Analysis of: Trump’s repeal of landmark climate ruling ‘un-American’ and ‘Orwellian’, says John Kerry – US politics live
The Guardian | February 13, 2026
TL;DR
Trump repealed the EPA's endangerment finding, stripping federal authority to regulate greenhouse gases—a direct gift to fossil fuel capital. Meanwhile, ICE fabrications collapse in court and FDA blocks mRNA vaccines, revealing how state power serves capital accumulation over public welfare.
Analytical Focus:Class Analysis Contradictions Historical Context
This collection of news items reveals the Trump administration as a coordinated instrument of capital accumulation operating across multiple fronts. The centerpiece—revoking the EPA's endangerment finding—represents perhaps the clearest example of state capture by fossil fuel interests in recent memory. By eliminating the scientific and legal foundation for climate regulation, the administration has effectively transferred regulatory authority over the atmosphere itself to private capital. Trump's own framing as 'the single largest deregulatory action in American history' accurately identifies the magnitude: this isn't merely policy adjustment but a fundamental restructuring of the relationship between public health and private profit. The article's framing through John Kerry's 'Orwellian' critique, while apt, obscures the class character of this action. Kerry represents a faction of capital—notably including segments of tech and finance—that has positioned itself to profit from energy transition. His objection is not to capitalist control of energy production but to which capitalists will control it. The real victims, obscured in this elite debate, are working-class communities who bear disproportionate burdens of pollution, climate disasters, and the health consequences of deregulation. The simultaneity of other developments—tariff confusion benefiting metal industry capital, FDA obstruction of vaccine development, and the collapse of fabricated charges against immigrants—demonstrates how state apparatus across departments serves coordinated class interests while generating contradictions that may ultimately destabilize this configuration. The tariff reversal is particularly revealing: even protectionist policies must bend when they threaten consumer goods prices before midterm elections, exposing how electoral legitimacy constrains capital's preferred policies.
Class Dynamics
Actors: Fossil fuel industry executives and shareholders, Trump administration officials, Working-class communities in polluted areas, Military families (Fort Bragg), Immigrant workers (Venezuelan detainees), Pharmaceutical capital (Moderna), Democratic Party establishment (Kerry, Obama), Steel and aluminum industry capital, Consumer goods manufacturers
Beneficiaries: Fossil fuel corporations and their shareholders, Heavy industrial polluters, Oil and gas extraction companies, Anti-vaccine ideological entrepreneurs, Metal tariff-affected manufacturers (potentially)
Harmed Parties: Working-class communities near industrial pollution sources, Climate disaster-affected populations, Immigrant workers facing state violence, Public health infrastructure, Workers dependent on stable climate conditions, Future generations bearing climate costs
The administration functions as direct representative of fossil fuel and extractive capital, using executive authority to override regulatory barriers accumulated over decades. The state's repressive apparatus (ICE, FDA) operates with significant autonomy to pursue ideological agendas, but faces constraints when fabrications collapse under judicial scrutiny. Elite opposition (Kerry, Obama) represents competing capital fractions rather than working-class interests, framing the conflict as procedural ('un-American') rather than structural.
Material Conditions
Economic Factors: Fossil fuel industry stranded asset concerns, Climate regulation compliance costs for heavy industry, Consumer price inflation affecting electoral calculations, Pharmaceutical R&D investment flows, Immigration enforcement labor market effects
The endangerment finding repeal eliminates the legal mechanism connecting the social costs of fossil fuel extraction (externalities) to the producers who profit from them. This represents a massive transfer of wealth from the public—who bear health costs, disaster costs, and climate adaptation costs—to fossil fuel shareholders. The tariff confusion reveals contradictions between protecting domestic production and maintaining consumer purchasing power.
Resources at Stake: Atmospheric carbon capacity (treated as free dump), Fossil fuel reserves currently considered 'unburnable', Public health infrastructure funding, Steel and aluminum supply chains, Vaccine technology development pathways
Historical Context
Precedents: Reagan-era EPA deregulation under Anne Gorsuch, Bush administration climate science suppression, Gilded Age absence of environmental regulation, Neoliberal rollback of New Deal regulatory framework, Historical patterns of state violence against immigrant labor
This represents an intensification of neoliberal deregulation entering a qualitatively new phase. While previous administrations weakened enforcement or delayed implementation, eliminating the endangerment finding attacks the legal-scientific foundation itself. This mirrors the broader pattern of late neoliberalism: having exhausted opportunities for conventional deregulation, capital now requires dismantling the epistemic and legal frameworks that legitimate regulation at all. The FDA's 'anti-vaccine agenda' represents similar epistemic warfare against public health science that constrains pharmaceutical profit maximization.
Contradictions
Primary: The administration must simultaneously serve fossil fuel capital's demand for deregulation while maintaining electoral legitimacy among workers experiencing climate disasters, pollution, and inflation—contradictions that intensify as climate impacts accelerate.
Secondary: Tariff policy oscillates between protectionist rhetoric and inflationary reality, Immigration enforcement fabrications collapse under judicial scrutiny, exposing state violence, FDA obstruction of vaccines contradicts pharmaceutical capital's profit interests, 'America First' nationalism accelerates US diplomatic isolation, potentially undermining dollar hegemony, Elite opposition (Kerry) represents competing capital fractions, not systemic alternative
These contradictions will likely intensify through 2026 midterms. Climate disasters will continue regardless of regulatory status, creating political pressure. The tariff reversals signal capital's influence can override ideological commitments when profits are threatened. The ICE case collapse demonstrates judicial limits on state fabrication, though enforcement violence will continue. The deeper contradiction—between capitalism's requirement for endless growth and planetary boundaries—remains unresolvable within this system.
Global Interconnections
The endangerment finding repeal must be understood within global context: as UN voting data shows US isolation accelerating, the administration is simultaneously withdrawing from international climate commitments while other nations—particularly China—position themselves as climate cooperation leaders. This creates a profound contradiction for US hegemony: climate leadership has become a terrain of geopolitical competition, and US withdrawal cedes this ground to rivals while exposing American workers to climate impacts without international coordination. The Rubio-Wang meeting in Munich occurs against this backdrop, revealing how 'America First' nationalism coexists uneasily with capital's need for global market access. The tariff confusion—50% metals tariffs potentially being 'narrowed'—demonstrates that protectionist rhetoric confronts the reality of integrated global supply chains that capital itself constructed. Working-class communities experience these contradictions as simultaneously higher prices (tariffs), environmental degradation (deregulation), and precarious employment (capital mobility).
Conclusion
This moment crystallizes the fundamental truth that bourgeois democracy serves as a management committee for capital's collective interests. The endangerment finding's repeal, ICE's fabricated charges, and FDA's vaccine obstruction are not separate phenomena but coordinated expressions of a state apparatus captured by specific class forces. For working-class organizing, this clarifies the inadequacy of purely electoral or regulatory strategies: institutions designed to serve capital will not protect workers from capital's depredations. The contradictions accumulating—between profit and planet, between repression and legitimacy, between nationalism and globalized production—create openings for building class consciousness and alternative power structures, but only if workers recognize elite opposition (Kerry's 'un-American' framing) as insufficient and build independent organization around material interests rather than procedural norms.
Suggested Reading
- The State and Revolution by V.I. Lenin (1917) Lenin's analysis of the state as an instrument of class domination directly illuminates how the EPA, ICE, and FDA function as tools of capital, not neutral arbiters of public interest.
- Marx's Ecology: Materialism and Nature by John Bellamy Foster (2000) Foster's recovery of Marx's ecological thought provides theoretical grounding for understanding climate deregulation as an intensification of capitalism's metabolic rift with nature.
- The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein (2007) Klein's documentation of how crises enable rapid deregulation contextualizes Trump's 'largest deregulatory action' as part of a longer pattern of disaster capitalism.