Nineteen years ago, toward the end of the George W. Bush Administration, the United States Supreme Court agreed to hear a case prompted by government inaction on climate change. The plaintiffs in the case, Massachusetts v. Environmental Protection Agency, argued that the Clean Air Act compelled the E.P.A. to determine whether greenhouse-gas emissions constituted a threat to the public, and, if so, to regulate them. The Court, in a 5\u20134 ruling, essentially agreed. Richard J. Lazarus, a Harvard Law School professor who wrote a book about the decision, has called it \u201cthe most important environmental law case ever decided by the Court.\u201d The ruling gave rise, in 2009, to what\u2019s known as the \u201cendangerment finding,\u201d which has formed the basis of federal limits on carbon pollution ever since.<\/p>\n
Now the Trump Administration wants to overturn the Court\u2019s decision, or perhaps just violate it. Last week, it announced a plan to revoke the endangerment finding. In concert with congressional Republicans, the White House has already laid waste to dozens of programs aimed at limiting climate change. These include fees on methane leaks, tax credits for clean-energy development, and grants to states to install electric-vehicle charging stations. (Recently, a federal district judge in Seattle ordered the disbursement of the charging-station grants awarded to several states, though it\u2019s unclear whether the money has been released.) Still, in taking on the endangerment finding, the Administration has managed to outdo itself.<\/p>\n
Speaking last week at a truck dealership in Indianapolis, Lee Zeldin, the E.P.A. administrator, said that \u201cthe proposal would, if finalized, amount to the largest deregulatory action in the history of the United States,\u201d and it\u2019s possible that he\u2019s right. The repeal\u2014if it is finalized and also, given the inevitable lawsuits, upheld by the courts\u2014would invalidate several sets of Biden-era regulations aimed at reducing emissions from vehicles and power plants. (The Administration is going after these regulations with separate actions, too.) More significantly, it could make it pretty much impossible for future Administrations to try to curb emissions without new legislation from Congress.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think the goal is to have this destruction of climate regulation go beyond Trump,\u201d Michael Gerrard, the faculty director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia, told me. If the Administration\u2019s arguments prevail, he added, \u201cit\u2019s going to be very hard for E.P.A. going forward to use the Clean Air Act to regulate greenhouse gases. So they\u2019re trying to take that away permanently\u2014not just for the next three and a half years.\u201d<\/p>\n
The obvious beneficiary of the E.P.A.\u2019s latest move is the fossil-fuel industry, which, under Donald Trump<\/a>, seems to get pretty much anything it asks for, and then some. According to the White House, its recent trade deal with the European Union includes an E.U. pledge to purchase hundreds of millions of dollars\u2019 worth of oil and liquefied natural gas from the U.S. A few weeks earlier, in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act approved by Congress, oil and gas companies received new or expanded tax incentives adding up to an estimated eighteen billion dollars. \u201cThe final bill was positive for us across all of our top priorities,\u201d Aaron Padilla, the vice-president of corporate policy at the American Petroleum Institute, an oil-industry lobbying group, told<\/a> the Times. \u201cWe are becoming a petrostate\u201d is how Gerrard put it.<\/p>\n The attempt to rescind the endangerment finding combines pandering to the fossil-fuel industry with another of the Administration\u2019s favorite activities: flouting science. The E.P.A., in its proposal to repeal the finding, which was released last Tuesday, relied heavily on a report, made public the same day, that the Department of Energy had commissioned from a handful of scientists clearly chosen for their contrarian views. The hundred-and-forty-one-page assessment downplays the dangers from climate change, sometimes in ways that seem contradicted by the document\u2019s own figures. And several climate scientists whose work is cited in the D.O.E. report have said that their conclusions are misrepresented. One, Zeke Hausfather, told<\/a> Wired that the assessment seemed to him less like an official document than \u201ca blog post\u2014a somewhat scattershot collection of oft-debunked skeptic claims, studies taken out of context, or cherry-picked examples that are not representative of broader climate science research findings.\u201d In a comment on the website realclimate.org, Christopher O\u2019Dell, a senior research scientist at Colorado State University\u2019s Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere, noted<\/a> that a paper attributed to him by the report was actually written by an entirely different set of authors, a mistake that suggests the document was composed with the aid of A.I.<\/p>\n At this point, repealing the endangerment finding on scientific grounds should be impossible: contra the claims of the D.O.E. report, the evidence since 2009 that climate change represents a threat to public welfare has become only that much more overwhelming. (It\u2019s worth noting that on the day that both the report and the E.P.A.\u2019s proposal were released, more than eleven million Americans were under a rare extreme-heat warning from the National Weather Service.)<\/p>\n \u201cRevisiting the science is a frivolous argument,\u201d Lazarus, the Harvard Law professor, said. But, he observed, the Administration\u2019s legal arguments, which center on how, exactly, to interpret the relevant sections of the Clean Air Act, could appeal to the current Supreme Court. None of the five Justices who were in the majority in Massachusetts v. E.P.A. are still on the Court, but three of the dissenters\u2014John Roberts, Samuel Alito, and Clarence Thomas\u2014remain. Meanwhile, three of the Court\u2019s newer Justices\u2014Brett Kavanaugh, Neil Gorsuch, and Amy Coney Barrett\u2014are Trump appointees.<\/p>\n \u201cThere are a couple arguments they make where a hostile Court might bite,\u201d Lazarus said. \u201cMy guess is that their aim here is not to have the Court say there\u2019s no endangerment but for the Court to say there\u2019s reason to revisit the endangerment finding,\u201d he added. \u201cThere won\u2019t be a revisitation, but that by itself will be enough to collapse everything.\u201d<\/p>\n