From Tilak´s Substack

By Tilak Doshi

On Monday in Houston, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin stood alongside Energy Secretary Chris Wright and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum at a G20 ministerial meeting on energy abundance and signed what may be the single most consequential act of environmental deregulation in American history. The final rule, formally the “Partial Repeal of the Carbon Pollution Standards for Fossil Fuel-Fired Electric Generating Units”, eviscerates the Biden administration’s 2024 mandate requiring coal- and gas-fired power plants to capture 90% of their carbon dioxide emissions or shut their doors. A companion proposal goes further still, moving to rescind the EPA’s underlying claim to authority to regulate greenhouse gases from power plants under the Clean Air Act altogether. It is an attempt not merely to repeal a rule but to permanently dismantle the legal scaffolding beneath the entire punitive regulatory edifice inspired by the Church of Climate.

The reaction from the climate establishment was as predictable as it was shrill. The green rag Guardian announced that Trump’s EPA had stripped itself of regulating ability, gutting the Clean Air Act in “a gift to planet polluters”. Environmental groups vowed immediate litigation, and the Clean Air Task Force branded the repeal unlawful. Sceptics will recognise the pattern by now: any retreat from Net Zero orthodoxy is met not with argument but with moral panic dressed up as science.

Undoing a fraudulent finding

To understand why Monday’s action matters so much, one has to trace the regulatory lineage back nearly two decades. In 2007, the US Supreme Court in Massachusetts v EPA ruled that greenhouse gases could, in principle, be treated as air pollutants under the Clean Air Act. The Obama EPA seized on that narrow opening in 2009 to issue what became known as the Endangerment Finding, the proposition that greenhouse gas emissions from new motor vehicles endanger public health and welfare. That single administrative finding, resting on computer models rather than observed harm, became the legal mechanism through which the entire American climate-regulatory apparatus was subsequently built: vehicle mileage mandates, methane restrictions on oil and gas wells, and, in 2024, the power-plant carbon-capture rule that is now being repealed.

Zeldin’s EPA had already struck at that foundation earlier this year, when it finalised the rescission of the 2009 Endangerment Finding itself in February, arguing that the agency lacks statutory authority under Section 202(a) of the Clean Air Act to regulate emissions on the basis of an imagined ‘climate crisis’ rather than demonstrable local harm. Power plants, the second-largest source of America’s greenhouse gas emissions after transportation, were always the next logical target. The courts’ “major questions doctrine”, which holds that agencies need clear congressional authorisation before regulating matters of major economic significance, cuts sharply against the sweeping powers the Obama and Biden EPAs assumed for themselves.

Monday’s rule is designed with that doctrine in mind, and the accompanying proposal is engineered so that no future administration can simply reinstate the old regime by regulatory fiat. Given that the entire edifice was erected on shaky legal and scientific foundations to begin with, its removal is wholly justified.

The scale of what is underway should not be understated. The power-plant rule is only one entry in a list of dozens of environmental regulations Zeldin targeted when he announced what his agency called the most consequential day of deregulation in American history back in early 2025: vehicle emissions standards, the ‘good neighbour’ rule governing cross-state pollution, environmental-justice offices and mercury restrictions have all been in his sights. Zeldin has been careful to stress that the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards themselves remain. The green lobby has been happy to blur this distinction in its rush to cast every rollback as an assault on breathable air. The distinction matters. It is a repeal of climate regulation built on a contested finding about global atmospheric effects, not a repeal of the conventional pollution controls for particulates, sulphur dioxide and mercury that the Clean Air Act was originally written to address and that have genuinely cleaned America’s air over half a century.

CO2: the gas of life, not a pollutant

What the hysteria over Monday’s announcement obscures is an elementary scientific point that carbon dioxide is not a pollutant. It is a trace gas, present in the atmosphere at a small fraction of one percent, and it is essential to photosynthesis, the biochemical process on which virtually all plant, and by extension all life on Earth depends. Dr Will Happer, the Princeton physicist and CO2 Coalition co-founder, has for years called carbon dioxide the gas of life, not as rhetorical flourish but as biochemical fact: plants cannot grow without it. Satellite records show the planet has measurably greened as CO₂ concentrations have risen and crop yields have benefited accordingly.

The Endangerment Finding inverted this reality, transforming a trace gas integral to agricultural productivity into an object of state-sanctioned hostility. It asked Americans to believe that the same molecule enriching greenhouses to boost tomato yields is simultaneously an existential threat requiring the closure of the power plants that keep their lights on. The absurdity was never really about atmospheric physics. It is about political power, specifically the power to reorganise the American economy around the preferences of a green priesthood that has rarely had to answer for the cost of its prescriptions in higher electricity bills, deindustrialisation and diminished energy security. Zeldin’s EPA estimates that eliminating the power-plant carbon rule alone will remove more than $300 billion in compliance costs. That is the agency’s own figure, not an independent audit, and it deserves the same scrutiny any regulatory-impact estimate does. But even a fraction of that sum, redirected from compliance costs to reliable power generation, is a fraction worth having.

It is worth dwelling on the numbers that the climate alarmists prefer not to mention. Atmospheric carbon dioxide has risen from roughly 280 parts per million before the Industrial Revolution to something over 400 parts per million today, an increase that sounds dramatic until one recalls, as CO₂ Coalition scientists routinely point out, that concentrations were several multiples higher for most of the planet’s geological history, when life was in no way endangered by it. The CO₂ Coalition, of which more than 80 scientists and researchers are members, has argued for years that treating a two-hundredths-of-one-percent increase in a trace gas as the central threat to human civilisation inverts the actual risk ledger: energy poverty, not energy abundance, is what shortens lives and stunts economies. That is not a fringe position but reflects elementary plant physiology better than the vilification campaign the Obama and Biden EPAs built their anti-fossil fuels regulatory onslaught upon.

Houston and the energy counter-revolution

That Zeldin chose to make the announcement in Houston, at a G20 ministerial gathering explicitly billed around the theme of energy abundance, was no accident. It is the latest instalment in the broader Trump energy counter-revolution I have chronicled in these pages since the President’s inauguration. Delegations from China, India, Japan and Germany, alongside major oil producers, gathered in the same rooms where Zeldin, with Chris Wright and Doug Burgum, made their case that reliable, affordable energy, not emissions targets set by unelected bureaucrats, should be the organising principle of energy policy.

The announcement landed even as a war-disrupted oil market has pushed fuel prices higher across the country, a reminder that energy abundance and energy security are not abstractions but kitchen-table concerns for ordinary households. Surging electricity demand from data centres, artificial intelligence infrastructure and advanced manufacturing has made the reliability case for coal- and gas-fired baseload power more urgent, not less. This was a point industry groups were quick to make in welcoming Monday’s repeal as protection for grid reliability at precisely the moment America can least afford to lose it.

The Houston meeting’s guest list underscores just how far the old climate consensus has frayed as a diplomatic project. The talks brought together not only China, India, Japan and Germany but also Saudi Arabia, Canada and, notably, Russian officials attending a G20 energy forum for the first time since the invasion of Ukraine. A Venezuelan delegation was also invited amid Washington’s newly expanded stake in that country’s oil reserves. Whatever one makes of the geopolitics, the symbolism is unmistakable: the world’s major economies, energy producers and consumers alike are gathering under an American Presidency that has explicitly reframed the global energy conversation away from emissions targets and toward supply reliability and low cost. It is the same reorientation when Trump first returned to office promising an “energy dominance” agenda that would find enthusiastic support well beyond America’s shores among governments no longer willing to subordinate their energy security to the Brussels and Davos-style globalist climate agenda.

None of this will stop the green ideologues from fighting a rear-guard action in the courts, and it would be naïve to expect otherwise. But the wider context is instructive. Despite the IPCC’s quiet retirement of its most extreme warming RCP8.5 scenario, the climate establishment has refused to acknowledge the collapse of its own modelling premises. Rather than reassess, it doubles down, through litigation, through international bodies, through central-bank mandates dressed up as prudential risk management. Confronted with an EPA that has simply followed the statute and the underlying physics and economics of reliable energy supply, critics reach not for a rebuttal of the science but for the courts and the language of moral urgency.

Expect, too, the familiar coalition of blue-state attorneys general and legacy environmental groups to pursue litigation that has accompanied nearly every Trump-era rollback since the February rescission of the Endangerment Finding itself. Several states announced plans to sue within hours of the announcement. Some of that litigation may well succeed at the margins. The American legal system gives courts ample room to quibble over procedure even when the underlying policy judgment is sound. The argument that a trace atmospheric gas essential to plant life poses imminent danger to human life and justifies the reorganising of the entire American power grid rests more on speculative modelled projections than on measured harm.

A long-overdue correction

What Monday’s action represents, then, is not simply a rollback but a long-overdue correction. It is a recognition, 17 years late, that carbon dioxide was never the pollutant the 2009 Endangerment Finding pretended it to be. An economy built on affordable, reliable fossil-fuelled power is not a problem to be regulated away but the foundation on which American prosperity and the world’s energy security still rest. The gas of life has, for now, won a favourable hearing in Washington. Whether that verdict survives the inevitable litigation by Leftist-Democrat interests is a question for the courts. That it was ever seriously in doubt is a question for historians of the climate industrial complex that demonises as a poison a trace gas essential to life on Earth.

This article was first published in the Daily Sceptic https://dailysceptic.org/2026/09/18/trumps-epa-ends-americas-war-on-co2/

Dr Tilak K. Doshi is the Daily Sceptic‘s Energy Editor. He is an economist, a member of the CO₂ Coalition and a former contributor to Forbes. Follow him on Substack and X.