Are greenhouse gases actually dangerous? That’s the latest question the Trump administration is asking. Despite the decades of growing evidence that the ice caps are melting and driving sea level rise, the Trump administration is now seriously considering whether or not greenhouse gases are actually harmful to us and our planet. The answer they decide on could very well change American climate-change laws for years to come.
This landmark move by Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) could undo years of work to cut down on carbon dioxide emissions while also completely ripping apart the foundation of the US’s climate laws. Foundations that were further solidified as part of the “endangerment finding,” which was put together using decades of research into climate-change driving causes.
Lee Zeldin, the EPA administrator under the Trump administration, said that the agency is reconsidering the endangerment finding due to concerns that it has spawned “an agenda that throttles our industries, our mobility, and our consumer choice while benefitting adversaries overseas.”
Zeldin also wrote that the ruling to revisit this finding was part of the Trump administration’s plan to drive “a dagger through the heart of climate-change religion” as Donald Trump and his administration usher in “America’s Golden Age.”
Of course, environmentalists everywhere were horrified by the ruling, as the EPA made 31 announcements in just a few hours—all of which target almost every major environmental ruling designed to protect Americans’ access to clean air and water. The EPA even plans to revisit a ruling that power plants could not dump their toxic waste near waterways—with further possible considerations into how it might narrow the Clean Water Act in general.
Since taking office in January, the Trump administration has been making some very big moves. DOGE has been looking at replacing government workers with AI, while the changes within the EPA have been staggering to say the least—with offices that dealt with addressing how much pollution poor people and minorities are facing being shuttered and mass agency-wide firings.
Additionally, Zeldin has instructed the agency to halt $20bn in federal funding that had been granted to help address the ongoing climate crisis, with citations of potential fraud lingering in the air.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not wholly in the camp of “humans caused climate change, and we’re the only thing to blame. The planet has constantly been changing. It changed billions of years ago—leading to the demise of entire species before even the dinosaurs roamed the Earth. But we are driving it faster than it would naturally happen.
But this move has all the same hallmarks we’ve been seeing from the Trump administration in other areas, and it’s hard not to look at it and feel like these moves are just being made to line the pockets of those running the power companies and other businesses affected by the regulation of greenhouse gas emissions.
Are greenhouse gases actually harmful to public health? The evidence already says yes. But I’m not particularly surprised to see the Trump administration taking aim at these laws. Trump has long been an outspoken advocate against climate change—years ago, even calling it a hoax despite all of the evidence to the contrary.
If these changes to America’s climate-change laws go through, we could be well on our way back to a time when smog filled the skies of every major city (and even those minor cities), and rivers ran with the toxicity of American industrialization. Ah, yes, a golden age for America, indeed.
