The 57th Earth Day and the State of the Environment in the US
Things are not looking great for the US environment this Earth Day.
Shameless Plug: The California Environmental Right Coalition (https://enviroright.org) is holding a free Webinar open to everyone at 10 a.m Pacific Time this Earth Day, April 22, 2026. The Webinar will cover the Environmental Right Amendment we’re working to add to the Bill of Rights in the California Constitution, as well as the impacts of similar amendments that have been enacted in other states and countries. Register for the Webinar at this link.
The Trump Administration is Trashing Our Environmental Laws
April 22, 2026 will be the 57th time Earth Day is celebrated. The first time was in 1970, the year the Clean Air Act was passed and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was created. Richard Nixon was President. The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) had been enacted the year before, requiring environmental review of major federal projects. Environmentalism was on a roll, and the next few years under Republican Presidents would see the passage of our most important environmental laws:
Clean Air Act in 1970
Clean Water Act in 1972
Endangered Species Act in 1973
Safe Drinking Water Act in 1974
Resource Conservation and Recovery Act in 1976
Toxic Substances Control Act in 1976
The Trump Administration wants to “make us great again” by taking us back to the days before these protections became law. Environmentalists are now fighting a rear-guard action to preserve our legacy in the US.
The US was the world leader in fighting pollution in the 1970s. NEPA was the first law in the world requiring environmental review before projects could be approved. The idea is simple and obvious. Prior to NEPA, government agencies would approve projects without knowing their environmental impacts. NEPA requires an environmental impact statement or, in some cases, a shorter version called an Environmental Analysis for federal projects that might have significant environmental impacts, so that the agency deciding whether to approve a project will know in advance its environmental consequences. Most states have enacted their own “baby NEPAs,” which apply to projects approved by state and local agencies. California’s Environmental Quality Act, CEQA, is California’s baby NEPA.
The Trump Administration has considerably weakened NEPA. By executive order, the President ordered the Council on Environmental Quality to rescind its regulations, which had served as binding standards for NEPA compliance since 1978. Last summer, many of the major permitting agencies across the executive branch updated their NEPA procedures to simplify the process, lessening public participation and eliminating requirements to address climate change and environmental justice. The Forest Service was directed to rely heavily on categorical exclusions, which bypass environmental review for projects like timber sales.
The Clean Water Act has been watered down as well. The Trump Administration has proposed new regulations reducing the scope of the “waters of the United States” that are protected under the act. It has also adopted rules limiting states’ abilities to block or condition federally permitted projects, has reduced the number of projects requiring CWA dredge-and-fill permits, and has rescinded prior limits on PFAS compounds in drinking water.
The Endangered Species Act (ESA) is under attack. The Secretary of Defense recently convened the Endangered Species Committee, which exempted oil and gas industry activities in Gulf of Mexico from the ESA, purportedly for national security reasons. This purpose of this committee is to consider whether a proposed federal action is of such great importance that it should go forward, even if it risks the extinction of a threatened or endangered species. Rice’s whales, among other species, are at risk in this case; only 51 of them remain, their ranks having been decimated by the 210 million gallons of oil that leaked from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. The administration decided it was more important to facilitate oil and gas production than to preserve the whales.
In addition, the Trump Administration is using the regulatory process to narrow the scope of the ESA. It has redefined “harm” under the act to include only direct injury or killing, excluding habitat destruction. It has weakened protections for threatened species, which formerly were automatically protected like endangered species. It has tightened restrictions on listing species and made it easier to delist them, and has injected economic considerations into listing decisions for the first time. It has narrowed how “critical habitat” is defined, elevated economic and development concerns in habitat decisions and expanded agency discretion to exclude areas from protection. It has cut funding and staffing for ESA implementation and enforcement.
The Clean Air Act is also under attack. I’ll discuss the repeal of the Endangerment Finding below when I get to climate. But there are several other ways the administration has curtailed government regulation of air pollution. It offered exemptions by email. Businesses emailed the agency with a justification, such as national security or lack of available technology, and the President granted exemptions willy-nilly. 68 coal-fired power plants were exempted from mercury and arsenic pollution limits across 23 states, and more than 50 chemical facilities were allowed to turn off pollution controls or dodge recently strengthened emissions limits. The administration is also rolling back regulation of power plants, vehicles, soot, mercury, and coal-ash pollution.
Many of these regulatory changes are being challenged in court. During Trump’s first term, such changes were made using abbreviated or improper processes, which didn’t stand up in court. This administration is smarter about the process, so it’s hard to say who will win these challenges when the courts eventually decide.
Declaring Fake Emergencies
The President has proclaimed at least nine national emergencies since 2025 under the National Emergency Act, 50 U.S.C. sections 1601-1651. Most of these are for fake emergencies contrived to give the administration additional powers under various statutes passed by Congress.
A good example is the National Energy Emergency declared in Executive Order 14156. In the order, the President decries “the high energy prices that devastate Americans, particularly those living on low- and fixed-incomes.” It also references “a precariously inadequate and intermittent energy supply, and an increasingly unreliable grid,” which “require swift and decisive action.” This is pretty obviously a fake emergency, especially in light of the recent attacks on Iran, which have driven up energy prices in this country. The President has boasted that we don’t need oil from other countries because we have a surplus here.
But, in a case decided in 2020, Center for Biological Diversity v. Trump, 453 F.Supp.3d 11, the D.C. District Court decided that CBD’s challenge to an emergency declaration “presents a non-justiciable political question.” “There is a general rule against inquiring into the mental processes of administrative decisions.”
Elections are supposed to check the President’s power and prevent his abuse of that power. It would have been inconceivable to the framers of the US Constitution that the nation would elect a madman like Trump to be President, when all he cares about is lining his own pockets and those of his billionaire supporters, and retaliating against every slight and insult he has suffered so far in his long life. I’m afraid we’re going to have to live with him being US President for almost three more years. Congress needs to start resisting.
Climate
The current administration’s depredations are most harmful in the climate area. Dismissing climate change as a “hoax,” the administration has been very hostile to efforts to fight it. They paid the French oil giant TotalEnergies a billion dollars to abandon its plans to build wind farms off the East Coast and to invest, instead, in oil and gas projects in the US.
In February the EPA issued a final rule rescinding the greenhouse-gas endangerment finding, which provided the legal basis for EPA to regulate greenhouse gases. This has allowed major federal policy changes, such as eliminating federal greenhouse-gas standards for vehicles, and removing or reducing rules on power-plant emissions.
As I discuss at some length in my book, Earthling, the most important thing we need to do to stop increasing climate impacts is to stop burning fossil fuels. This administration has gone all out in the opposite direction, promoting fossil-fuel burning. “Drill, baby, drill” and “Burn, baby, burn.” Fracking has transformed the US from a net importer to the world’s largest oil and gas exporter. The President has been pushing deals requiring our trading partners to buy more fossil fuels from the US. The big oil companies are making record profits.
They know this can’t go on forever. Like so much else in MAGA-land, it’s a rear-guard effort to fight inevitable trends. Our country will get browner-skinned, less Christian. We will never get back the coal plants or manufacturing jobs we lost. And we will move from fossil fuels to renewables, because it’s cheaper. But the big oil companies want to go on making big profits for as long as they can. They’ve donated hundreds of millions of dollars to Trump and the Republicans in the 2024 election cycle, and they’ve gotten it back many times over in increased profits since then, due largely to the administration’s oil-friendly policies.
We need just the opposite: a strong federal climate bill that establishes a path to greatly reducing our reliance on fossil fuels, to reach net zero GHG emissions by 2050. There has never been a political constituency for this. Neither the Obama nor the Biden administrations delivered such a bill; they made incremental steps to preserve the climate, such as the Clean Power Rule and the Economic Recovery Act, but fell far short of what’s required.
Time is of the essence for climate change. Temperatures keep rising as we keep pumping more CO2 and methane into the atmosphere. The CO2 will stay there for thousands of years. We are quickly transforming the world into a place that is less suitable for human life, and future generations will have to live on the new Earth. The way to stop making things worse is to stop burning fossil fuels.
The President pulled the US out of the Paris Climate Accord on his first day in office in 2025. And he started the process of withdrawing from the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) early this year. This latter action is arguably illegal; the President does not have authority to withdraw from a treaty that has been ratified by the Senate without approval by the Senate. But it appears that his decision is not reviewable by the courts.
The rest of the world will continue to work on climate. China, the world’s largest GHG emitter, has become world leader in manufacturing solar panels, and is on its way to dominance in the electric-vehicle market. The EU’s per-capita GHG emissions are about 40% of ours and they’re working to reduce them further. As with so much else, the US has lost its leadership.
Overall, a Sad Earth Day
So this is a pretty sad Earth Day for those of us in the US who care about the environment now and for generations to come. But there are still things we can do to fight for the environment.
States Can Still Enact Strong Environmental Laws
Environmentalists in California have mixed feelings. On one hand, our state is officially opposed to many of the federal government’s environmental rollbacks. We have the strongest state environmental laws in the nation, which provide something of a bulwark against the administration’s attacks. But the legislature’s attention seems to be focused on affordability and abundance. The environment is not among the top five public issues in most opinion polls. The focus is on much shorter-term issues: the wars, consumer prices, the state of our democracy, immigration, and healthcare.
The legislature could help California fight for the environment if it would strengthen our environmental laws. It has lately been watering down the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) to reduce regulation of construction projects, and should stop doing this. We currently have a good balance between environmental protections and our ability to build things.
The legislature could also help by adding a new human right to the Bill of Rights in the California Constitution, a right to a clean and healthy environment. Please support this effort by signing up for our mailing list on the issue at https://enviroright.org and by attending our Earth Day webinar on the subject. Register for the Webinar here. I hope to see you there!