Trump is wiping out all climate regulation. Big Oil may regret it.

For decades, oil majors fought climate regulation. Now, they’re afraid Trump’s extreme rollbacks could leave them on the hook to pay for what they’ve done.

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Protesters rally in Colorado to support one of many lawsuits seeking accountability from the fossil fuel industry for damaging the climate. Photo by Helen H. Richardson/The Denver Post via Getty Images

The Trump administration is on the verge of stripping away the federal government’s power to regulate climate pollution—no matter how severe the consequences become.

On Thursday, the EPA is expected to rescind the endangerment finding, the federal government’s landmark conclusion that greenhouse gases endanger human life and therefore must be regulated under the Clean Air Act. The move would be one of the largest deregulatory actions in American history.

While environmental groups will undoubtedly sue, they’ll have their work cut out for them. If even one of the EPA’s many legal arguments hold up in court, those precedents could restrict future presidential administrations from trying to regulate planet-warming emissions. Fossil fuel companies, power plants, and other major emitters could effectively be free to pollute as much as they want—forever.

You might think that major oil companies would be thrilled about this. After all, the industry’s most powerful lobbying group, the American Petroleum Institute, coordinated a multi-industry campaign against the federal regulation of greenhouse gases beginning in the 1990s, tried to block the endangerment finding before EPA even finalized it in 2009, and then spent years attacking it in court.

But it turns out, API isn’t celebrating. Instead, the trade group—one of the most influential and well-organized lobbying forces in the world—is now hedging, backtracking, and sending mixed signals about whether it wants the endangerment finding rescinded.

The reason is simple: oil corporations have realized that repealing the endangerment finding could backfire, leaving them more vulnerable to accountability than ever before.

Big Oil’s legal shield is cracking

Over the past decade, the fossil fuel industry has faced a growing avalanche of lawsuits and state laws aimed at forcing them to pay for their role in driving climate chaos.

Specifically, dozens of active lawsuits now accuse big oil companies of deceiving the public about climate change while knowingly fueling it—and then sticking taxpayers with the bill for the damage. At the same time, states like Vermont and New York have passed climate “superfund” laws that force major fossil fuel companies to pay into state-run funds to help cover the costs of climate disasters.

These efforts have seriously rattled API and many of its corporate members, including ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell, and BP. At a recent Federalist Society event, West Virginia attorney general John McCuskey—one of the oil and gas industry’s staunchest allies—called them an “industry-destroying problem.”

“There will be no more oil industries, there will be no more coal industries, there will be no more natural gas industries,” he said. “If we lose one, we lose them all.”

But the oil industry has so far been successful in fighting most of these efforts, in part because of the endangerment finding. A critical part of their legal defense has been that, because the federal government already regulates greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Air Act, any claims under state law are preempted. Therefore, they say state and local lawsuits should be thrown out of court, and state laws should be struck down.

That defense is now being threatened by the Trump EPA’s actions. If the administration’s final rule says the Clean Air Act doesn’t give EPA authority to regulate greenhouse gases, then it will be considerably more difficult for Big Oil to contend state efforts are federally preempted.

API’s flip-flopping

This likely explains why, this past September, API came out against a key element of the Trump administration’s proposal to repeal the endangerment finding—even though API itself had pushed the same argument for more than a decade.

In a regulatory comment, the trade group said that it “believes EPA has authority to regulate GHGs under the CAA.” API similarly warned the EPA not to try overturning Massachusetts v. EPA—the landmark ruling that affirmed the EPA’s authority.

To be clear, API did not suddenly become a climate champion. The rest of its comment encouraged EPA to narrow and weaken the endangerment finding to the point where it would become effectively useless as a tool for reducing emissions, maintaining only the guise of regulation.

But it was a significant about-face for an organization that, before its members started feeling threatened by climate liability lawsuits, argued that EPA didn’t have the authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions at all under the Clean Air Act.

Then, just weeks ago, API reversed course yet again.

On January 12, only days after EPA sent its endangerment finding rule to the White House for review, API president Mike Sommers told reporters that the trade group supports the agency’s repeal of the endangerment finding for motor vehicles—but not for stationary sources, like oil and gas facilities.

In other words, the major oil companies want to have it both ways: they’d like to repeal climate regulations on cars so gas demand never declines, but preserve enough climate regulation so they can defend themselves in court.

But here’s the problem: the endangerment finding underpins regulations on cars and trucks and regulations on power plants and oil and gas facilities. The EPA didn’t do separate analyses. Greenhouse gases pose the same risks, no matter their source. If the endangerment finding falls for mobile sources, there’s no clear basis for preserving it for other sources.

It’s difficult to say whether API’s latest flip-flop represents its true preference or whether it’s an attempt to align itself with the Trump administration, which appears determined to wipe out the endangerment finding. The trade group may have wanted a scalpel, but it appears willing to accept a sledgehammer.

The next fight: blocking climate liability

If the Trump administration succeeds in wiping out the endangerment finding, the oil industry’s next priority is clear: protecting itself from climate liability.

That’s why API and its allies are now focused on other ways to do that.

This past October, House Republicans submitted an amicus brief asking the Supreme Court to block cities and states from suing fossil fuel companies for climate damages. In December, EPA removed a peer-reviewed model for estimating climate damages called the Framework for Evaluating Damages and Impacts, or FrEDI, from its website without explanation. This was exactly the sort of tool cities and states could use to inform climate laws.

And in January, Republican state lawmakers began a concerted legislative push to prohibit state climate lawsuits against the oil and gas industry.

All of this aligns with API’s 2026 agenda, which includes a top priority of stopping what it calls “extreme climate liability policy.”

Still, Pat Parenteau, an emeritus law professor at Vermont Law and Graduate School who has followed the climate lawsuits closely, believes that a case will eventually break through.

“The oil companies are undoubtedly accountable for the damage being done. And there will be a day of reckoning,” he said. “But only if the states that are bringing these cases have the wherewithal, the capacity, and the political determination to see them through, no matter how long it takes.”

Further reading

• Trump EPA to take its biggest swing yet against climate change rules. (Politico)

  EPA’s expected move has been hailed by conservatives who have long denied that human activity has played a large role in causing increasingly extreme weather or that climate change represents a global threat.

  
  “It’s a bright new world. It’s much brighter than it was a year ago,” said Myron Ebell, who ran EPA’s transition team for Trump’s first term and has been working to repeal the finding since the ink was still wet.

• Trump administration decision to deny the science of climate change puts communities at increased risk. (Appalachian Voices)

  “The people of Appalachia are all too familiar with the devastating effects of flooding and other natural disasters that have been made worse by a rapidly warming planet,” said North Carolina Program Manager Ridge Graham. “The EPA’s decision to abandon its responsibility to regulate greenhouse gases ignores the severe dangers our communities face and the economic benefits of responsibly preparing for a changing world.”

• The EPA is barreling toward a Supreme Court Showdown. (New York Times)

  “The goal is not just to rescind the endangerment finding, it’s to overturn Massachusetts v. E.P.A. and make sure this cannot come back, unless Congress decides to get involved,” said Steven J. Milloy, the founder of a website that has disputed the scientific consensus on climate change. “Anything else is not good enough.”

In other news…

• Climate change is erased from a manual for federal judges. (New York Times)

  In a new attack on the science of climate change, a federal agency has stripped a chapter on global warming from a manual written to help judges understand important scientific questions they may face in their courtrooms.
  

  The chapter was deleted after a group of Republican state attorneys general complained about it to the Federal Judicial Center, a government agency that provides resources to judges. In recent years, judges in the United States have had to contend with a widening array of cases related to climate change, putting jurists in the position of having to understand the complexities of the science and research behind its causes and effects.

• Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl show had a big message about Puerto Rico’s grid. (Canary Media)

  Bad Bunny highlights the ailing grid in his 2022 song ​“El Apagón” (“The Blackout”), which he sang yesterday from a sparking utility pole in a show seen by perhaps 135 million viewers.
  

  Despite billions of federal recovery dollars and post-hurricane repairs, Puerto Rico’s 3.2 million residents continue to endure widespread disruptions, electrical surges, and soaring electricity rates — even on storm-free days. Utility customers in Puerto Rico experienced an average of 27 hours of power grid interruptions not related to major events like hurricanes per year between 2021 and 2024. By contrast, people living on the U.S. mainland lacked power for an average of just two hours per year, according to federal data.
  

  Yet rather than invest in Puerto Rico’s recovery, the Trump administration is clawing back key federal funding meant to modernize and decarbonize the territory’s electricity system.