The Freedom From Religion Foundation is decrying the Trump administration’s recent anti-science action that will erase the scientific foundation for federal climate protections.

The White House has ordered a repeal of the Environmental Protection Agency’s 2009 Endangerment Finding, which recognizes a basic scientific reality: Carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gases endanger human health and welfare. This determination triggered the EPA’s duty under the Clean Air Act to regulate pollutants that “cause or contribute to” dangerous air pollution — until now.

“You cannot repeal a fact,” says FFRF Co-President Annie Laurie Gaylor. “No administration, no matter how hostile to science, can nullify atmospheric chemistry or legislate away the laws of physics. Greenhouse gases  trap heat — whether politicians acknowledge it or not.”

By revoking this finding, the administration is not merely revising policy; it is attempting to nullify the overwhelming scientific consensus that climate change is real, human-caused and already inflicting catastrophic harm. In an Orwellian maneuver, the agency charged with protecting our environment has declared that a documented public health threat no longer legally “exists.”

Rescinding the Endangerment Finding strips the EPA of its core authority to address greenhouse gas emissions from vehicles, power plants and other major polluters. It dismantles the legal backbone of climate regulation and signals open season for fossil fuel interests while communities across the country endure intensifying heat waves, stronger hurricanes, worsening wildfires, rising seas and climate-driven disease.

The Clean Air Act directs the EPA to regulate emissions from new motor vehicles that “cause or contribute to” air pollution that endangers public health or welfare. The repealed finding faithfully applied that mandate. The administration’s new position, which attempts to exclude pollutants that endanger people “only indirectly,” contradicts the statute’s plain language and decades of settled law, including the Supreme Court’s recognition in Massachusetts v. EPA that greenhouse gases fall within the act’s scope.

Greenhouse gases do not cease trapping heat because a presidential administration wishes them away. As the EPA’s own website has long explained, these gases thicken the Earth’s atmospheric blanket, intensifying warming regardless of how “well-mixed” they are in the atmosphere. The physics of climate change is not subject to executive revision.

The repeal also leans on fringe and cherry-picked claims that elevated atmospheric carbon dioxide is not a serious threat and that isolated environmental anecdotes undermine decades of peer-reviewed research. Meanwhile, the scientific evidence of harm has only grown stronger. Researchers can now attribute specific extreme weather events, ecosystem collapses and public health crises directly to rising greenhouse gas concentrations.

This action aligns directly with the Christian nationalist, anti-science agenda outlined in Project 2025, which seeks to gut environmental protections, dismantle climate initiatives and subordinate evidence-based policymaking to ideological goals. Trump’s former EPA Chief of Staff Mandy Gunasekara helped write the climate section of the guiding document for Project 2025 and was a driving force behind this change, along with Christian nationalist Russell Vought.

Nonreligious Americans, who now make up roughly one-third of the U.S. adult population, overwhelmingly accept the scientific consensus on climate change. Pew Research has found that 90 percent of atheists acknowledge the reality of human-caused climate change, the highest percentage of any religious or nonreligious group. The “Nones” understand that this is our only world while evangelicals are apt to deny reality.

“The only afterlife that should concern us is leaving our descendants and planet a secure and pleasant future,” says Gaylor. “By repealing the Endangerment Finding, this administration is willfully sabotaging that future. It is choosing short-term corporate gain over long-term human survival — and condemning our children and grandchildren to escalating climate chaos, preventable suffering and irreversible environmental loss.”

All Americans rely on the EPA’s regulation of greenhouse gas emissions. Clean air, a stable climate and a livable planet are not partisan luxuries. They are prerequisites for public health, economic stability and intergenerational justice. By repealing the Endangerment Finding, the Trump administration has abandoned the EPA’s core mission and placed ideology above evidence. The government cannot repeal atmospheric chemistry by decree. It cannot vote away thermodynamics. And it cannot wish rising seas, burning forests and intensifying storms out of existence.

The Freedom From Religion Foundation calls on Congress, the courts and the American public to reject this reckless repudiation of science and to restore the EPA’s obligation to protect the health and welfare of present and future generations before it’s too late.

The Freedom From Religion Foundation is a U.S.-based nonprofit dedicated to defending the constitutional principle of separation between state and church and educating the public on matters relating to nontheism. With about 42,000 members, FFRF is the largest association of freethinkers (atheists, agnostics and humanists) in North America. For more information, visit ffrf.org.

The post FFRF castigates EPA’s Orwellian attempt to ‘repeal’ climate science appeared first on Freedom From Religion Foundation.