How EPA endangerment repeal could hit your wallet

The Trump administration repealed a key defense in the U.S. fight against climate change — and it will likely have far-reaching impacts on people’s finances, according to experts on the economic effects of global warming.

The Environmental Protection Agency on Thursday overturned the “endangerment finding,” a cornerstone of U.S. climate policy since the Obama era.

The finding underpins the federal government’s legal authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, which trap heat in the atmosphere and warm the planet.

Experts have said the change is the Trump administration’s most aggressive move yet to hobble U.S. climate policy.

Repealing the endangerment finding leaves the U.S. with fewer ways to curb emissions and increases Americans’ exposure to climate damages, Chris Field, director of the Woods Institute for the Environment at Stanford University, said in a September briefing.

President Donald Trump has called climate change a “con job” and a “hoax.” But scientists almost universally agree that climate change is real and mainly caused by humans via greenhouse gas emissions.

A warming climate will fuel more extreme weather and events like wildfires, floods, droughts and hurricanes, experts said.

These can have profound financial impacts for households, including higher costs for insurance, relocation, home repair, health care, food, and electricity to heat and cool homes, experts said. Workers may also see smaller paychecks due to missed work days, they said.

Weather-related disasters already cost the U.S. close to $150 billion a year, a sum expected to grow in the near term due to climate change, according to the U.S. government’s most recent National Climate Assessment, published in 2023.

“You can’t escape the basic physics of climate change,” said Andrew Rumbach, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute who co-leads the left-leaning think tank’s climate and communities practice.

The repeal of the endangerment finding will likely exacerbate the effects of climate change over the longer term, he said.

“It’s a very big deal,” Rumbach said. “It will have a huge drag” on people’s finances, he said.

The EPA endangerment finding has its roots in a 2007 Supreme Court case, Massachusetts v. EPA.

In that case, the Supreme Court ruled that greenhouse gases qualify as air pollutants under the Clean Air Act. Justices directed the EPA — which is required to set limits for damaging pollutants — to determine if greenhouse gases endanger public health or welfare.

In December 2009, the Obama administration issued the so-called endangerment finding: That six greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide and methane, in the atmosphere threaten the public health and welfare of current and future generations.

Since then, the EPA has regulated emissions from automobiles and other vehicles and power plants. Its revocation on Thursday would open the door to challenging those regulations.

EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said in a statement on Thursday that the repeal is the “single largest deregulatory action in U.S. history.”

The federal agency estimates the move will save Americans more than $1.3 trillion, by eliminating the endangerment finding and “all subsequent federal GHG emission standards for all vehicles and engines of model years 2012 to 2027 and beyond.”

The average person would save about $2,400 per vehicle, according to the EPA. The estimate includes the avoidance of costs tied to purchasing equipment for electric vehicles.

Transportation is the largest emitter of greenhouse gases, accounting for about 28% of the nation’s emissions in 2022, according to the most recent EPA data.

Those emissions come primarily from the burning of fossil fuels (like oil and gasoline) for cars, trucks, ships, trains, and planes, it said.

“Calling CO2 a pollutant and doing something about it is good for the climate,” said Gernot Wagner, a climate economist at Columbia Business School.

Without the endangerment finding, “emissions will go up, and that means more CO2 in the atmosphere, meaning more intense wildfires, storms, etc.,” he said. “That’s bad for the rest of us.”

“Now the big question is: What is the chance of this holding up in court?” he said.

Climate change is fueling more weather and climate disasters in the U.S. — and those disasters have grown more costly over time, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

From 1980 to 2023, the U.S. experienced nine disasters each year that caused more than $1 billion in damage apiece, according to NOAA data published in 2025. However, the frequency of costly disasters increased to an average of 23 per year over the five years from 2020 to 2024, NOAA found.

An American born in 2024 can expect to pay about $500,000 during their lifetime as a result of climate change’s financial impacts, according to a study from that same year by ICF, a consulting firm.

For example, climate change will increase the risk of property damage from floods and wildfires throughout the 21st century, the Congressional Budget Office wrote in a 2024 report.

“Property owners, mortgage lenders, insurance companies, and the federal government will bear losses due to floods and wildfires,” CBO wrote. “If those losses led to cascading failures of financial institutions, they would undermine the financial system.

Home insurers are raising rates to unaffordable levels for many consumers, and some insurers are abandoning certain markets altogether, experts said.

In Florida, for example, a state prone to hurricanes, the average annual homeowners insurance premium is close to $6,000, more than double the national average, according to a 2024 report by the Bipartisan Policy Center. Nationwide, homeowners insurance premiums rose 40% faster than inflation from 2017 to 2022, with climate risk a primary culprit, the report said.

Extreme weather can also impact household cash flow due to lost work days, experts said.

Wildfire smoke, for example, reduces earnings for workers in sectors like manufacturing, crop production, utilities, health care, real estate, administration and transportation, according to a 2022 study by economists at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the University of Oregon.

On average, workers’ foregone earnings totaled $125 billion a year between 2007 and 2019, the economists found.

Among other impacts, a higher concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere could also mean “more cases of asthma and heart disease linked to poor air quality, higher food prices from climate-stressed crops, and economic losses as U.S. companies fall behind in global clean-tech markets,” Stanford’s Woods Institute for the Environment wrote in an explainer about the endangerment finding.

In the shorter run, auto efficiency standards could fall as a result of the overturned endangerment finding, said Urban Institute’s Rumbach. Consumers might save money on a car purchase, to the extent automakers are able to produce cheaper vehicles, he said.

However, consumers may give back those savings over the vehicle’s lifetime, relative to a more-efficient car like an electric vehicle, said Rumbach. Researchers have found that certain consumers save money over the long term on EVs relative to traditional gas-powered cars due to lower fueling and maintenance costs, for example.