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Despite its low success rate, the administration is actually winning — at least some of the time. That’s because the administration has learned to use delaying tactics to undermine and even repeal federal regulations it doesn’t like, even when judges rule against it in court.

Revesz said many of the court losses can be tied to a conundrum for the administration: If they complete scientific and thorough analysis to justify what they want to do, that work will show why their goal is harmful to the public. But if they complete haphazard analysis, judges will see through it. “So they’re caught between a rock and a hard place,” Revesz told CQ. “I think in some cases there is not good analysis that they could do, so they resort to bad analysis.”

Every additional ton of the greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels to generate electricity contributes to climate change. This carbon pollution has many negative consequences, both to the physical world and also to global social and economic systems. But utilities don’t always tally the costs of these consequences. Because dealing with climate change is astronomically expensive, we believe that this should change.

“What this decision says is, in evaluating the environmental consequences of the lease, an agency has to look not just at the consequences of the impacts immediately surrounding the lease but also the consequences down the road of burning the fuel once it’s extracted,” said Richard L. Revesz, an expert on environmental law at New York University. “That’s enormously important.”

The agency has invented a new, unnatural way of evaluating regulatory cost that finds no support in the economics literature or in the regulatory practices of prior administrations of either political party.

Andrew Wheeler’s EPA may not be as dramatic as Scott Pruitt’s, but it still suffers the pathologies that make its work poor quality—and unlikely to hold up in court.

As climate threats mount and the window to act is beginning to close, states need to adopt desirable energy storage policies as quickly as possible.

An analysis by the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University School of Law shows that more than 90 percent of court challenges to major Trump deregulatory actions have been successful so far. In a typical administration, the government wins on such challenges around 70 percent of the time, said Richard Revesz, a law professor at N.Y.U. who specializes in environmental law. “This is truly aberrational,” he said.

Senators may ask Wheeler about his plans to ease carbon pollution regulations on coal plants. That and many other initiatives will face legal challenges, including plans to roll back auto fuel efficiency and air pollution standards. Richard Revesz at NYU Law doubts if any will survive.

Richard Revesz, a professor at NYU Law School and director of the Institute for Policy Integrity, discusses how Democratic attorneys general, riding a blue wave into office, may do a U-turn on lawsuits brought by their Republican predecessors – many of which challenge tighter federal environmental regulations. He speaks with Bloomberg’s June Grasso.