EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said today he's issuing draft plans to overturn the agency's 2009 scientific finding that greenhouse gases threaten human health and welfare — a move guaranteed to spark litigation.

Why it matters: It's President Trump's most direct effort to rip out climate regulations root and branch — and make it harder for a successor to impose new ones.

• The "endangerment finding" provides a key legal underpinning for regulating heat-trapping gases from cars, power plants and more under the Clean Air Act.

Driving the news: "This has been referred to as basically driving a dagger into the heart of the climate change religion," Zeldin said on Ruthless, the popular conservative podcast where he announced the plan.

• EPA first signaled in March that it would attempt to overturn the decision.

Catch up quick: EPA issued the finding in response to a landmark 2007 Supreme Court decision, Massachusetts v. EPA, which held that greenhouse gases are pollutants under the Clean Air Act.

• The ruling led then-President Obama in 2009 to issue an order allowing EPA to establish emissions standards for sources shown to reasonably affect health and welfare.
• Zeldin has said the decision stipulated that EPA was authorized — but not obligated — to regulate greenhouse gases.

The big picture: Researchers and environmentalists have warned ahead of the proposal that it conflicts with the scientific consensus on the unfolding harms from climate change.

• "It is callous, dangerous and a breach of our government's responsibility to protect the American people from this devastating pollution," the Environmental Defense Fund said ahead of the long-expected plan.
• And Dan Becker of the Center for Biological Diversity said in a statement today: "By revoking this key scientific finding Trump is putting fealty to Big Oil over sound science and people's health."

What we're watching: Specifics. The formal proposal is slated to land later today.

State of play: Zeldin argued that he's in favor of less pollution, and cast emissions rules as a distraction, saying "this is an economic issue."

• "We want clean air, land and water. Conservatives love the environment, want to be good stewards of the environment," he said.
• But he alleged there are people who want to "bankrupt the country" in the name of battling climate change.

Friction point: Zeldin said the agency welcomes a battle over what he called faulty conclusions about climate harms. The EPA administrator would make the final determination after a public comment period.

• "We're going to go out to public comment. We're not afraid of allowing the public to weigh in," Zeldin said.

What's next: Certain legal battles if and when EPA finalizes the draft proposal.

• Opponents of EPA's greenhouse gas regulations "might be able to fast-track their elimination by bringing lawsuits alleging that — without an underlying endangerment finding — the rules are arbitrary and capricious," ClearView Energy Partners said earlier this year.

There's skepticism to spare that the EU can meet its pledge of a massive surge in U.S. energy imports beyond levels that have already jumped in recent years.

Why it matters: Energy is part of the new U.S.-EU trade deal, with the bloc pledging $750 billion of purchases over three years, or $250B per year.

Friction point: "Does it make sense? No," writes Anne-Sophie Corbeau of Columbia's energy think tank via LinkedIn.

• The number is simply "not realistic," Mizuho Securities USA analyst Robert Yawger said in a note.
• "You'd essentially have to divert all energy trade. That's just not possible," ING's Warren Patterson tells the WSJ.
• And remember that private companies are largely in control of purchase decisions.

The intrigue: Details remain sparse about what counts toward the $750B, including goods beyond commodities like oil and gas.

• EU officials see the $750B applying to nuclear tech purchases, and, per Bloomberg, that includes small modular reactors.

State of play: The EU imported roughly $435B in energy commodities from all sellers combined last year, with oil as the biggest share, followed by pipelined gas, LNG, and coal, Corbeau writes.

• About $89B came from the U.S., she notes.
• The U.S. already provides half of the EU's LNG, around 15% of its oil imports (including products) and around a third of its coal imports, per EU stats.

The bottom line: There's indeed room to further boost U.S. exports, especially as more LNG projects come onstream. And if commodity prices climb, that ups the dollar figure too.

• But the totals in the U.S.-EU pact look like quite a reach.
• Asked about criticism that the number isn't realistic, a White House official told Axios that it's what the EU agreed to, adding: "The president reserves the right to revisit tariff rates if countries renege on their commitments."

The U.S. wind sector is seeing a rebound for the moment, but big problems loom, per new data and industry analysis of Trump 2.0 policies.

Why it matters: Wind is the country's largest source of renewable electricity, providing roughly 10% of U.S. power in 2023.

• Along with EVs, it's the tech that President Trump most dislikes — and that's filtering into agency decision-making.

Driving the news: The U.S. added 2.1 gigawatts of new wind capacity in the first quarter of 2025, a significant increase from Q1 2024, per Wood Mackenzie and the American Clean Power Association.

• Their latest report sees 8.1 GW of new capacity in 2025, including repowering of projects (a small slice of the total).
• That's a roughly 56% rise from last year but well below 2020-2022 levels, and additions will average about 9 GW over the next five years, they project.

Threat level: One sign of headwinds is that new turbine orders plummeted 50% in the first half of 2025 compared to last year.

• Recent and emerging hurdles like tariffs could further cloud the outlook, even as developers move fast to capture incentives.
• One is Trump's July 7 directive to the Treasury Department to take a hard line on the new budget law's phaseout of solar and wind credits.

More recently, the Interior Department started requiring new layers of review for dozens of regulatory steps and filings for wind and solar projects, which isn't modeled in the latest ACP and Wood Mackenzie outlook.

• Interior said it's "ending preferential treatment for unreliable, subsidy-dependent wind and solar energy."

Friction point: A separate industry analysis finds that the new Interior policy will affect projects far beyond federal lands, which the agency directly regulates but form a small share of the country's renewables portfolio.

• The analysis — viewed by Axios — finds that 27 of the nearly 70 actions subject to more review "potentially impact projects on private lands."
• Think everything from reviews under species protection laws to a suite of actions for private lands projects that tie into transmission that crosses public lands.

The bottom line: The jump in Q1 installations and the current project pipeline shows "resilience" and the ability to provide "clean, affordable, and reliable energy," said John Hensley, ACP's senior VP of markets and policy analysis.

• But his statement added: "This momentum is threatened by the changing policy landscape."

Oil saw just modest gains after Trump said he's shortening a deadline to impose heavy sanctions against Russia if President Vladimir Putin doesn't agree to a ceasefire in Ukraine.

Why it matters: Trump has previously threatened massive tariffs on buyers of Russian energy, which could raise prices.

• The market response to Trump's new timeline of "about 10 to 12 days" — instead of over a month under prior plans — suggests traders are taking the threat seriously but not literally.

State of play: Prices are at their highest levels in over two weeks, with the global benchmark Brent crude trading at $70.38 this morning.

What they're saying: "[I]f countries like India and Turkey take the threat of secondary tariff seriously, the prices for global oil benchmarks could increase temporarily as refiners in these countries drop purchases of Russian oil and express interest in purchasing oil from other countries," oil analyst Ellen Wald tells me via email.

• "However, prices will go back down as OPEC puts more oil [in] the market to satisfy these customers," she adds.

That's crude oil production from onshore federal lands in 2024, a six-fold increase from 2008, per EIA analysis of Interior Department data.

The big picture: This is largely a story about New Mexico, where output from the Permian Basin shared with Texas has soared.

What we're watching: The trajectory of federal lands moving forward.

• They're the areas where federal policy can have the most sway. Trump officials say they'll speed permitting and offer acreage under more generous terms.