There are seasons in the life of a republic when the soul of governance turns inward upon itself, not in contemplation but in a kind of willful forgetting, a deliberate unlearning of truths that have grown inconvenient to those who hold power.
One recognizes such seasons not by their violence—that comes later—but by their strange, bureaucratic quietness, the soft rustling of documents being unsigned, of findings being unfound, of knowledge being ceremonially returned to ignorance. On February 12, 2026, at a White House podium polished to the brightness of false certainty, President Donald Trump and EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin announced the formal revocation of the 2009 endangerment finding—the scientific and legal determination that greenhouse gases imperil public health and welfare. They spoke of liberation. They spoke of savings. They did not speak of the sky, which went on thickening with carbon above their heads, indifferent to the ceremony below.
To understand what was surrendered that afternoon, one must travel backward through the architecture of law and reason that produced it. In 2007, the Supreme Court ruled in Massachusetts v. EPA that greenhouse gases—carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and their chemical kindred—are air pollutants under the Clean Air Act, and that the EPA bore a solemn obligation to determine whether they endangered human life. Two years of exhaustive scientific review followed, drawing upon the accumulated wisdom of atmospheric physics, epidemiology, and earth science. The conclusion, reached in 2009, was not controversial among those who study the atmosphere for a living: the accumulation of heat-trapping gases posed a clear and measurable threat to the health and welfare of present and future generations. From this finding flowed every federal regulation on vehicle emissions, power plant pollution, and methane leakage. It was the keystone in an arch of protection—remove it, and the entire structure trembles toward collapse.
And so the keystone has been pulled. Administrator Zeldin, who last year described the campaign as “driving a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion,” presided over what he termed the largest deregulatory action in American history. One notes the word “religion” and pauses, for it reveals more than its speaker intended. To call science a religion is to confess that one has abandoned the discipline of evidence for the comforts of belief—belief, in this case, that the market requires no correction, that the atmosphere absorbs without consequence, and that the warnings of ten thousand researchers across a hundred nations amount to nothing more than an elaborate conspiracy of the credentialed. It is the language of a man who has mistaken his own refusal to look upward for the absence of the storm.
The repeal eliminates all greenhouse gas emissions standards for cars and trucks manufactured between 2012 and 2027 and beyond. It strips away the legal framework that compelled automakers toward cleaner vehicles. It flings wide the door to the broader dismantling of climate regulations on power plants, oil refineries, and industrial facilities. And it rests—this is the part that would be darkly comic were the stakes not existential—not upon new scientific discovery but upon a report from the Department of Energy’s Climate Working Group, a body whose findings were so riddled with errors that dozens of independent scientists published a joint rebuttal and whose creation a federal judge ruled violated public records laws. The group has since been disbanded. Its conclusions, rejected by the scientific community, now serve as the intellectual foundation for the most consequential environmental decision of the century. One thinks of a house built upon sand and wonders whether the architects noticed or simply chose not to care.
Meanwhile, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine—the most authoritative scientific institution in the United States—reviewed the original endangerment finding in September 2025 and concluded it was accurate, had stood the test of time, and was now reinforced by even stronger evidence. The panel observed that much of what was uncertain in 2009 has since been resolved with overwhelming clarity. The evidence linking human-caused greenhouse emissions to rising temperatures, intensifying storms, prolonged droughts, lethal heatwaves, and accelerating sea-level rise is, in the panel’s carefully measured language, beyond scientific dispute. This is not the hedged equivocation of bureaucrats protecting their grants. This is the settled verdict of a civilization’s most rigorous method of knowing. And it has been set aside like a letter one prefers not to read.
The atmospheric consequences will unfold with a patience that shames human politics. Roughly twenty percent of America’s heat-trapping emissions rise from the tailpipes of cars and light trucks—a ceaseless exhalation of carbon dioxide that, once released, lingers in the atmosphere for centuries, capturing solar radiation with the quiet persistence of a debt that compounds unseen. Methane, shorter-lived but eighty times more potent than carbon dioxide over its first twenty years aloft, thickens the thermal blanket further. Each molecule joins the billions already there, each incrementally raising the equilibrium temperature of a planet whose ice sheets and ocean currents were calibrated over millennia for conditions we are rapidly leaving behind. Without federal standards compelling cleaner vehicles, these emissions will rise. The carbon budget—that finite allowance of greenhouse gases humanity may emit while retaining some chance of limiting warming to internationally agreed thresholds—will be consumed faster, and the margins for future action narrowed with each passing month of inaction.
And the bodies will accumulate, though no one in the White House ceremony spoke of them. The Biden-era vehicle emissions standards now eliminated were projected to prevent up to 2,500 premature deaths annually by 2055, along with meaningful reductions in heart attacks and respiratory illness. Ground-level ozone—the choking, invisible smog that worsens as temperatures climb—aggravates asthma in children, destroys lung tissue in the elderly, and inflames cardiovascular disease across every demographic. The communities that bear these burdens most heavily are those that have always borne them: the poor, the marginalized, and those who live in the shadow of highways and downwind of refineries and who lack the resources to relocate when the air turns toxic. The American Lung Association and the American Public Health Association have announced their intention to sue, recognizing what the medical profession has long understood: climate pollution is a public health emergency that observes no partisan boundaries.
There is a particular species of cruelty in the administration’s insistence that this revocation serves ordinary Americans. The White House claims savings of $1.3 trillion and a reduction of roughly $2,400 in the price of a new vehicle. These figures arrive sealed within a chamber of deliberate omission, hermetically separated from the hundreds of billions in annual damages that climate-related disasters—floods, wildfires, droughts, infrastructure failures—already impose upon the American economy. Insurance markets in fire-prone and flood-prone regions are collapsing. Agricultural yields are declining where heat and drought exceed the tolerances that generations of farmers once took for granted. To calculate savings while refusing to count costs is not economics. It is a conjurer’s trick, performed with the gravity of statesmanship, and it asks the audience to applaud while the theater burns around them.
The global consequences radiate outward like concentric rings from a stone dropped into still water. The United States departed the Paris Agreement for a second time last month and is expected to withdraw entirely from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. With the endangerment finding revoked, America has not merely retreated from climate leadership—it has repudiated the scientific premises upon which international cooperation depends. The atmosphere, of course, recognizes no sovereignty. Carbon dioxide emitted from an American interstate highway warms the air above the Ganges Delta and bleaches the coral of the Great Barrier Reef with perfect democratic indifference. By dismantling its domestic regulatory architecture, the world’s largest historical emitter of greenhouse gases has declared itself exempt from the consequences of its own emissions—a moral position so untenable that one suspects even its architects do not believe it but merely find it profitable.
Legal challenges will come swiftly. California Governor Gavin Newsom has pledged immediate litigation. Multiple state attorneys general, environmental organizations, and public health associations are preparing suits. Former EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy, who served as the Biden White House’s climate adviser, has called the action reckless, observing that the agency would rather spend its time in court defending the fossil fuel industry than protecting Americans from pollution. Environmental law professor Ann Carlson of UCLA has warned that overturning the finding will raise more havoc than any other regulatory rollback the administration has attempted. The courts, which have uniformly upheld the endangerment finding since its inception—including a 2023 ruling by the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals—will now be asked to determine whether an agency may simply discard its own scientific conclusions because a new administration finds them ideologically displeasing.
But the atmosphere does not pause for litigation. It does not file amicus briefs or await judicial calendars. While lawyers prepare their arguments and judges schedule their hearings, the concentration of carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere continues its inexorable climb—past 425 parts per million now, a level not seen in over three million years of planetary history. Each day of regulatory absence adds to the cumulative burden. Each year of inaction forecloses options that might have remained open had the will existed to use them. Hermann Hesse once wrote that every person’s life is a journey toward themselves, but so too is every civilization’s trajectory a journey toward the truth of what it values. The revocation of the endangerment finding reveals, with painful clarity, what this administration values: the brief intoxication of deregulation over the long sobriety of stewardship, the quarterly profit over the generational inheritance, and the convenience of denial over the burden of knowledge. The sky, unpersuaded by any of it, goes on warming. And the question it poses—the question it has always posed—is not whether we will answer, but whether we will answer in time.