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The centerpiece of Mr. Obama’s climate change policy is a 2015 E.P.A. rule curbing greenhouse gas emissions from electric utilities. Mr. Trump has vowed to eliminate the rule, but doing so could require years of court battles. “There are a number of ways this could play out as it goes through the courts, and it could take at least four to five years,” said Richard Revesz. “Ultimately, what happens to it will likely be determined by the results of the 2020 presidential election.”

America’s most progressive state is set to lead the new fight against federal power. Some potential suits are starting to take shape. California’s lieutenant-governor has said that the state could sue under the California Environmental Quality Act or its federal equivalent to quash Mr. Trump’s plans for a wall along the border with Mexico. Richard Revesz, an environmental-policy expert at New York University’s School of Law, says Democratic states could also sue to slow the repeal of the Clean Power Plan.

The federal coal program is a quintessential bad deal for Americans. President-elect Donald Trump campaigned on a promise to end similar bad deals; his administration shouldn’t discard ongoing reform efforts that could add billions to the federal treasury and energy-producing states.

“If the metric is revised, then the incoming administration would have an obligation to explain why it’s departing from the current approach,” Richard Revesz said. Any changes made without adequate scientific justification would likely be struck down in court.

The new administration almost certainly couldn’t make any major changes without providing adequate scientific and economic justification, said Richard Revesz, a law professor and dean emeritus of the New York University School of Law. Otherwise, the move would also likely be struck down in court as “arbitrary and capricious,” he argued.

Last year, the New York–based Institute for Policy Integrity tried to remedy that situation with just such a large-scale survey of economists who have published work on climate change.

There is no “short cut” for President-elect Donald Trump to roll back environmental regulations but the incoming administration still could target Obama era rules, a former Justice Department official said Nov. 15.

The situation in Standing Rock shows the difficulty of fighting for a right to use land in a way that does not yield short-term profits. “By using economics to show just how wasteful under-regulation can be,” Richard Revesz wrote in 2008, “cost-benefit environmentalism can be the key to creating the political coalition necessary to make America richer by regulating more wisely.”

Over the course of the D.C. Circuit hearing, the Clean Power Plan’s opponents made several legal and factual assertions that don’t stand up to scrutiny. Our research helps set the record straight.

You probably thought that last week’s only notable debate was the one between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump at Hofstra University, but, on Tuesday, supporters and opponents of EPA’s Clean Power Plan had a high-stakes showdown of their own in Washington, D.C.: a seven-hour oral argument before the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. The proceedings may not have spawned an SNL sketch, but in the wonky world of environmental law, they were a very big deal.