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To date, challenges to Trump’s deregulatory actions have been very successful. The Institute for Policy Integrity at the New York University School of Law found that the Trump administration has lost 87% of challenges to its regulations, guidance documents, and agency memoranda.

EDF asked the court to strike down the Trump EPA’s July 2019 rule repealing the Clean Power Plan, and to order the agency to  fulfill its statutory obligation to establish meaningful protections against climate- and health-harming pollution from existing power plants. A diverse array of experts and organizations have also filed amicus briefs forcefully opposing the rollback of the Clean Power Plan. That group includes five of the nation’s most prominent health and medical associations, the Institute for Policy Integrity at NYU Law School, seven leading experts in administrative law, one of the authors of the Clean Air Act, organizations dedicated to the conservation of national parks, a group of leading climate scientists and economists, and the Union of Concerned Scientists.

What are we to make of this seeming sea change in corporate social responsibility? Critics are correct in pointing out that these measures fall far short of what is needed to avoid catastrophic levels of warming. But to observers of corporate governance, this level of climate activism is unprecedented, almost shocking—and without an analytical vocabulary to make sense of it. To understand this recent rise in institutional investor activism, one has to look at the shifting composition of the major players in capital markets over the past decade.

Trump’s regulatory legacy will be greatly shaped in coming months by court rulings in lawsuits challenging some of his most potentially consequential rollbacks. “He needs to win reelection in order to defend those rules in court, and even then I think it’s going to be a longshot to win some of those,” said Bethany Davis Noll, litigation director of New York University’s Institute for Policy Integrity.

By the administration's own admission, the new aviation emissions standards would do nothing to further reduce the country's rising greenhouse gas levels because the airline industry had already imposed those standards on itself four years ago. "Everything the Trump administration has done has either made no difference at all or involved significant cutbacks," Richard Revesz, a New York University law professor and founder of the Institute for Policy Integrity, said of the administration's environmental policy decisions. "So, the airline standard that was announced is essentially business as usual."

In litigation over the attack on state clean car standards, our coalition has been joined by a dozen amici curiae, who have filed briefs as “friends of the court” in support of state authority. These amici include leading researchers and professors including University of Michigan law professor Leah Litman, New York University School of Law’s Institute for Policy Integrity, and seven climate science professors at California universities.

The Trump administration is inept. Evidence for this can be found in the administration’s victory record in the lower courts, where more run-of-the-mill cases are decided than in the Supreme Court. There, an astonishing statistic reveals itself: According to the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University Law School, only 11 percent of Trump administration regulatory actions prevailed in the lower courts; the other 89 percent were blocked by courts or withdrawn. In contrast, academic research indicates that earlier presidents, since the 1990s or so, have prevailed 60 to 70 percent of the time on regulatory matters in the lower courts.

Messages, made public in a lawsuit, suggest the E.P.A. rescinded a requirement on methane at the behest of an executive just weeks after President Trump took office. Just last week, a federal court, restoring an Obama-era regulation, struck down a Bureau of Land Management effort to weaken restrictions on methane gas releases from drilling on public lands. In that case, Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers ruled that the Trump administration, in its “haste” and “zeal,” failed to properly justify its rollback. “In the early days they did very little justification,” said Richard Revesz, a professor of environmental law at New York University and director of the Institute for Policy Integrity, the university’s nonpartisan think tank. “They justify their policies on analytically flimsy or sometimes nonexistent grounds, thinking, I guess, that they will get away with it,” Mr. Revesz said. “But time and again, the courts say no.”

The decision serves as a powerful warning to other agencies seeking to justify rollbacks by using a domestic-only metric to study the social costs of greenhouse gases, said Jason A. Schwartz, legal director for New York University’s Institute for Policy Integrity. The group filed an amicus brief supporting challenges to the Trump administration’s methane rollback. “No administration can change what the best science or the best economics is by fiat,” he said, paraphrasing the opinion. “You can’t cherry-pick which aspects of a model or which recommendations from a scientific body or literature you want, and then ignore the rest.”

As of 2017, the Trump administration’s new discount rate for SCC is between 3% to 7%—up from 2.5% to 5% during the Obama administration. When setting funding priorities and regulatory policy for government agencies, the Office of Management and Budget has been instructed to use the maximum rate of 7%. That leaves the US without many peers, says Peter Howard, an economics director at New York University School of Law’s think tank for government decision-making, Policy Integrity. “Few economists think that [discount rate] is appropriate,” said Howard. “Seven percent is an extreme outlier.”