President Donald Trump’s latest climate rollback makes it all but official: The United States is giving up on trying to stop the planet’s warming.
In some ways, the effort has barely started.
More than 15 years after federal regulators officially recognized that greenhouse gas pollution threatens “current and future generations,” their most ambitious efforts to defuse that threat have been blocked in the courts and by Trump’s rule-slicing buzzsaw. Wednesday’s action by the Environmental Protection Agency would extend that streak by wiping out a Biden-era regulation on power plants — leaving the nation’s second-largest source of climate pollution unshackled until at least the early 2030s. Rules aimed at lessening climate pollution from transportation, the nation’s No. 1 source, are also on the Trump hit list.
Meanwhile, the GOP megabill lumbering through the Senate would dismember former President Joe Biden’s other huge climate initiative, the 2022 law that sought to use hundreds of billions of dollars in tax breaks and other incentives to encourage consumers and businesses to switch to carbon-free energy. At the same time, Trump’s appointees have spent months shutting down climate programs, firing their workers and gutting research into the problem, while making it harder for states such as California to tackle the issue on their own.
The years of whipsawing moves have left Washington with no consistent approach on how — or whether — to confront climate change, even as scientists warn that years are growing short to avoid catastrophic damage to human society. While the Trump-era GOP’s hardening opposition to climate action has been a major reason for the lack of consensus, one former Democratic adviser said her own party needs to find a message that resonates with broad swaths of the electorate.
“There’s no way around it: The left strategy on climate needs to be rethought,” said Jody Freeman, who served as counselor for energy and climate change in President Barack Obama’s White House. “We’ve lost the culture war on climate, and we have to figure out a way for it to not be a niche leftist movement.”
It’s a strategy Freeman admitted she was “struggling” to articulate, but one that included using natural gas as a “bridge fuel” to more renewable power — an approach Democrats embraced during the Obama administration — finding “a new approach” for easing permits for energy infrastructure, and building broad-based political support.
As the Democratic nominee in 2008, Obama expressed the hope that his campaign would be seen as “the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.” But two years later, the Democrats’ cap-and-trade climate bill failed to get through a Senate where they held a supermajority. Obama didn’t return to the issue in earnest until his second term, taking actions including the enactment of a sweeping power plant rule that wasn’t yet in effect when Trump rescinded it and the Supreme Court declared it dead.
Republicans, meanwhile, have moved far from their seemingly moderating stance in 2008, when nominee John McCain offered his own climate proposals and even President George W. Bush announced a modest target for slowing carbon pollution by 2025.
EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin contended Wednesday that the Obama- and Biden-era rules were overbearing and too costly.
“The American public spoke loudly and clearly last November: They wanted to make sure that all agencies were cognizant of their economic concerns,” he said when announcing the rule rollback at agency headquarters. “At the EPA under President Trump, we have chosen to both protect the environment and grow the economy.”
Trump’s new strategy of ditching greenhouse gas limits altogether is legally questionable, experts involved in crafting the Obama and Biden power plant rules told POLITICO. But they acknowledged that the Trump administration at the very least will significantly weaken rules on power plants’ climate pollution, at a moment when the trends are going in the wrong direction.
Gina McCarthy, who led EPA during the Obama administration, said in a statement that Zeldin’s rationale is “absolutely illogical and indefensible. It’s a purely political play that goes against decades of science and policy review.”
U.S. greenhouse gas emissions were virtually flat last year, falling just 0.2 percent, after declining 20 percent since 2005, according to the research firm Rhodium Group. That output would need to fall 7.6 percent annually through 2030 to meet the climate goals Biden floated, which were aimed at limiting the rise in global temperatures to 1.5 degrees Celsius since the start of the Industrial Revolution. That level is a critical threshold for avoiding the most severe impacts of climate change.
Those targets now look out of reach. The World Meteorological Organization last month gave 70 percent odds that the five-year global temperature average through 2029 would register above 1.5 degrees.
The Obama-era rule came out during a decade when governments around the world threw their weight behind blunting climate pollution through executive actions. Ricky Revesz, who was Biden’s regulatory czar, recalled the “great excitement” at the White House Blue Room reception just before Obama announced his power plant rule, known as the Clean Power Plan. It seemed a watershed moment. But it didn’t last.
“I thought that it was going to be a more linear path forward,” he said. “That linear path forward has not materialized. And that is disappointing.”
Opponents who have long argued that such regulations would wreck the economy while doing little to curb global temperature increases have traveled the same road in reverse. Republican West Virginia Gov. Patrick Morrisey said he felt dread when Obama announced the Clean Power Plan in 2015. Then the state’s attorney general, he feared the rule’s focus on curbing carbon dioxide from power plants would have a “catastrophic” impact on West Virginia’s coal-reliant economy.
“It was really an audacious and outrageous attempt to regulate the economy when they had no power to do so,” said Morrisey, who led a coalition of states that sued the EPA over Obama’s proposal. “You can’t take the actions that they were trying to take without going to the legislature.”
Meanwhile, Congress has become harsher terrain for climate action.
In May, House Republicans voted to undo the incentives for electric cars and other clean energy technologies in Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, the nation’s most significant effort to spur clean energy and curb climate change.
That same week, 35 House Democrats and Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.) crossed the aisle and voted to kill an EPA waiver that had allowed California to set more stringent tailpipe pollution standards for vehicles to deal with its historically smoggy skies. California was planning to use that waiver to end sales of internal combustion engine vehicles in 2035, a rule 10 other states and the District of Columbia had planned to follow.
The Supreme Court has added to the obstacles for climate policy — introducing more existential challenges for efforts to use executive powers to corral greenhouse gas emissions. In its 2022 decision striking down the Obama administration’s power plant rule, the court said agencies such as EPA need Congress’ explicit approval before enacting regulations that would have a “major” impact on the economy. (It didn’t precisely define what counts as “major.”) In 2024, the court eviscerated a decades-old precedent known as the Chevron doctrine, which had afforded agencies broad leeway in how they interpret vague statutes.
Many climate advocates and former Democratic officials contend that all those obstacles are bumps, not barriers, on the tortuous path to reducing greenhouse gases. They say that even the regulatory fits and starts have provided signals to markets and businesses about where federal policy is heading in the long term — prodding the private sector to make investments to green the nation’s energy system.
One symptom is a sharp decline in U.S. reliance on coal — by far the most climate-polluting power source, and the one that would face the stiffest restrictions in any successful federal regulation to lessen the electricity industry’s emissions. Coal supplied 48.5 percent of the nation’s power generation in 2007, but that fell to 15 percent in 2024. Last year, solar and wind power combined to overtake coal for the first time.
“Regulation has served the purpose of moving things along faster,” said Janet McCabe, who was deputy EPA administrator under Biden and ran EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation during Obama’s second term. “The trajectory is always in the right direction.”
Freeman, who is now at Harvard Law School, said federal regulations plus state laws requiring renewable power to comprise portions of the electricity mix helped justify utility investments in clean energy. That, in turn, accelerated price drops for wind and solar power, she said.
Clean energy advocates point to those broader market shifts, calling a cleaner power grid inevitable.
“There are people in each of these industries who wouldn’t have taken the climate problem seriously and cleaner technology seriously, and invested in it, if it weren’t for the pressure of the Clean Air Act and the incentives that more recently had been built into the IRA,” said David Doniger, senior attorney and strategist at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “So policy does matter, even when it’s not in a straight line and the implementation is inadequate.”
But even if those economic trends continue — an open question given the enormous new power demand from data centers — it will not bring the U.S. closer to cuts needed to keep the world from overheating, multiple climate studies have concluded. And the greatest chunk of the emissions decline since 2005 comes from shifting coal to natural gas, another fossil fuel, which fracking made cheap and abundant.
Biden’s power plant rule, now being shelved by Trump’s EPA, would have imposed limits on both coal-burning power plants and future gas-fired ones, requiring them to either capture their greenhouse gases or shut down.
Staving off regulations may well keep coal-fired power plants running longer than anticipated to meet forecast demand growth, belching more carbon dioxide into the air. The Trump administration has even sought to temporarily exempt power plants from air pollution rules altogether and is trying to use emergency powers to prevent coal generators from shuttering.
Without federal rules that say otherwise, power providers would also be likely to add more natural gas generation to the grid.
Failing to curb power plants’ pollution, scientists say, means temperatures will continue to rise and bring more of the floods, heat waves, wildfires, supply chain disruptions, food shortages and other shocks that cost the U.S. hundreds of billions of dollars each year in property damage, illness, death and lost productivity.
“I don’t think the economics are going to take care of it by any means,” said Joe Goffman, who led the Biden EPA air office. “The effects of climate change are going to continue to be felt and they’re going to continue to be costly in terms of dollars and cents and in terms of human experience.”
Some state governors, such as Democrats Kathy Hochul of New York and Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, have vowed to go it alone on climate policy if need be.
But analyses have shown state actions alone are unlikely to achieve the greenhouse gas reductions at the scale and speed needed to avoid baking in catastrophic effects from climate change.
The Sierra Club, for example, has helped shutter nearly 400 coal-fired units across the U.S. since 2010 through its Beyond Coal campaign, which has argued the economic case against fossil fuel generation in front of state utility commissions. While Joanne Spalding, the group’s legal director, said it can continue to strike blows against coal with that strategy, she acknowledged that “gas is a huge problem” — and left no doubt that the Trump administration’s moves would do damage.
“Given what the science says about the need to act urgently, this will be a lost four years in the United States,” she said.
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