‘The siege of Carthage’: Breaking down the Trump EPA’s major climate regulation rollbacks
The Trump EPA just dropped a bomb on climate and environmental regulations.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on Wednesday announced plans to roll back dozens of federal rules that protect climate, waterways and the air from pollution, marking what the head of the agency called the “greatest day of deregulation in American history.”
In a short video posted just after noon, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin drew the battle lines where the agency will fight with environmentalists and Democratic attorneys general over the next few years — and make no mistake, the frontlines cover a lot of real estate.
All told, Zeldin said there were 31 regulations he would be tackling as a part of a broader effort to redirect enforcement resources “to EPA’s core mission to relieve the economy of unnecessary bureaucratic burdens that drive up the costs for American consumers.”
To help readers get a sense of what all this means, Landmark has explained some of the key regulations below, as succinctly as possible and in no particular order. After the list, we’ll have some analysis from legal experts on what it all means. (The EPA’s full list can be accessed here.)
Revise the EPA’s Waters of the United States (WOTUS) rule: An area of frequent friction between the EPA and developers, the WOTUS rule defines which waterways are protected under the Clean Water Act. In 2023, the Supreme Court issued a landmark ruling in Sackett v. EPA that vastly reduced that law’s scope — essentially saying waterways must have “continuous surface connection” to traditional navigable waters like lakes or rivers to be protected (so groundwater wouldn’t count). The EPA says the new rule will bring it into compliance with that decision.
Revisit the Social Cost of Carbon accounting metric: This metric is used when evaluating the benefits of a proposed project and attempts to quantify, in dollars, the damage caused from emitting a ton of carbon. In other words, it takes a crack at incorporating external costs to the community from pollution (for a fairly local example: A power plant may emit pollution that causes nearby asthma, which leads to more doctor’s visits and costly medical care. Those costs are shouldered by someone, but wouldn’t show up in a straightforward economic analysis of the power plant that more narrowly analyzed the monetary value of energy produced there).The Obama administration had originally estimated the social cost of carbon at $42 per ton, and the first Trump administration revised that down to $5. The Biden administration then set the level first at $51 before debuting a whopping $190 per ton price tag.
Eliminate the Biden administration’s rules for power plant carbon emissions, mercury and toxic air pollution rule, and coal ash discharges rule: These rules were announced as a package and were among the most ambitious regulatory moves by the Biden administration to control power plant emissions.The most stringent was the carbon rule, dubbed the Clean Power Plan 2.0 by Zeldin, which required many new gas and existing coal plants to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 90% by 2032. That meant the U.S. power industry would need to install billions of dollars worth of emissions control technologies, or shut down dirtier plants.
Reconsider the Biden administration’s tailpipe emissions rules: Zeldin and conservatives have called these rules an electric vehicle “mandate,” largely because they strongly encourage the adoption of EVs through increasingly strict tailpipe emissions requirements (and opponents said it was impossible to build an internal combustion engine under the requirements, effectively making it an EV mandate).The rules applied to cars as well as small and large trucks. Specifically, cars and light trucks needed to cut fleetwide tailpipe emissions by nearly 50% over 2026 levels in 2032, and reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 7.2 billion tons through 2055.
Reconsideration of the EPA’s endangerment finding: The EPA’s 2009 endangerment finding is the legal determination that greenhouse gas emissions pose a threat to public health and safety. That determination is needed for the agency to craft regulations for those gases under the Clean Air Act, and has been cited in other regulations as well. (Landmark has written a deep dive on this, if you want to read more).
Legal experts told Landmark that the barrage of deregulatory actions will not be easy for the EPA to pull off and are part of what appears to be a coordinated effort to undermine the agency’s operations — first through mass firings of employees, and now through aggressive deregulation.
“This is looking more and more like the siege of Carthage,” Patrick Parenteau, a law professor emeritus at Vermont Law School and former EPA regional counsel, told Landmark. “First destroy the institution, then pour salt on the ground to make sure it never comes back.”
But Parenteau and others said that the EPA will still have to contend with numerous legal obstacles in this deregulatory push, and is working with reduced manpower to do so.
The EPA will need to satisfy procedural requirements as outlined under the Administrative Procedure Act, for instance, which requires public notice and comment and lays out the framework for judicial review of agency actions that are “arbitrary and capricious.”
Regulatory missteps often doomed the first Trump administration in court.
Michael Burger, the executive director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia Law School, told Landmark that it will take the EPA years to work all the announced policy changes through the administrative rulemaking process.
He expects many of the rules will likely still fail in court once challenged, since implementation of the nation’s environmental laws must be “consistent with the purposes and language of the statutes themselves.”
“This administration will have a hard time doing what it wants to do within the confines of the law,” Burger said.
Part of the trouble will be contending with the Biden administration’s own work on the rules being rolled back, according to Bethany Davis Noll, the executive director of the State Energy & Environmental Impact Center at the NYU School of Law.
Davis Noll told Landmark that the rules will have to be justified along numerous criteria, including the costs and benefits, but also whether they advance the purpose of laws like the Clean Water Act and Clean Air Act that were designed to protect human health, not the other way around.
“Every single one of these rollbacks will require the agency to prepare a detailed analysis that grapples with the Biden administration’s analysis and explains why the new course is justified,” she said.
She added that “it is just hard to justify a rule that will be causing harm in rolling back health and safety protections.”
But Jamie Pleune, an associate professor of law at the University of Utah, noted that it appears the EPA is more worried about helping businesses than it is health and safety protections, given Zeldin’s announcement.
Pleune pointed out Zeldin’s description of climate change as a “religion,” instead of observed patterns of weather variation based on massive amounts of data and scientific research.
“Unlike religion, climate change will continue affecting our lives, regardless of whether we believe in it,” Pleune said.