There are moments in politics that are symbolic. A nice speech. A handshake. A bill that sounds good but does nothing. And then there are moments where someone actually grabs the regulatory machine by the throat and rips out its beating heart on live television.
Thursday was the second kind.
Trump and EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin stood together and announced the termination of the Obama-era endangerment finding — the 2009 regulation that classified six greenhouse gases, including CO2, as threats to public health under the Clean Air Act. Gone. Every vehicle greenhouse gas emission standard that flowed from it. Gone. Every off-cycle credit that gave us those miserable stop-start engine features that make your car feel like it’s having a seizure at every red light. Gone.
Zeldin called it the single largest deregulatory action in U.S. history. And for once, that’s not hyperbole.
$1.3 Trillion
That’s the estimated cost savings. Not million. Not billion. Trillion. With a T. That’s what sixteen years of regulatory creep built on top of one bureaucratic “finding” was costing the American economy. Every fuel standard. Every emissions mandate. Every compliance requirement that trickled down from Washington into the price of your car, your electricity, and everything that gets shipped on a truck — which is everything.
The endangerment finding was never just about tailpipe emissions. It was a skeleton key. Once the EPA declared CO2 dangerous, they had justification to regulate anything that produces it. Cars. Power plants. Factories. Furnaces. If it burned fuel or exhaled carbon, the EPA had a claim on it. One ruling in 2009 gave an unelected agency the authority to reshape the entire American economy — and they used every inch of it.
Obama used it. Biden doubled down on it. They tightened vehicle standards to force automakers toward hybrids and EVs that consumers didn’t want and the industry has since retreated from. They squeezed power plants. They layered mandate on top of mandate until the regulatory stack was so tall that compliance departments needed their own compliance departments.
Trump looked at the stack and reached for the bottom block.
Death of the Stop-Start
Buried in the announcement is a detail that every driver in America will celebrate: the end of mandatory stop-start engine technology. If you’ve driven a car built in the last few years, you know the misery. You pull up to a stoplight, your engine dies. The light turns green, there’s a half-second delay while the car figures out you want to move, and the engine coughs back to life like it just woke up from a nap it didn’t ask for.
Nobody likes it. Not drivers. Not mechanics who get to replace the beefier starters and batteries these systems require. Not the people sitting behind you at the light while your car decides whether it feels like going. The only people who liked stop-start were regulators who needed fractions of a mile-per-gallon improvement to hit arbitrary emissions targets.
It existed because of the endangerment finding. Now it dies with it.
The Obama Legacy That Wasn’t
The endangerment finding was supposed to be Obama’s crown jewel on climate. The regulation that would outlast any president and keep the green agenda permanently embedded in federal law. And for sixteen years, it worked exactly as designed — an unassailable regulatory foundation that no Republican president had been willing to touch.
Trump touched it. He didn’t chip away at it. He didn’t issue a competing executive order. He terminated it. The foundation is gone, and every regulation that was built on top of it just lost its legal footing.
The climate lobby will sue. That’s as certain as sunrise. Environmental groups will file challenges in every friendly jurisdiction they can find. This will end up in court, probably multiple courts, and the legal battle will last years.
But here’s what matters right now. The regulatory burden is lifted. The standards are repealed. The cost savings start immediately. And the EPA’s ability to use a seventeen-year-old “finding” as a blank check for unlimited regulation is over.
The Contrast
Obama and Biden spent their administrations treating American energy like a problem to be managed — something dirty and dangerous that needed to be regulated into submission. They jacked up costs, killed domestic production, and pushed green fantasies that collapsed the moment reality showed up.
Trump sees energy as what it actually is: the foundation of everything. Every job. Every product. Every meal. Every mile driven. When energy is cheap and abundant, the economy grows. When it’s expensive and strangled by regulation, everything else gets more expensive too. That’s not ideology. That’s math.
Thursday’s announcement is the math finally winning.
And somewhere in America, a driver is sitting at a red light with their engine still running, and for the first time in years, it feels like the car is on their side.