‘Carbon dioxide, which is required for life on earth and also happens to result from every single bit of human and animal activity on the planet, is not a pollutant and never was.’
SCHAUMBURG, IL (February 10, 2026) – President Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency this week will repeal an Obama-era rule called the “Endangerment Finding,” which categorized carbon dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gases as a threat to public health. This move would remove the legal framework for the EPA’s climate rules, which allowed the federal government to impose ever-increasing regulations on automobiles, appliances, and power plant emissions.
EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said the new rule would amount “to the largest act of deregulation in the history of the United States.”
The following statements from energy and environment experts at The Heartland Institute may be used for attribution. For more information or to schedule an interview, please contact Executive Vice President and Director of Communications Jim Lakely at [email protected] or call/text 312-731-9364.
The Heartland Institute is a national free market think tank that The Economist magazine called “the world’s most prominent think-tank promoting skepticism about man-made climate change.”
Heartland has organized 15 International Conferences on Climate Change and will host its 16th conference on April 8-9 in Washington, DC. Heartland also published the 3,000-page Climate Change Reconsidered series of volumes by the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change.
“President Trump is demonstrating remarkable vision and leadership repealing the Endangerment Finding. CO2 is absolutely necessary for all life on Earth, and Earth is presently starved of atmospheric CO2. The Obama administration’s determination that CO2 endangered human health and welfare was scientifically flawed and blatant political pandering.”
James Taylor
President
The Heartland Institute
[email protected]
312/377-4000
“The repeal of the Endangerment Finding was long overdue because the EPA’s determination that carbon dioxide is a pollutant that endangered human health and welfare was never justified.
“As a matter of law, the Clean Air Act never countenanced the regulation of CO2. It wasn’t in the letter of the law. CO2 is a naturally occurring gas critical to life on Earth, a non-toxic output of industrial and commercial activities fundamental to the U.S. economy, and a gas emitted every time anyone exhales. If Congress wanted the government to regulate CO2, they should have specifically directed the EPA the ability to do so. Indeed, Congress has debated doing so for decades and has consistently failed to authorize it.
“Importantly, as a matter of science, there is no evidence, by which I mean data, that CO2, at any foreseeable level, is a direct threat to human health or welfare. Some claim that CO2 is a threat as an indirect driver of ‘dangerous’ climate change. But those dangerous indirect effects are not in evidence in the real world, but rather only exist in theory and in flawed climate models that have for more than 30 years consistently gotten their basic metric of temperature rise wrong. As temperatures have risen modestly, natural disasters haven’t worsened, life spans and economic growth have increased, deaths from extreme weather and temperatures have fallen, and crop production and yields have increased as the Earth has generally greened. There is no existential threat of climate change and thus the Endangerment Finding is not scientifically justified.
“The Trump administration should be applauded for following the law and the science in rescinding the job-killing and choice-robbing Endangerment Finding. It was never anything more than a lever of control over the economy and people’s lives imposed by elites and their bureaucrat lackeys in their quest to establish a new two-tiered feudal age of economic royalty and those peasants dependent for their continued existence on them.”
H. Sterling Burnett, Ph.D.
Director
Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy
The Heartland Institute
[email protected]
“The repeal of the EPA’s 2009 Endangerment Finding is warranted because the EPA’s own internal record shows it was politically predetermined, not scientifically derived. Internal EPA emails reveal that Obama-era officials called the finding a ‘decision ready to go’ within weeks of taking office, treating endangerment as a settled conclusion before any meaningful review occurred. Public comment and scientific evaluation were reduced to formalities, while dissenting analysis was ignored or suppressed. That is not objective science, it is a rigged regulatory process.
“Because the Endangerment Finding became the legal foundation for sweeping climate regulations, its illegitimacy cannot be brushed aside. Federal agencies are required to keep an open mind and follow the evidence wherever it leads. The EPA did the opposite. Repealing this finding is not an attack on science, but a necessary correction to restore due process, transparency, and credibility to environmental policymaking.”
Anthony Watts
Senior Fellow for Environment and Climate
The Heartland Institute
[email protected]
“It is difficult to list all the ways the Endangerment Finding has harmed America and held our economy and innovation back. The determination that carbon dioxide was a dangerous pollutant that needed obsessive regulation has been a key annihilator of our electrical grid’s stability. It impacted the affordability and even design of cars and trucks, the reliability of household appliances, the cost of airline tickets, and led to the promotion of countless scams and schemes like the carbon credit system and cap-and-trade, which accomplish nothing but redistributing wealth from average Americans to the elites and organizations that can best leverage them.
“Carbon dioxide, which is required for life on Earth and happens to result from every single bit of human and animal activity on the planet, is not a pollutant and never was.
“Although it might not be obvious at first glance, the Trump administration getting rid of the Endangerment Finding is something that will have long term positive impacts on American life well into the future.”
Linnea Lueken
Research Fellow
Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy
The Heartland Institute
[email protected]
312/377-4000
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H. Sterling Burnett, Ph.D., is the Director of the Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy and the managing editor of Environment & Climate News.
Anthony Watts is a senior fellow for environment and climate at The Heartland Institute.
Linnea Lueken is a Research Fellow with the Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy.
