In the News

It’s no secret that the Trump administration would like to undo as much of Obama’s environmental legacy as possible by rescinding or repealing regulations. Under the law, that process is difficult, but Trump’s agency heads now seem to be looking for an easy way to undo rules without officially rescinding or repealing them. Courts have rejected this kind of behavior in the past. Let’s hope they do so this time too.

Richard Revesz, director of the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University School of Law, said a D.C. Circuit ruling resolving that uncertainty would head off further courtroom wrangling over the issue. “There is no compelling reason for the D.C. Circuit to delay facing those issues for years, with the serious negative consequences that would entail, when it is likely to already have decided them,” he said.

“It’s uncharted territory for a president to attempt to completely lift a moratorium like the one President Obama instituted,” says Jayni Hein, policy director at New York University’s Institute for Policy Integrity. Past presidents have tweaked the size of previously designated protected areas, she says, but a full-on repeal is unprecedented and would likely end up in the courts.

Pruitt is in no position to declare victory and merely preserve the status quo. Large swaths of the country are violating the air and water standards that both Republican and Democratic administrations have agreed were necessary to protect public health.

What President Trump’s environmental executive order fails to acknowledge is that the Obama Administration’s estimate of the social cost of carbon is consistent with the guidance from Circular A-4. Asking each agency to develop its own metric will waste agency resources and open rules up to needless and risky legal challenges.

“Staying in the Paris accord signals to the world that the long-term policy of the United States is to control greenhouse gases,” Richard Revesz, an environmental law expert who wrote a useful book about the climate wars, told me. “The U.S. gets large benefits from the greenhouse gas reductions occurring outside our borders, and the actions of the U.S. are likely to have an impact on the actions of other countries. Withdrawing from it is likely to lead some other countries to relax their own commitments, to the detriment of the United States.”

Most of us employ informal cost-benefit analysis (CBA)—or what Benjamin Franklin described as weighing pros and cons—whenever we make decisions in our daily lives. It seems fair to expect federal agencies to do the same when considering new rules. Surprisingly, though, some agencies, including the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), are not required to engage in CBA before issuing a rule.

Last month, I explained that EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt’s handling of the case would test the sincerity of his recent pledges to prioritize air quality, even as he works to unwind EPA restrictions on greenhouse gas emissions. Well, test day arrived, and Pruitt failed miserably. It seems that the new administrator’s only real priority is rolling back regulatory protections, regardless of which type of pollution they address.

Speaking with Knowledge@Wharton, Denise Grab pointed out that the specific language of the order doesn’t remove requirements for federal agencies to meet their duties under regulations such as the Clean Air Act. “The executive order itself is a lot of sound and fury signifying not much on its own,” she said. “Whether it will result in substantive changes does remain to be seen.”

Mere hours after the signing ceremony for Trump’s executive order, EPA filed a motion in the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, asking the court to put a pending case about the Clean Power Plan on indefinite hold. The court should say no.