The once-bipartisan effort to reduce the greenhouse gasses that harm human health, cause heat waves and increase the intensity of storms ended when the Environmental Protection Agency, established by President Nixon in 1970, reversed course and dismissed the science of climate change.
“Administrator Zeldin Announces Single Largest Deregulatory Action in US History,” said the EPA, which claimed erasing emission standards for cars and trucks would “save American taxpayers over $1.3 trillion” without explaining how. President Donald Trump claimed it would save “trillions of dollars.”
Lee Zeldin
The move reverses an Obama-era finding that greenhouse gasses such as carbon dioxide and methane endanger human life and contribute to climate change. EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said endangerment findings were part of an “ideological crusade” that harmed the auto industry.
Trump has long called climate change a “hoax” and called efforts to battle it “the Green New Scam.” His views are now America’s official policy. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum told Fox Business this week that more carbon dioxide in the environment is a good thing because “plants thrive with more CO2.”
Evangelical groups that advocate for creation care joined mainstream environmental groups in expressing dismay at the change, which the energy industry and anti-regulation groups have sought for decades.
“As evangelicals committed to defending the sanctity of life, we believe pollution must be addressed because it harms human life,” said Jessica Moerman, president of the Evangelical Environmental Network. “We believe this effort will ultimately fail in court, wasting taxpayer dollars and distracting from the real issue at hand — advancing American-made solutions to climate pollution.”
Lawsuits challenging the EPA’s move are expected soon. California Gov. Gavin Newsom said his state would sue the EPA and would continue regulating greenhouse gasses.
Some legal experts say the EPA’s reversal is vulnerable to lawsuits because the agency didn’t provide any new scientific findings to support the changes. Environmental groups say if the EPA reversal stands, Americans will suffer more health problems, more will die, and heat and storms will continue to intensify.
Trump also is working to revive the U.S. coal industry by ordering the Pentagon to buy and use more electricity produced with “clean beautiful coal.”
Meanwhile, the Department of Energy has used its emergency authority to order electric utilities to stop shutting down coal-fired electricity plants that were slated for closure. One Colorado company has challenged the order, saying the U.S. is not in an energy emergency and warning that costs to maintain old coal-burning plants will be significant and will be paid by utility customers, many of whom already are paying higher energy costs due to a sudden increase in data centers created for artificial intelligence.
“Muzzling the EPA was one of the goals of Project 2025.”
Muzzling the EPA was one of the goals of Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for the second Trump administration, which criticized the EPA for “costly, job-killing regulations that serve to depress the economy and grow the bureaucracy but do little to address, much less resolve, complex environmental problems.”
“The EPA has been a breeding ground for expansion of the federal government’s influence and control across the economy,” said Project 2025’s chapter on the agency. “Embedded activists have sought to evade legal restraints in pursuit of a global, climate-themed agenda, aiming to achieve that agenda by implementing costly policies.”
From the 1970s to the early 1990s, caring for the environment was a bipartisan issue. Richard Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970, and he backed laws lowering motor vehicle emissions, taxing lead additives in gas, cleaning up of federal facilities that pollute and ending dumping in the Great Lakes.
In 1990, Congress passed the Clean Air Act with 88 votes in the Senate and more than 400 votes in the House. President George H.W. Bush signed it into law.
Such bipartisanship over the environment ended after Republicans adopted a stronger anti-regulation agenda. As evangelicals embraced the GOP and its anti-regulation agenda, creation care was orphaned and demonized.
“One of the most effective arguments accused secular environmentalists of being earth worshipping extremists and participants in a conspiracy to promote New Age religions and a one world government that would destroy American capitalism,” wrote Neall Pogue in his book, The Nature of the Religious Right: The Struggle Between Conservative Evangelicals and the Environmental Movement.
Trump’s EPA has adopted much of this approach, as BNG reported in March 2025 when Zeldin announced 31 actions to weaken pollution regulations, cancel grants and halt studies of climate change and its causes. That was the first time Zeldin celebrated “the greatest and most consequential day of deregulation in U.S. history.”
“We are driving a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion to drive down cost of living for American families, unleash American energy, bring auto jobs back to the U.S. and more,” said Zeldin, a Jewish Republican.
The Family Research Council has praised EPA efforts to eliminate its “climate slush fund.” The EPA “has initiated a vast reversal of the regulatory-heavy, climate change fear-based policies of the Biden administration,” said FRC.
The Trump administration’s environmental policies have made the U.S. an international outlier. Trump withdrew the U.S. from the Paris Agreement on climate change, “making it the only nation among nearly 200 to do so,” reported The New York Times. Trump said the Paris Agreement and other environmental accords are “contrary to the interests of the U.S.”