February 12, 2026
WASHINGTON, D.C. – The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has issued a final rule repealing its 2009 greenhouse gas “Endangerment Finding” and repealing clean car and clean truck standards. EPA’s longstanding determination that greenhouse gas emissions contribute to air pollution that endangers public health and welfare have required the EPA to regulate greenhouse gas pollution from vehicles and other industrial sources under the Clean Air Act since 2009.
EPA’s repeal of these critical protections marks a stark and unjustified departure from decades of scientific consensus and legal precedent, raising serious concerns about the nation’s ability to address the pollution causing climate change and safeguard public health and our environment.
“The Trump EPA’s action today favors political ideology over statutory law, Supreme Court precedent, sound science, and common sense,” said Howard Learner, CEO & Executive Director of the Environmental Law & Policy Center. “When proposing the repeal, the agency relied on a cherry-picked, biased scientific assessment that ignored overwhelming peer-reviewed fact-based evidence of climate change realities and harms. In today’s announcement, the agency hides behind a flimsy legal argument, ignoring real-world climate change realities.”
“Here in the Midwest, the real-world impacts of climate change are impossible to ignore – extreme heat, derechos and more intense and more damaging storms. By repealing the evidence-based endangerment finding, the Trump EPA is creating uncertainty for businesses and communities, leaving Americans exposed to worse human health threats and rising insurance costs. The Trump EPA is abandoning its core mission – protect public health and the environment for all Americans.”
In 2019, the Environmental Law & Policy Center published a special climate change assessment by a team of 18 leading university and research scientists that examined the current and projected impacts of climate change on the Great Lakes and the region around the Great Lakes. In 2025, we published an updated assessment. Both can be found here: The Impacts of Climate Change on the Great Lakes.