Climate Action
Who Pays the Price of Environmental Deregulation?
August 28, 2025
The Trump Administration recently announced its plan to overturn a 2009 scientific finding that gives the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, EPA, the legal authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions.
Backed by an overwhelming literature of science, the 2009 “Endangerment Finding” concluded that greenhouse gases like methane and carbon dioxide pose a risk to human health. This gave the EPA the authority to regulate fossil fuels under The Clean Air Act, and regulate sources of greenhouse gas emissions like cars, factories and power plants.
The proposal, if finalized, would leave the EPA with no authority to regulate the U.S. emissions of greenhouse gases accumulating in the atmosphere and contributing to global warming under the Clean Air Act, which currently prevents over 230,000 premature deaths each year.
Transportation accounts for the largest sector of the U.S. climate emissions, making up 28 percent. In early 2024, the Biden administration introduced the strongest-ever pollution standards for cars, which was projected to prevent 7.2 billion tons of CO2 emissions through 2055 as well as up to 2,500 premature deaths by reducing fine particulate matter and ozone. .
In its EPA press release announcing the proposal to rescind the Endangerment Finding, the EPA said getting rid of greenhouse emission regulations on motor vehicles would decrease the cost of living for American families by reducing the price of products driven by trucks and making cars cheaper.
Supporters of the change have echoed this sentiment, arguing that the main purpose of rescinding the endangerment is helping average Americans. EARTHDAY.ORG clearly refutes these claims and you can see our official response here in our EPA Statement.
At first glance, one might presume that this action by EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin was taken with the intent of helping poor or lower class individuals and families. But if you read between the lines – figuratively and literally (more on that later) – it becomes clear that as much as this was marketed as pro-consumer, in reality, it’s nothing more than a gift to fossil fuel companies at the expense of public health.
“Pro Poor” or Pro-Fossil Fuels?
It is well documented that in the U.S. and worldwide, low-income individuals and communities are disproportionately exposed and more vulnerable to air pollution. In the U.S., Black and Hispanic Americans are demonstrably more likely to live in locations with higher levels of pollution. Getting rid of protections that limit the pollution industry can pump into the air will only make areas with high levels of pollution and all of their associated economic, social, and health effects worse.
Take Cancer Alley, for instance. Grim name, right? It’s a place with a grim reality. The moniker refers to an 85 mile stretch along the Mississippi River in Louisiana, in between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, that houses over 200 petrochemical plants and refineries. Residents – disproportionately black – are immersed alongside factories, pipelines and tank farms. As a result, the area has among the highest concentrations of toxic chemicals nationwide, with a cancer rate nearly 50 times higher than the national average.
Fossil fuel fired power plants like those along the Mississippi – the very plants this proposal would allow complete freedom to – are the largest stationary source of nitrogen oxide (NOx) emissions, which contribute to the formation of ground-level ozone (the main ingredient in “smog”) and particle pollution.
Decades of research shows that ground-level ozone and fine particles aggravate lung and heart disease, cause strokes, asthma and heart attacks, and can increase susceptibility to respiratory infection.
According to the EPA itself, every year, “pollution from power plants causes fine particle and ground level ozone-related premature deaths, new asthma cases and asthma exacerbations, heart attacks, and lost school and work days.”
Anti Health and Anti Life Policy Is Bad for the Economy
When work days are lost due to the health impacts linked to climate change the economy is hindered and not helped.
Zeldin and the Trump administration EPA are well aware of this fact. In its own Regulatory Impact Analysis of the proposal to repeal limits on climate pollution from power plants, which it was legally required to prepare, the EPA found that following through with the proposal would cause thousands of premature deaths and cost Americans billions in healthcare costs.
On page 4-8, table 4-4 of the analysis, the EPA shows that the total increase in healthcare costs from this proposed rule – even without accounting for the costs of its associated climate change impacts – would be as much as $130 billion through 2047. Furthermore, on page 4-5, table 4-1, the EPA found that repealing Carbon Pollution Standards would cause up to 120 additional deaths from smog and 1,100 premature deaths from fine particulate matter in 2035 alone.
Zeldin and Trump’s EPA know its harmful climate decisions will cause deaths. The reason they don’t care? Could it be that these deaths won’t come from their communities and neighborhoods? These deaths will more than likely be of America’s poorest citizens, who, despite how often this Administration uses them as a political bargaining chip, they could not care less about. Proposals like this make that crystal clear. It is strange how the conservative obsession with human life becomes anti-life when it suits them.
Fighting Back
The endangerment finding is under attack, which means science is under attack and lives are at risk. The EPA, 55 years after its formation after the very first Earth Day back in 1970 is at risk. Which means all of us are under attack. Because all of us need clean air to breathe.
At EARTHDAY.ORG, we reject the idea that the quality of the air we breathe or the water we drink should be determined by faulty ‘belief’ systems. The time to act is now. Add your name to our public comments on the EPA’s intentions to gut the agency’s ability to regulate pollution due to climate change, also known as the Endangerment Finding.
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