stage to induce other countries to do more. The Trump administration is doing the opposite: It withdrew from the Paris Agreement, under which countries, including the United States, pledged to meet emissions-reduction targets, and it stopped participating in international climate negotiations altogether.
The Trump administration is not merely cynical; it is also irrational and wrong. If its nihilism becomes our national policy, as it is proposing, everyone will suffer the consequences.