By Kennedy Maize
Trump administration policies repealing previous U.S. initiatives designed to combat global warming and climate change, which the White House has billed as a benefit to society, will actually cost the nation dearly. 
That’s the finding of an upcoming study from Resources for the Future (RFF), a respected Washington economic and environmental non-profit think tank. RFF finds, “The federal government projects that a major regulatory repeal will benefit Americans. New independent modeling instead finds that the costs of repeal could outweigh benefits by about $1.5 trillion, even before considering air-quality damages.”
In February, on dubious grounds, Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency announced the repeal of the Obama’s administration’s 2009 EPA “endangerment finding” that has underpinned the government’s high-profile attempts to deal with a warming world, including the Biden administration’s 2022 $369 billion climate and tax package.
The EPA said in 2009 that it “finds that the current and projected concentrations of the six key well-mixed greenhouse gases—carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), nitrous oxide (N2O), hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), perfluorocarbons (PFCs), and sulfur hexafluoride (SF6)—in the atmosphere threaten the public health and welfare of current and future generations.”
Energy industry forces and climate change skeptics immediately began working to overturn the finding, led by Russell Vought, then head of the Heritage Foundation lobbying group and now director of Trump’s Office of Management and Budget.
The RFF analysis finds, “The rescission of the endangerment finding in February of this year by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) started a cascade of deregulatory actions that have dramatically changed the landscape of climate and air-pollution regulations. In September 2026, EPA repealed the 2024 standards limiting greenhouse gas emissions from power plants under Section 111(d) of the Clean Air Act and proposed the repeal of all remaining greenhouse gas emission requirements for power plants.
“EPA argues that the increase in greenhouse gas emissions due to this rollback will have a minimal impact on public health and welfare; as a result, EPA contends, these emissions do not warrant regulation by the agency, and the forgone climate benefits of the repeal can be ignored in EPA’s accompanying regulatory impact analyses.”
That’s intentionally deceptive, according to RFF analysts McKenna Peplinski, Ryan Hubble, and Kristen MacCormack. “Ignoring emissions of greenhouse gases and criteria air pollutants goes against decades of scientific peer review and best practice for benefit-cost analysis,” they write. “Because EPA does not account for the economic costs and benefits of carbon emissions or local air pollution, the agency’s reported cost savings do not reflect the true impact of the regulatory rollback.”
The RFF analysis uses the power sector model E4ST “to estimate how repealing the power plant standards affects the electricity generation mix, decisions over power plant investment and retirement, power-sector emissions, and system-level grid costs. We will quantify the health damages from increased air-pollutant emissions in a future blog post and in our final report.”
The RFF researchers acknowledge that the Trump climate rollback can save consumers money through lower electric bills: “Our modeling projects that the rollback would reduce total system costs incurred by electric power producers, which are ultimately passed on to consumers through electricity bills….
“These savings stem primarily from lower capital expenditures by power producers, as retaining paid-off coal capacity under the rollback scenario reduces the need for investment in new grid resources. Operational costs also fall, because retrofitted coal units (required by the power plant rules) have higher variable and fixed costs than unretrofitted coal units.”
According to the analysis, “These savings amount to a net present value of $221 billion in system savings (in 2024 dollars) between 2032 and 2050, discounted to 2026.”
But that’s not a full account of costs and benefits. The touted potential savings “are dramatically offset by the greenhouse gas damages that the rollback causes—we estimate these greenhouse gas damages to amount to nearly $1.7 trillion.” The net: a cost of $1.5 trillion.
Say the RFF analysts, “We arrive at this figure using the modeled change in carbon dioxide emissions from the rollback, the social cost of carbon, and a 2 percent discount rate consistent with the Office of Management and Budget’s 2023 guidelines.”
That figure doesn’t include potential “health damages from the widespread deterioration of air quality, which especially affect areas with higher unretrofitted coal-fired generation. We will provide estimates of these public health damages in an upcoming blog post and in our final report.”
The Quad Report, covering energy policy and politics