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Legal arguments that curbed several of the Trump administration’s most far-reaching executive actions could be used to slow President Joe Biden’s most ambitious climate and environment plans. The Trump administration had a 23% win rate in court challenges to its agency actions, according to data from the nonprofit Institute for Policy Integrity. That number is a stark contrast to the average 70% win rate of previous administrations, said Bethany Davis Noll, executive director of the State Energy & Environmental Impact Center and an affiliated scholar at the Institute of Policy Integrity.

In Biden’s first two weeks in office, he took 16 executive actions directly reversing one or more of former president Donald Trump’s policies. According to the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University School of Law, of the nearly 260 deregulatory and other actions of Trump’s administration that were challenged in court, three-quarters were either struck down or withdrawn by the agency in question after it was sued.

The Institute for Policy Integrity, a regulatory think tank based at New York University, says in July 6 comments that OMB should “detail sustainable methodologies and procedures that agencies can implement,” and identifies four principles to guide such action.

Legal experts say they expect these kinds of filings will happen more regularly in coming months. “There will be lots of them,” says Ricky Revesz, director of New York University’s Institute for Policy Integrity (IPI). “It’s not an unusual pattern. The same thing happened in the beginning of the Trump administration. Parties that were already intervening on the side of the Obama administration took the role of defending the Obama regulations that were now being attacked by the Trump administration.”

Justin Gundlach explained that the New York Public Service Commission is in a tough spot—coordinating the decline of the gas system is deeply complicated, and the state is still in the midst of a process to determine what, exactly, that decline should look like. 

Advocates of the newly formed Initiative on Climate Risk and Resilience Law (ICRRL) are advocating the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) bolster climate change protections with the finance industry. The ICRRL is a joint initiative that includes the Columbia Law School’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, the Environmental Defense Fund, the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University School of Law, and the Vanderbilt Law School.

The Biden administration intends to revive federal environmental protections for millions of streams, marshes and other bodies of water across the country. By starting early to revise the policy, the Biden administration stands a greater chance of defending it against the legal challenges that are expected to come, said Richard Revesz, a professor of environmental law at New York University. “That makes it much more likely it will stick,” Mr. Revesz said.

Local governments in the U.S. have instead tried to use common-law nuisance claims to force companies to pay the costs of adapting to the effects of climate change. Most of those cases are pending. Should a case end up at the Supreme Court, the conservative-leaning panel could be skeptical of allowing cities to get involved in regulating global matters, said Rachel Rothschild, a legal fellow at the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University School of Law.

In its order, a majority of FERC’s Commissioners said that they disagreed that greenhouse gas emissions must necessarily be a consideration, incremental or not for the WBI project, and rejected calls by the Institute for Policy Integrity to monetize such impacts using a social cost metric. Nonetheless, FERC did look briefly at the total potential for greenhouse gas emissions in its order, in response to Policy Integrity comments.

Many U.S. communities won't reach their climate targets without transitioning away from natural gas, a panel of regulators and lawmakers agreed during a Thursday discussion hosted by the New York University School of Law. However, they said there's no clear path to eliminating the fuel.