In the News

The Trump administration will make the case that the law must provide the ability to revoke a waiver because it provides the ability to grant one, said Richard Revesz, a leading scholar of environmental and regulatory law and the director of the nonpartisan Institute for Policy Integrity at the New York University Law School. “That argument works sometimes, but it doesn’t work other times,” Revesz said, explaining that there are reasons to believe that a waiver can’t be revoked in this particular case. For one, he said, California has obligations to meet certain federal environmental goals, and its plan to meet those goals is premised on the waiver. In addition, California has a strong interest in protecting the health and safety of its citizens.

At its full potential, energy storage will improve grid efficiency and resilience, while helping to reduce emissions. But if we don’t get the accompanying policies right, we risk falling short of these improvements.

If justices ultimately decide in favor of the Trump administration and find the Clean Air Act does not allow the government to direct broad changes to the nation’s energy deployment, it could permanently weaken the United States’ ability to tackle its contributions to global warming. “It would have a devastating effect on the ability of future administrations to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act,” said Richard L. Revesz, a professor at New York University who specializes in environmental law. “It would essentially make it extremely difficult to regulate greenhouse gases effectively,” he said.

Pay no attention to the premature deaths behind the curtain. That is the upshot of the analysis supporting the Environmental Protection Agency’s so-called Affordable Clean Energy rule, which public health groups are challenging in a lawsuit filed earlier this month.

Though standards limiting vehicle emissions have played a critical role in controlling U.S. air pollution, the Environmental Protection Agency and National Highway Traffic Safety Administration have imminent plans to roll back emissions standards for model years 2021 and beyond. As part of the proposal, the agencies have put California in their crosshairs. But leaving California alone could help keep the air cleaner and avoid the political and legal uncertainty caused by picking that fight with California.

The Trump administration appears to be entering an alarming new stage of its attack on environmental protection. EPA has recently decided it will change the way it collects and processes data, to provide better justification to dismantle the analytical foundation of its rules.The consequences for the environment and public health could be disastrous. But even as this approach might be more deliberate, these actions are unlikely to survive court challenges as well.

In court the administration has lost most of the environmental cases it has faced. It has been defeated in more than 90 per cent of the 41 legal actions related to regulatory rollbacks, in which a final outcome was reached, according to a database at the Institute for Policy Integrity at the NYU School of Law.

“Particulate matter is extremely harmful and it leads to a large number of premature deaths,” said Richard L. Revesz, an expert in environmental law at New York University. He called the expected change a “monumental departure” from the approach both Republican and Democratic E.P.A. leaders have used over the past several decades and predicted that it would lay the groundwork for weakening more environmental regulations.

Together, these court decisions amount to a stunning defeat of the “energy dominance” agenda and reveal that the Trump administration cannot operate outside the bounds of the law.

Bethany Davis Noll, litigation director for the Institute for Policy Integrity, said agencies’ repeated violations of procedural rules only partially explain the losses. As the administration moved past its initial strategy of delaying the implementation of Obama administration policies and into the next phase of attempting to overhaul them, it has run into a different obstacle: It is legally required to provide reasons for changing course. “They have this big substantive problem where the rules are justified and they aren’t giving us a good reason for abandoning them,” Noll said. “An agency that wants to turn its back on that has a really tough job.”