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By Denise Civiletti - July 30, 2025
Following through on a pledge made in March, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin announced Tuesday that the EPA is proposing to repeal all greenhouse gas emissions standards for light-duty, medium-duty, and heavy-duty vehicles and engines.
Reversing 16 years of policy, the EPA now takes the position that the Clean Air Act does not authorize it to prescribe emission standards to address global climate change concerns and proposes to rescind its 2009 scientific finding that greenhouse gas emissions from new motor vehicles and engines contribute to air pollution that may endanger public health or welfare.
The 2009 “endangerment finding” that planet-warming greenhouse gases endanger public health is the legal justification for most Clean Air Act regulations, including limits on greenhouse gas emissions from cars, power plants and other industrial sources of air pollution, are legally justified by this finding.
The proposal states that “no requisite technology for vehicle and engine emission control can address the global climate change concerns identified in the findings without risking greater harm to public health and welfare.”
The repeal will reinstate “consumer choice” and give “Americans the ability to purchase a safe and affordable car for their family while decreasing the cost of living on all products that trucks deliver,” the EPA said in a press release.
Zeldin made the announcement Tuesday at an auto dealership in Indiana, accompanied by U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright, Indiana Governor Mike Braun, and other government officials, as well as representatives of the Indiana Motor Truck Association.
“The proposal would, if finalized, amount to the largest deregulatory action in the history of the United States,” Zeldin said. It would “undo the underpinning of $1 trillion in costly regulations, saving more than $54 billion annually,” according to the EPA.
Last month, the EPA proposed repealing all limits on greenhouse gas emissions from power plants weakening restrictions on their other hazardous emissions, including mercury, arsenic and lead.
The transportation and power sectors are the country’s top sources of pollution that heats the planet. While scrapping policies that limit planet-warming emissions, the Trump administration is simultaneously working to increase the production and use of the fossil fuels that generate those emissions— in its pursuit to establish what it calls “American energy dominance.”
The EPA’s actions under Zeldin follow the direction of President Donald Trump in executive orders signed right after taking office in January.
Trump has famously called climate change a “hoax” and a “scam.” Zeldin on Tuesday referred to climate science as a “cult.” The endangerment finding, Zeldin said, is the “holy grail of climate change religion.”
Zeldin also said the rescission of the endangerment finding and repeal of tailpipe emissions limits would end the Biden electric vehicle “mandate.”
“For far too long, politics surrounding climate change have shrunk your life possibilities and put American businesses at risk,” U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright said Tuesday. “That ends now under President Trump!”
The EPA’s actions won praise from the chairperson of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, Shelly Moore Capito (R-WV). “The Clean Air Act has been weaponized by Democrat administrations for years, and this action takes initiative to prevent regulations that limit affordability, energy security, and consumer choice across our country,” Capito said in a statement posted on X.
Environmentalists and Democratic politicians reacted negatively to the actions.
“Today’s EPA announcement ignores the blindingly obvious reality of the climate crisis and sidelines the EPA’s own scientists and lawyers in favor of the interests and profits of the fossil fuel industry,” former Vice President Al Gore, a longtime climate activist, said in a statement posted on X Tuesday. He predicted that the Trump administration’s actions will actually hurt the U.S. economy.
“Weakening safeguards that reduce greenhouse gas pollution will harm American competitiveness in a global economy that is moving away from oil, gas, and coal,” Gore said.
New York’s commissioner of environmental conservation Amanda Lefton said the “Trump administration is moving our country backwards, eroding a decade of progress on clean air and ignoring science, threatening public health, and putting New Yorkers at risk.”
The policy shifts disregard established scientific consensus, Lefton said. They will increase harmful air pollutants and tailpipe emissions and could lead to “serious public health implications, including heightened risks for asthma, cardiovascular disease, and other respiratory ailments,” she said.
Long Island environmental activist Adrienne Esposito, executive director of Citizens Campaign for the Environment, said Tuesday she thought a second Trump administration would “perhaps just ignore climate change.”
“I didn’t think they would be seeking to accelerate it,” Esposito said. “There’s a big difference, but that’s what they’re doing,” she said.
“The sad part is, places like Long Island are going to be hurt the most,” Esposito said. “We’re on the front lines of climate change impacts, and those impacts are going to now be accelerated, and It’s going to be Lee Zeldin’s fault,” she said, noting the irony that Zeldin previously represented much of Suffolk County in the U.S. Congress. “When we worked with him as a congressman, he believed in climate change,” Esposito said.
“Honestly, the science is not that difficult to understand,” Esposito said. “Carbon dioxide absorbs heat. The more heat in the atmosphere, the warmer it gets, the more it warms up the oceans, the more the planet warms. This is not difficult to understand. It is not controversial science,” Esposito said. “But rather, it’s a matter of where their priorities are. Clearly, their priorities are on short-term profits for a long-term loss,” she said.
Long Island is especially vulnerable to increasingly severe weather brought about by a warming planet. Surrounded by water, the island is already seeing the impacts of rising sea levels in frequent and more persistent flooding events. The island is also part of a designated non-attainment area for ozone, meaning the area’s air quality does not meet the federal health-based standards for ozone set by the EPA. This results from vehicle emissions throughout the NY metro region as well as out-of-state emissions sources transported to the area by westerly winds.
Those impacts will all grow worse if the Clean Air Act regulations are repealed, Esposito said.
