Trump erased a bedrock climate rule. Here come the lawsuits.
- The San Juan Daily Star
- 16 hours ago
- 5 min read
By KAREN ZRAICK
When the Trump administration erased one of the nation’s bedrock scientific principles on climate change last week, it set up a legal battle that’s all but certain to hinge on the Supreme Court.
And not for the first time.
The scientific principle that was killed Thursday, the endangerment finding, which found that greenhouse gases endanger public health by heating up the world, itself resulted from a Supreme Court decision 20 years ago. The court had ordered the government to study whether greenhouse gases harm human health, and, if so, to regulate them.
But today’s Supreme Court is far more conservative.
And that, experts say, could complicate the legal strategy for the environmental groups and Democratic-led states that are lining up to sue the Trump administration. A negative ruling at the Supreme Court could hamstring future leaders seeking to reinstate climate regulations.
“If the rule survives all-but-certain legal challenges, we reiterate that it could reshape U.S. federal climate policy by pendulum-proofing the issue against a Democrat sweep” in the 2028 general elections, Clearview Energy Partners, a consulting firm, said Friday.
But a senior lawyer at the Sierra Club said the group was willing to take the risk that a more conservative Supreme Court might eventually uphold the Environmental Protection Agency’s decision to kill the endangerment finding.
“You can’t just stand by and let EPA trash its own authority because you’re scared of a potentially negative ruling” from the Supreme Court, said Andres Restrepo, the lawyer for the Sierra Club. “I think that it’s a bigger risk to do nothing.”
It comes at a time when the role of the courts in U.S. environmental policy has been growing. The Trump administration’s full-speed-ahead push to cut environmental protections, combined with Republican control of Congress, has left the courts as one of the few remaining avenues for the administration’s opponents to fight back. And Republicans see several recent rulings limiting the power of federal agencies as bolstering their prospects in the courts.
“We looked at what the highest court in the land had said, and we used a very simple metric: If Congress didn’t authorize it, EPA shouldn’t be doing it,” EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said at Thursday’s announcement at the White House.
The endangerment finding was the foundation of U.S. climate regulations. It gave the government authority to regulate planet-warming emissions from cars, power plants and other sources in an effort to slow climate change and protect human health.
It would quite likely take several years for any such cases to get there, however. “The first step is to go to the D.C. Circuit,” Restrepo said. “And it’s important to remember that the D.C. Circuit has already upheld the endangerment finding.”
He was referring to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, which is where disputes involving the Clean Air Act are first heard. In a 2012 case, that court upheld the endangerment finding, and many analysts expect it would do so again.
The Sierra Club is one of several groups and Democratic leaders who quickly vowed to challenge the move in court. California’s attorney general, Rob Bonta, called the administration’s actions an assault on environmental protections aimed at “putting the fossil fuel industry’s profits ahead of the health and safety of Americans.”
The EPA on Friday made public the full text of its final rule, and the arguments made there suggest the agency recognizes the legal risks it faces from the inevitable court challenges. Legal experts said the document had significant changes from a draft rule released back in July, and those changes seemed designed with court battles in mind.
In the earlier version, the administration’s argument included claims disputing the science of climate change, reflecting in part a widely criticized Energy Department report drafted by researchers who reject the scientific consensus on climate change. That report itself was challenged in court.
There is broad scientific consensus that climate change is caused by the burning of fossil fuels.
So instead of disputing the science in its final rule, the administration leaned into the legal arguments. “They made the proposal look less crazy,” said Jody Freeman, director of Harvard Law School’s Environmental and Energy Law Program. “That would have attracted a lot of judicial attention and made them look irrational.”
The final rule announced Thursday argues that the 1970 Clean Air Act applies only to direct, localized pollution, whereas greenhouse gases spread far and wide and therefore aren’t subject to regulation. The document also argues that emissions from American vehicles play too small a role in global warming to warrant regulation. And it makes a case that rules aimed at encouraging a shift to electric vehicles have such far-reaching consequences that Congress, not regulators at a government agency such as the EPA, would need to explicitly authorize them.
The endangerment finding was a scientific conclusion by the EPA that six greenhouse gases pose a threat to public health, obligating the agency to regulate them. The agency was forced to reach a determination on the matter after a 2007 Supreme Court case, Massachusetts v. Environmental Protection Agency.
That case is considered the most important environmental law matter ever decided by the court, according to Harvard law professor Richard Lazarus in his 2020 book, “The Rule of Five: Making Climate History at the Supreme Court.”
Lazarus said Friday that the EPA’s justification for killing the endangerment finding was a “frontal attack” on the precedent set in that case. Three of the dissenting justices are still on the Supreme Court. None of the original five who ruled in favor of Massachusetts remain.
Still, Lazarus cautioned that it was “not a done deal” that the justices would decide in the agency’s favor now, pointing to what he called flaws in the agency’s arguments.
“They’re not denying these huge worldwide threats posed by climate change, by emissions around the globe,” he said of the EPA. “To some extent, they’re simply saying that no one sector of an economy in the United States, like transportation, does enough by itself to deal with this massive problem. So we have no authority to do anything at all. That’s absurd.”
In the Massachusetts v. EPA decision, Justice John Paul Stevens wrote that climate change was a grave threat, and that the Clean Air Act obligated the EPA either to act or to explain why it would not do so. “EPA has refused to comply with this clear statutory command,” he wrote. “Instead, it has offered a laundry list of reasons not to regulate.”
But it was not a unanimous decision. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the dissent, joined by Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito.
Roberts wrote that, while global warming “may ultimately affect nearly everyone on the planet in some potentially adverse way,” addressing it was the function of Congress and the executive branch, not the federal courts. “Such a conclusion involves no judgment on whether global warming exists, what causes it, or the extent of the problem,” he wrote.
The EPA issued the endangerment finding in 2008, but officials in the George W. Bush White House refused to open the email notifying them of the decision to avoid acting on it, The New York Times reported at the time. The finding was put into effect after Barack Obama took office.