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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.”

The decision is a telling indication of rulings to come, as the first one targeting a final environmental repeal by the Trump administration, said Jayni Foley Hein, natural resources director at New York University’s Institute for Policy Integrity. “It’s emblematic of the challenges this administration has faced in trying to carry out the energy dominance agenda. When you are weakening or rolling back environmental standards, you’re going to be challenged in the court, and there are certain substantive and procedural hurdles you have to overcome in order to carry that out.”

It was the latest setback for an administration that has repeatedly lost efforts to defend its deregulatory actions in court. It has lost roughly 95% of its deregulatory cases, according to data compiled by the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University School of Law. That is three times the rate of most executive-branch agencies in prior administrations for similar actions in the courts.

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.