Or: How To Dismantle 50 Years Of Environmental Protection While Nobody Is Looking At Iran

While you were watching the Iran war, something else happened.

On February 12, 2026, President Trump stood in the Roosevelt Room with EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin and announced what the White House called “the single largest deregulatory action in American history.” Zeldin, who had previously promised to drive “a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion,” was there to formalize it.

The Trump administration rescinded the 2009 Endangerment Finding, the central scientific and legal determination that greenhouse gases threaten public health and welfare. The finding is the legal foundation for the EPA’s authority to regulate carbon dioxide from power plants, methane from oil and gas operations, and tailpipe emissions from every vehicle on every road in the United States.

Without it, the EPA cannot regulate greenhouse gases. Not now. Not under any future administration, unless Congress acts or the courts intervene. This was not a rollback. It was an attempt at a permanent removal.

The past three years were the three hottest years humans have ever recorded. The past 11 years have been the 11 warmest on record. The decision came in the wake of deadly flooding in Texas, catastrophic wildfires in Los Angeles, and record heat waves hitting every summer.

Trump called climate change a “con job.” Zeldin called it a “religion.” The EPA’s press release described climate scientists as “zealots.”

This is the federal government’s official position on the most consequential environmental question of the century.

What the Endangerment Finding Was

In 2009, the EPA determined that six greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide and methane, could be regulated under the Clean Air Act because they endanger public health and welfare. This was not a novel or radical finding. It came two years after a Supreme Court ruling that the EPA had the authority to make exactly that determination. It was the legal mechanism that allowed the federal government to set vehicle emissions standards, limit pollution from power plants, and require major industrial facilities to report their greenhouse gas output.

A former top Biden EPA official described the repeal plainly: “Their definition of winning has been and will be when they take final action and defend their action in the courts, to permanently remove EPA’s Clean Air Act authority to regulate greenhouse gases. If upheld in court, no future EPA will be able to regulate carbon dioxide emissions.”

This is the goal. Not regulatory relief. Permanent removal. A future Democratic administration could not restore it without either new legislation or a successful court challenge that could take years to resolve.

The US transportation sector is the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the country at 30 percent, and also the fastest growing sector. The EPA did not publicly release its annual greenhouse gas emissions inventory in 2025. The data had to be obtained by the Environmental Defense Fund through a Freedom of Information Act request.

The government stopped publishing its own emissions data and then eliminated the legal basis for acting on that data. These two things happened in sequence and are not unrelated.

The Scientists They Fired

The Endangerment Finding was not the only thing that happened.

In January 2026, the Trump administration formally announced the US government would no longer participate in the IPCC or the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. The administration also dissolved the US Global Change Research Program, which coordinates federal climate research and produces the National Climate Assessment. In April 2025, the administration fired all USGCRP support staff, dismissed approximately 400 authors working on the Sixth National Climate Assessment, turned off the USGCRP website, and removed the previous quarter-century of National Climate Assessments from the internet.

Twenty-five years of climate assessments. Removed from the internet.

In February 2025, 880 NOAA employees were terminated in a single day, over 7 percent of the agency’s total staff. Among those let go were radar specialists, Hurricane Hunter crew members who fly aircraft into storms to help forecasters make accurate predictions, and scientists who had dedicated decades to the work. One terminated employee had been a forecaster for El Nino and La Nina for a decade. He published his final blog post for the service the day he was fired.

NOAA’s $6.6 billion annual budget represents just 0.097 percent of what Washington spent in fiscal year 2024. Eliminate the agency’s entire 13,000 person staff and you have cut 0.43 percent of the federal workforce. In 2024 alone, the US experienced 27 weather and climate disaster events each with losses exceeding $1 billion. Climate and weather disasters cost the US $115 billion in 2025.

The math is not complicated. The agency that predicts and tracks the disasters costs less than one tenth of one percent of the federal budget. The disasters themselves cost $115 billion last year. DOGE eliminated it anyway.

What Happened in Texas

This is the part that should make you angry enough to put down whatever you are eating.

In July 2025, catastrophic flooding killed more than 100 people across six Central Texas counties. The National Weather Service had been warning about the rains for days. The warnings were accurate. People died anyway.

The NWS forecasting office covering the affected area had a vacant warning coordination meteorologist position, a role responsible for working with emergency managers and the public to ensure people know what to do when a disaster strikes. The person who had held that role for decades was among hundreds of NWS employees who accepted early retirement after the DOGE cuts, leaving at the end of April. The position had not been filled.

The position was vacant because the administration eliminated the staff. The staff was eliminated to save money. The money saved was a rounding error in the federal budget. The people are still dead.

Two days after the flood, the Trump administration released a memo stating that no federal agencies should be filling recently vacated positions.

The Numbers They Don’t Want You To See

The administration’s proposed budget cut geosciences funding at NSF by more than 40 percent. Ocean observations were cut by about 80 percent. Projects explicitly related to global change research were cut by 97 percent. At NASA, earth science funding was cut by about half. At NOAA, it eliminated the entire Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research. At the Department of Energy, it cut the Biological and Environmental Research program by about 60 percent.

97 percent. That is not a trim. That is not finding efficiencies. That is elimination with a number attached to make it sound like math.

One environmental attorney described the approach this way: “What they came in with wasn’t a road map. It was a wrecking ball. They got a lot done, but what they got done was taking stuff down, breaking stuff.”

The administration’s stated justification is cost savings and regulatory relief. The EPA’s own press release claims the repeal of the Endangerment Finding will save Americans $1.3 trillion and $2,400 per vehicle. These numbers are projections based on avoided compliance costs. They do not include the cost of the floods, fires, droughts, and heat waves that the regulations were designed to reduce. Those costs are paid by different people, in different budget lines, after different news cycles, and are therefore not counted.

This is how the math works when you are trying to make the math work.

The Part Nobody Is Writing About

Last year was the first year the world crossed 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming above pre-industrial levels, the threshold the Paris Climate Accord identified as the point beyond which the consequences become significantly harder to reverse.

The response of the United States government to crossing that threshold was to eliminate the legal basis for regulating the emissions causing it, fire the scientists tracking it, remove 25 years of assessments documenting it from the public internet, withdraw from the international bodies coordinating the global response to it, and call anyone who raised concerns about it a zealot.

We are currently fighting a war in Iran partly because instability in the Middle East is partly connected to water scarcity and resource competition that climate change is accelerating. The war has closed the Strait of Hormuz, spiked oil prices past $100 a barrel, and is pushing recession odds to 35 percent. The administration’s response to $100 oil is to remove the regulations that were designed to reduce dependence on the fossil fuels that produce the oil economy that makes the Middle East strategically important enough to go to war over.

These things are connected. The people in charge have decided they are not.

EPA Administrator Zeldin called the Endangerment Finding “the Holy Grail of the climate change religion” when he announced his intention to repeal it.

The last three years were the hottest ever recorded. The Texas flood killed over 100 people. The warning meteorologist position was vacant. The fires in Los Angeles destroyed thousands of homes.

The dagger is in the heart of the climate change religion.

The climate did not notice.

George Wicks writes the only column at the Post Meridiem Post. He does not believe climate change is a religion. He believes it is a bill that is coming due and that we have just fired the accountants.

Photo by Nikoli Afina via Unsplash