ON Monday, Sept. 14, Lee Zeldin, the administrator of the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), announced that the agency had finalized the repeal of the majority of the Biden administration’s greenhouse gas emissions requirements for US power plants. In addition, the EPA is also proposing rescinding every remaining greenhouse gas emissions standard for the power sector in the US, as part of a comprehensive campaign by the Trump regime to abolish any climate change-related regulations. This unwelcome development should give serious pause to the Marcos administration, and the private sector backers currently singing hosannahs about the “Pax Silica” preliminary agreement on critical minerals, as it guarantees that any environmental concern of the Philippines will be aggressively ignored by the current US administration.
The EPA justified the repeal of most provisions of the 2024 Carbon Pollution Standards for Fossil Fuel-Fired Electric Generating Units by saying it does not have the authority under the Clean Air Act to regulate power plant greenhouse gases for the purpose of addressing climate change. This point of view was largely supported by the unilateral repeal via executive order earlier this year of the 2009 “endangerment finding” of the EPA, which identified greenhouse gas emissions as harmful to human health.
To emphasize that the agency under Trump appointee Zeldin sees its role as one of gutting environmental regulation, the EPA’s press release asserted that, “Models continue to show that GHG (greenhouse gas) emissions from power plants have no material impact on global climate change,” which is, of course, a bald lie. There is more than 50 years of firm scientific evidence — the first of which, ironically, was provided by the petroleum industry — that indisputably indicates that human activities, primarily the human burning of fossil fuels, have warmed Earth’s surface and its ocean basins, which in turn have continued to impact Earth’s climate. Yet Trump personally considers this body of overwhelming evidence to be a hoax, and thus official US policy is to work against efforts to mitigate and adapt to climate change.
This latest development, and the prospect that the US will roll back emissions standards even more in the near future, is disturbing on two different levels. In a broad sense, it is worrisome because the US is the second-largest producer of climate-altering GHG emissions, just behind China, which surpassed the US in this metric sometime in 2024. However, China has over the past several years pursued an aggressive program of development of clean energy sources (primarily solar and wind), as well as progressively tighter regulations on industrial emissions, and so it is very likely that within this year or next, it will again slip to No. 2 behind the US — despite having a population and industrial base three to four times larger than its rival.
Thus, US efforts to actively undermine climate action by the rest of the world will already have a negative effect on the Philippines, as well as other countries that are similarly net victims of the climate impacts caused by the industrialized world. Similarly, we can expect no support whatsoever through the official development assistance channels still connected to the US government for climate adaptation or mitigation efforts here.
More specifically, the latest decision by the EPA raises concerns about the “Philippines-US Memorandum on Critical Minerals” (MOU) that is a precursor to the imagined industrial development under the US-led Pax Silica initiative. Nothing in that MOU addresses the Philippines’ environmental concerns in any manner, which is already a glaring omission, since mining is inevitably an environmentally invasive activity that requires firm regulatory guardrails to ensure that it is carried out with the least possible harm.
The latest EPA decision indicates that environmental controls that might be insisted upon by the Philippine government will not be acceptable to the US in proceeding further with development under Pax Silica, if those controls run counter to US policy. At this point, it would appear that any proposed controls would run counter to US policy, thereby leaving the Philippines with an extremely unpalatable choice: either to dismiss reasonable environmental protections, or risk losing whatever benefits can be gained by participating in the Pax Silica program.
This is not a “lose-lose” position that the Philippines should accept, but how it can avoid being put in that position is not clear at the moment. We do not envy the task of our government negotiators as they discuss the final details of the Pax Silica agreement, as extreme delicacy will be required.
