President Donald Trump’s drive to shred the endangerment finding, the 2009 legal underpinning of EPA’s climate rules for cars and trucks, is putting a question on the aerospace industry’s radar: what the repeal might mean for similar rule for airplanes.
EPA recently carried out Trump’s Day One order to repeal the finding that had girded decades of regulations on greenhouse gas emissions from road vehicles — and that Trump called “a disastrous Obama-era policy.” But his administration is pointedly not going after a second greenhouse gas endangerment finding issued by former President Barack Obama — one that applies to aircraft.
Repealing that finding would have serious repercussions for Boeing and other domestic fabricators. Aerospace manufacturers under international law must have federal greenhouse gas standards in place in order to be certified by U.S. authorities to sell planes to the rest of the world and to fly and land them at foreign airports.
The U.S. exported over $153 billion in aircraft, engines and parts in 2025, the Bureau of Economic Analysis said on Thursday — trade that would be put at risk if EPA’s climate rule for planes went away.
