US president Donald Trump is continuing his attacks on climate regulation, with his latest focus on the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), responsible for setting national environmental standards in the US. He has moved to rescind the ‘endangerment finding’, the legal foundation underpinning key regulations on pollution, boasting “the greatest day of deregulation our nation has seen”.
The endangerment finding, issued under Barak Obama, formally concluded that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases threaten public health. It has been called the climate ‘Magna Carta’: its removal could unravel the entire edifice of US climate regulation, stripping the legal basis from rules limiting heat-trapping pollution from automobiles to power plants.
The move is expected to face immediate legal challenges, but Trump may be seeking to take the case up to the Supreme Court, hoping its conservative majority will uphold the repeal. If successful, the EPA would be severely restricted from enacting climate rules long after Trump leaves office.
The Trump administration frames this as an affordability issue. “This action will eliminate over $1.3 trillion of regulatory cost”, Trump said, promising average per-vehicle savings of more than $2,400. American carmakers had already begun shifting their portfolios back to combustion-engine vehicles in anticipation of the repeal, and electric vehicle (EV) sales in America began dropping in September 2025.
However, the rollback also imposes costs: clean vehicle standards have saved consumers trillions at the pump over the past decade, while the administration’s own analysis projects the repeal could increase fuel prices by 25 cents per gallon by 2035, potentially costing Americans up to $1.7 trillion more. This was before the oil price spike triggered by the Iran war. Three-quarters of registered American voters believe the government should regulate carbon dioxide as a pollutant.
Meanwhile, the economic damage to America’s auto industry by whipsawing policy changes is already visible. Stellantis announced a $26 billion write-down; Ford recorded $19.5 billion in charges after cancelling EV programmes; GM wrote down $6 billion in EV investments. In 2025 alone, companies cancelled or downsized $34.8 billion in clean energy projects, costing more than 15,000 jobs, with a further 450,000 at risk by 2035. This is unlikely to help Trump’s record levels of unpopularity.
So what lies behind Trump’s actions? In reality, Trump’s approach represents a tactical shift rather than a break with past practice. The Democratic administrations of Obama and Joe Biden presided over the fastest and largest growth of fossil fuel production capacity in history. Obama oversaw the biggest increase in US oil production on record, driven by shale extraction. The Democrats’ claim to be environmental champions was always qualified by this reality.
US greenhouse gas emissions were already heading in the wrong direction before Trump’s domestic policy changes took hold. Emissions rose in 2025, as the country burned more fossil fuels for heating and to power AI data centres. Trump’s ‘drill baby drill’ policy, the newly created National Energy Dominance Council and now the EPA moves are all aimed at increasing the ‘dirtiest’ forms of energy production, adding further upward pressure on emissions.
Biden did attempt to compete with China – which dominates the production of many forms of green technology globally – through his ‘Inflation Reduction Act’, unleashing huge subsidies. But Trump has given up on this approach, instead using US military power to try to secure energy supplies and block Chinese access to resources globally.
Worldwide EV sales in 2025 reached 20.7 million, nearly one in four vehicles sold. China produces over 70% of the world’s EVs. In China, more than half of new vehicles bought are electric. The EU has reached nearly 25% EV share; the US has stalled at around 10% and that share is now declining. China’s BYD has overtaken Tesla as the world’s biggest seller of electric vehicles, with annual sales of 2.25 million versus Tesla’s 1.64 million.
Protectionist measures from both Democrat and Republican administrations have largely blocked Chinese EV imports into the US market. As a result, about 68% of EVs sold in the US in 2025 were domestically produced. Trump’s EPA move, and his cancellation of subsidies of $7,500 dollars in tax credits per EV at the end of September last year, shows that he has given up on trying to compete with China on EV production.
However, China’s rapid expansion has created overcapacity. Its auto industry could theoretically produce more than 55 million vehicles annually, but currently uses less than half that capacity. Intense competition has triggered a price war among manufacturers, prompting government warnings about ‘involution’, competition so fierce that it undermines profitability and progress.
China’s energy build-out is staggering. It has more than double the electricity generating capacity of the US and in the first six months of 2025 installed more solar panels than Germany, France and Spain have added in their entire history combined. President Xi’s aims are to ensure energy security, limit dependence on fuel imports, and give competitive advantage to AI, robotics and advanced manufacturing, exactly the sectors where the US now faces power shortages. Elon Musk has warned that the US may soon produce more computer chips than it can power due to the vast data centre boom.
Chinese greenhouse gas emissions have continued to rise, though some point to a recent fall as a possible peak. China has a record of under-committing on environmental targets and then over-performing. Whether this pattern will repeat for emissions reductions remains uncertain. China retains elements of a planned economy that could, in theory, support long-term environmental goals. Yet the absence of democratic workers’ control – leading to bureaucratic distortions, the misallocation of resources, and corruption – and the pressures of a large market sector, do not allow the full potential of planning to be reached.
Green issues are still playing an unacknowledged role in US strategic thinking, despite Trump calling climate change a ‘hoax’. It is a paradox that Trump has been willing to undermine NATO through threats against Greenland and Canada, to secure access to materials needed to address a problem – global warming – that he says does not exist. It is doubly paradoxical that the US cites Russian and Chinese expansion into the Arctic as the reason for its actions, when that expansion is itself made possible by the melting of polar ice due to global warming.
National Security Advisor Mike Waltz was blunt: “This is about critical minerals; this is about natural resources. It’s oil and gas. It’s our national security”.
Trump’s policies reflect more than personal climate denial. They express a deeper shift within global capitalism. The era when the United States could afford long-term planning, invest in scientific research and promote international agreements has given way to a period of geopolitical rivalry and short-term economic pressure. Environmental protection becomes secondary to the struggle for markets, resources and technological dominance.
Different sections of the capitalist class promote competing strategies, from fossil fuel expansion to subsidised green industries, but none offer a coherent long-term solution to the climate crisis. As the Spanish author Miguel de Cervantes put it: “When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies?” The need for a socialist planned economy on a global scale is increasingly urgent.
Oscar Parry