Trump moves to end U.S. climate policy

Supreme Court to the rescue?

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The key to understanding U.S. policy on climate change - and how the Trump regime is trying to overturn it - is a 2007 court case called Massachusetts v. Environmental Protection Agency.

That year, Massachusetts and a bunch of other blue states and environmental groups took the George W. Bush administration to court to try to force it to regulate emissions of greenhouse gases. Their argument was that these gases pose a clear danger to human health and so the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has a duty to regulate them under the Clean Air Act.

The Bush administration, not known for its respect for science, fought back. But ultimately the Supreme Court sided with the plaintiffs by 5-4. It told the EPA that it had a legal duty to go and examine the science on climate change and determine whether greenhouse gases threaten Americans’ health. In 2009, under the Obama administration, the EPA issued a so-called “endangerment finding” stating that they in fact did.

Pretty much all of U.S. federal climate policy flows from that finding. That includes auto emission standards, regulations on methane emissions from oil and gas projects, power plant regulations, and air travel emission rules. Without the endangerment finding, the EPA wouldn’t have the authority to impose any of these things.

And that’s exactly what the Trump regime wants to happen, which is why EPA administrator Lee Zeldin has just announced that the agency plans to overturn the endangerment finding, which he promises will result in “the largest deregulatory action in the history of the United States”.

The consequences, at a time when the world is nowhere near close to making enough progress against climate change, would be severe. The U.S. is responsible for an enormous quantity ofemissions. If the U.S. transportation sector were a country, it would be the fourth largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world. And that’s with the EPA’s current restrictions, which arguably don’t go anywhere near far enough.

Fortunately, the Trump regime can’t revoke the endangerment finding so easily. If it tries to do so, it will quickly have a new court battle on its hands. Less fortunately, that battle is likely to end up in the extremely conservative and Trump-friendly Supreme Court.

The reason the regime can’t just do what it wants is that the endangerment finding is based not on a political or ideological decision, but on law and science. The Clean Air Act requires the EPA to look at all the available science about a particular pollutant and to reach a decision based on that science, not on politics. That’s precisely what the Supreme Court ordered it to do in the Massachusetts case, even though the Bush administration didn’t want to.

That means that, in theory at least, any new determination about the risk of greenhouse gases also has to be based on science. And there is an overwhelming scientific consensus that climate change is caused by greenhouse gas emissions and poses a risk to human health. It’s possible to find some cranks and bad faith ideological actors who argue otherwise, but they’re way outside the mainstream.

If the Trump regime tries to make a new determination based on no science at all or on the arguments of those cranks, then by all rights it ought to be laughed out of court. It has to follow the process set out in the Clean Air Act, or what it’s doing is illegal - and the Supreme Court should say so.

Unfortunately, as you can probably guess, this might not be what happens.

The Supreme Court is a different beast today to the one that ruled in favor of the blue states in 2007. It is much more committed to twisting precedent and the constitution to get whatever outcome it wants. A number of judges on it have also shown a disturbing tendency to buy into the absurd alternative reality that American conservatives spin in order to avoid facing truths such as “January 6th really happened” and “climate change exists”. I wouldn’t put it past them to side with the regime.

Even if the Supreme Court rules the right way, the situation for U.S. climate policy - and hence the world - is still extremely depressing.

Rather than continuing with the sort of forward looking climate policy that the Biden administration embraced with the Inflation Reduction Act - which remains the only piece of federal climate legislation to ever pass the U.S. Congress - the country is stuck arguing over whether climate change is even real. At a time when the world needs to be taking great leaps forward, instead the U.S. is debating whether to take a huge step backwards.

Whatever the ultimate outcome of the case, that’s simply not enough.

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