False humility is not an attribute one would ascribe to Donald J. Trump. In December, 2025, the White House Office of Management and Budget’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) boasted that the numbers for Fiscal Year 2025’s year-end regulatory accounting “are not only bigger and better than expected, but historic. [snip] In total, agencies finalized 646 deregulatory actions compared to only 5 regulatory actions, for a ratio of 129-to-1, dramatically exceeding the President’s 10-to-1 target.”

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“The Trump Administration’s deregulatory agenda is the most ambitious in American history. We have blown far past the target 10-to-1 deregulatory ratio in President Trump’s Executive Order, saving hundreds of billions for the American people. In less than one year we have already achieved more savings than in all four years of the prior Trump Administration, and we’re just getting started,” said White House Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought.

Braggadocio, to be sure, but President Trump is a man who walks the walk. In February of this year, the EPA press office published a summary of what EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said was “the single largest deregulatory action in U.S. history,” as the EPA eliminated:

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both the Obama-era 2009 Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Endangerment Finding and all subsequent federal GHG [greenhouse gas] emission standards for all vehicles and engines of model years 2012 to 2027 and beyond. The action also eliminates all off-cycle credits, including for the almost universally hated start-stop feature. [snip] In finalizing this rule, EPA carefully considered and reevaluated the legal foundation of the 2009 Endangerment Finding and the text of the Clean Air Act (CAA) in light of subsequent legal developments and court decisions. The agency concludes that Section 202(a) of the CAA does not provide statutory authority for EPA to prescribe motor vehicle and engine emission standards in the manner previously utilized, including for the purpose of addressing global climate change, and therefore has no legal basis for the Endangerment Finding and resulting regulations.

The ramifications of this regulatory rollback extend far beyond the impact of egregious vehicle emissions standards and annoying start-stop features in cars. For example, states must now back up their war on carbon dioxide with actual proof:

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The EPA’s revocation of the 2009 endangerment finding shifts the burden of proof from federal agencies to state capitals. Governors who declared climate emergencies must now demonstrate with regional data that rising carbon dioxide (CO2) endangers their residents. Wisconsin cannot meet that burden.

This is groundbreaking, for no state can possibly meet that burden of proof. In Wisconsin, 20 years of assessments proved that CO2 levels have had a negligible effect on temperature despite global CO2 emissions increasing by more than 100 times over the same period. What has increased for Wisconsin are electricity prices (despite decreased demand) and the high-risk prospect of blackouts within two years.

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There is no denying the existence of air, land, and water pollution from various sources, but the underlying problem is that our political betters are unwilling to acknowledge that carbon dioxide is not the fearsome bogeyman they would have us believe it is. We know from ice cores and geologic data that in the past, CO2 levels were 5-10 times more concentrated than today’s paltry 400 ppm, yet the earth never experienced the runaway warming that the current groupthink establishment insists should have occurred. During the last ice age, CO2 levels dropped to around 350 ppm, which was dangerously close to 330 ppm that many scientists believe is the level at which photosynthesis begins to break down. Recent scientific studies have demonstrated that there is no linear relationship between rising CO2 levels and rising temperatures, that “any further increases in atmospheric CO2 -- even doubling that amount to 800 parts per million -- would only result in minimal increases in atmospheric temperature of 0.5C, or 1 degree Fahrenheit.” This is why the past 50 years have proven Al Gore, James Hanson et al, dead wrong.

Nevertheless, it should come as no surprise that a whopping 24 states, including Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia, have mandated that within the next 15 to 20 years or so, all electricity generation must come from 100% “clean,” i.e. carbon-free energy sources.

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Earlier this month, the Supreme Court threw a monkey wrench into those quixotic, economically destructive plans by:

tossing a lower court’s ruling that had upheld  Biden-era regulations on gas furnaces and commercial water heaters, which opponents argued were overreaching and would ban various gas appliances from being sold. [snip] A coalition of energy companies, led by the American Gas Association, filed a petition to the Supreme Court earlier this year, arguing the justices should reverse the D.C. Circuit’s ruling as a violation of the standard set in the 2024 ruling Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, which limited federal agencies’ rulemaking ability… The petition also warned that Biden-era rules at the center of the lawsuit would “force millions of Americans with gas appliances to either renovate their homes or switch to electric appliances.”

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Is it any wonder that the Democrats want to stack the Supreme Court with 13 Justices?

One of President Trump’s very first acts after his inauguration 18 months ago was to pull the U.S. out the Paris Climate Agreement, for the second time. Even though most of the signatories fall far short of meeting the goals of the accord, and even though the overwhelming majority of greenhouse gas emissions come from China and India (neither of whom have any intention of signing up), President Trump’s forthright repudiation of the Paris Agreement has had a real, more-than-symbolic mitigating effect upon the damage to our economy that Obama and Biden-era wokism hath wrought. That wokism has infected not just the economy, but the education of our children and the social fabric of the country.

Trump’s first term provided a hiatus from the abuse heaped on us by a profusion of regulations issued by an Administrative State that was enthusiastically nurtured by the Obama and Biden administrations. It will take more time than what’s left of this current administration to unwind the lion’s share of that abuse.