Nathan Gardels is the editor-in-chief of Noema Magazine. He is also the co-founder of and a senior adviser to the Berggruen Institute.
Last week, the Trump administration’s Environmental Protection Agency rescinded a long-standing “endangerment” finding that determined greenhouse gas emissions were harmful to public health by accumulating in the biosphere and warming the planet.
Former California Gov. Jerry Brown, who put in place many of the state’s regulations to curb emissions, warned in a recent conversation that such a move constitutes a fundamental assault on all progress so far. “If CO2 is redefined as a non-pollutant,” he told me, “then there would be no basis for the whole regime of carbon emission regulation, whether from cars, factories, coal plants, oil refineries or anything else. That would all go out the window.”
The danger of climate disarmament is obvious.
Unlike a supine Congress or weaker nations with an asymmetrical trade relationship with the U.S., the climate will not bend to President Trump’s will to power. Declaring climate change a hoax won’t make it go away. Liberating the spew of emissions from further control will gravely compound the level of pollutants already remaining in the atmosphere from the long tail of industrial exhaust in the century before any regulation.
Even given all the efforts to stem the damage up to this point, the planet is on track to surpass the critical threshold of a 1.5 degrees Celsius increase in global temperatures, unleashing a cascade of calamities from intense wildfires and extreme storms to alternating cycles of drought and deluge.
What comes to mind by analogy is the criminal negligence of a parent who leaves an infant locked in the car on a hot day with the windows rolled up and then goes shopping.
Thermodynamic Disadvantage
But this is also a foolish move for the America First agenda because it would put the U.S. at a thermodynamic disadvantage relative to its main competitor, China, by removing incentives to transition to electric vehicles and to an industry powered by the ever-more-affordable renewable energy economy of the future.
As Bentley Allan wrote in Noema, “Green technologies such as solar panels, wind turbines and electric vehicles have major thermodynamic advantages over fossil fuels, the drilling, extraction, refining and transportation of which result in expensive energy losses at every distribution and conversion point. Sunlight and wind, on the other hand, produce power with little ongoing cost and are available nearly everywhere. And manufacturing these technologies is scalable and repeatable, which means that producers can learn and improve iteratively.
“Clean technologies aren’t just better for the environment — they’re increasingly more affordable and accessible in the long run, giving more countries a chance to achieve energy security and geopolitical autonomy.”
China has gotten the message and acted on it with a “whole dragon” strategy. In 2025, China’s renewable energy sector achieved a significant milestone, with clean power capacity (including hydro, wind, and solar) exceeding that of fossil fuels for the first time. Combined renewables and nuclear power generation fueled over 80% of 2024’s electricity demand growth.
The growing abundance of renewable energy in China will also give it a significant advantage in the AI race, which ultimately depends on the capacity to meet the vast power demands of data centers without depleting resources and driving up consumer costs.
The Deregulation Delusion
Announcing the cancellation of the endangerment finding, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin crowed, “I am proud to deliver the single largest deregulatory action in U.S. history.” Like others in the Trump administration, he has long argued that regulation has stymied economic growth and innovation while dismissing any evidence of energy affordability for industries and consumers at scale, amply demonstrated in China and elsewhere.
The reality is the opposite. It was California’s regulatory regime, so despised by the administration, that catapulted Trump-aligned Tesla into the $1.5 trillion company it is today. Without the state’s emission control standards that created the market for EVs and the subsidies it provided, Tesla would never have gotten off the ground. It would not be in a position today to compete with rivals like China’s BYD, which in 2025 surpassed the American company in global sales.
It is with this trajectory of China’s growing dominance in mind that California Gov. Gavin Newsom said last week at the Munich Security Conference that the EPA repeal of the endangerment finding is “a death sentence for the American auto industry” because it removes the incentive for innovation in a globally competitive marketplace.
Thanks to the efforts of successive California governors over recent decades, the state is positioned on the right side of the thermodynamic divide.
Greenhouse gas emissions in California have dropped 21% since 2000 — even as the state’s GDP increased 81% over the same period, making it the world’s fourth largest economy.
By 2023, the state was powered by two-thirds clean energy, making it the world’s largest economy to achieve this level. California has also run on 100% clean electricity for at least part of the day almost every day last year.
California has the largest installed battery capacity of any jurisdiction other than China. Since 2019, battery storage has surged to nearly 17,000 megawatts — a 2,100%+ increase — and over 30,000 megawatts of new resources have been added to the electric grid. California now has 33% of the storage capacity estimated to be needed by 2045 to reach 100% clean electricity.
The tragedy of the moment is that the climate cancel culture that has taken hold in Washington comes just as decades of investment in renewable energy resources and infrastructure have reached sufficient capacity at scale to overtake the cost-efficiency of the long-embedded fossil- fuel economy. The ideologically driven effort to unwind and crush the green transition is occurring just as it is on the very cusp of materializing.
It is the energy dinosaurs, not what U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio calls “the climate cult,” that are stranding America on the wrong side of history as the rest of the world moves on.
