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Four rulings from the past week will weigh heavily on future climate regulation.
Perhaps it’s futile to talk about any Supreme Court decision this term other than the justices’ unprecedented ruling in the Trump case. The court’s decision to grant broad immunity to the president from criminal prosecution could reshape the modern presidency and empower Donald Trump during his potential — and increasingly likely — second term.
That ruling, too, will have profound practical implications for Americans who care about climate change. During his presidency, Trump flexed his power to slow the energy transition, bury scientific reports, and attack protesters. What will happen now that he is unbound?
But just as the court was expanding the president’s personal authority, it was confining and shrinking the power of any president to address climate change or regulate carbon dioxide emissions.
In a series of important rulings over the past week, the Supreme Court sharply limited the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to regulate carbon pollution. These rulings could resonate for years to come, no matter who wins the White House in November.
It did so by focusing on a corner of federal law that is often overlooked by the mass public: administrative law, the body of rules that govern how federal agencies constrain and regulate the private sector. Although Americans rarely interact with these rules, they affect the water we drink, air we breathe, and the food and drugs that we ingest.
Taken together, the four cases — Loper Bright Enterprises, Corner Post, Jarkesy, and Ohio v. EPA — are not as high-profile as the Supreme Court’s broad grant of immunity to Trump. But they could substantially weaken the EPA for decades to come, stymying its ability to write and enforce rules limiting carbon pollution. They could also slow down the permitting and construction of new clean energy infrastructure.
“All of these decisions — all four of them — inflate the role of the courts relative to the bureaucracy. This is part of a longstanding campaign by the conservative legal movement to bring the administrative state to judicial heel,” Nicholas Bagley, a law professor at the University of Michigan Law School, told me.
“Congress has not comprehensively addressed climate change but the agencies are trying to,” Emily Hammond, an environmental law professor at George Washington University, told me. “What these cases do, all together, is fairly comprehensively limit the ability of agencies to protect health and human safety and try to mitigate climate change.”
“It’s a shocking and scary grab of power by a court that is rapidly discarding principles that we’ve been able to rely on and expect for a long time,” she added.
In the first case, Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, the Supreme Court repealed a 40-year-old tenet of American regulatory law that said courts should generally defer to executive agencies such as the EPA when interpreting an ambiguous law. In the second, Corner Post v. Board of Governors, the court opened the door to lawsuits targeting federal regulations that have been on the books for years. Instead of allowing companies to challenge a new rule during the first six years after it was published, the court ruled that companies can challenge a new rule during the six years after the rule begins to affect them. That seemingly allows companies to challenge federal regulations long after they have been issued and treated as settled law.
In the EPA’s case, these two cases may have less influence than it may seem— not because the EPA won’t be subject to these precedents, but rather because the agency receives so little deference from the justices already.
The high court has asserted since 2022 that agencies cannot write new rules on questions of “vast economic and political significance” without clear authorization from Congress. This principle, called the “major questions doctrine,” was first invoked by the justices to overturn the Clean Power Plan, an Obama-era rule that restricted greenhouse gas pollution from power plants in part by setting up an interstate carbon trading scheme. But the doctrine would seem to constrain almost any EPA attempt to regulate activities related to climate change, Carlson said. The EPA’s recent attempt to limit tailpipe pollution from cars — in addition to rules cutting carbon pollution from heavy-duty trucks — could run astray of the major questions doctrine.
“At least in my mind, in terms of what regulations will be challenged and how, the major questions doctrine poses the biggest threat to regulatory authority,” Carlson said.
The Corner Post ruling, which effectively extends the statute of limitations for suing over new regulations, may also mean less for the EPA than for other agencies. That’s because virtually every EPA climate protection is already battled over in court, and once a court has decided whether a given regulation is legal, everyone has to abide by that precedent.
“Most rules worth challenging will already have been challenged,” Bagley said.
The EPA may escape, too, from the worst of the Corner Post ruling, but only because its rules are almost always litigated within the first six years of their life anyway, Carlson told me. That means companies probably won’t need to sue after that, as they might want to do for other federal regulations.
Even if those cases have a muted effect on the EPA, however, the other two rulings — which have received less attention so far — could prove far more restrictive to the agency’s authority.
In one case, Securities and Exchange Commission v. Jarkesy, the court ruled 6-3 that the SEC cannot use an in-house tribunal of administrative judges to impose a civil penalty on a company. Instead, the agency must grant the company a full jury trial in federal court. But many other agencies, including the EPA, also use administrative judges and in-house trials to punish individuals or companies for breaking the law. Each year, the EPA imposes hundreds of millions of dollars in fines on companies that violate the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act.
Over the next few years, federal judges — and eventually the Supreme Court — will have to decide whether the Jarkesy ruling affects all executive agencies, including the EPA. If they decide it does, then it could slow down the agency’s efforts to penalize polluting companies by forcing virtually every decision into an already overworked court system.
But perhaps the most ominous ruling, Bagely said, is the one in a lawsuit concerning the EPA itself. On Thursday, in Ohio v. EPA, the court blocked the agency’s “good neighbor” rule, meant to limit how much air pollution upwind states can release into downwind states. The five-justice majority did so not only because it disagreed about the agency’s interpretation of the Clean Air Act, but also because the justices felt that the EPA had not properly addressed a few of the more than 1,100 comments about the rulemaking that it had received from the public. As such, they stayed the rule — temporarily blocking it from being enforced — and sent the case back down to a lower court.
That decision could change how every court views the rulemaking process, Bagley told me. Whenever the EPA drafts a new environmental rule, it receives thousands of public comments criticizing and praising different aspects of the proposal. Under a law called the Administrative Procedure Act, which governs how federal agencies deal with the public, it must respond to the substance of each of those comments before it can finalize and enforce the rule.
The EPA did respond to the comments at the center of the Ohio case, but Justice Neil Gorsuch, writing for the majority, decided the agency did not address a few specific concerns sufficiently.
Justice Amy Coney Barrett issued a dissent — joined by the court’s liberals — and castigated Gorsuch for focusing on “an alleged procedural error that likely had no impact” on the EPA’s actual anti-pollution plan.
“Given the number of companies included and the timelines for review, the court’s injunction leaves large swaths of upwind States free to keep contributing significantly to their downwind neighbors’ ozone problems for the next several years,” Barrett wrote.
Although the ruling may seem technical, it could create a major new obstacle for agencies to take almost any action, Bagley said. “The reason this worries me in the environmental context is that every major environmental action is going to come with 1,000, 2,000, 3,000 public comments,” he said. “What the court did here is flyspeck those comments,” meaning it looked for a tiny error and used it to justify pausing the entire rule. That’s despite the fact that the Clean Air Act, which the EPA was enforcing in the Ohio case, says that the courts must already meet an unusually high standard to intervene in an agency’s response to public comments.
“By flyspecking these comments … it increases the incentive to submit lots and lots of comments” in the hope that the EPA misses one of them. In those comments, “industry groups strew rakes all over your lawn in the hope that you’ll step on one — eventually an agency will.”
That has dire implications for the EPA’s ability to propose new climate rules, he said, but more broadly it affects any regulatory proceeding where the federal government has to reply to hundreds or thousands of public comments.
In recent years, for insurance, some Democrats and many clean energy developers have grown frustrated with the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, which requires the government to study the environmental impact of any action that it takes. NEPA seems to particularly hamstring clean energy projects, such as transmission lines and geothermal wells. NEPA does not require that agencies minimize a project’s impact to the environment; only that the government study all potential impacts. But as part of the NEPA process, the government must respond to public comments about the proposed action.
The government can receive hundreds or thousands of comments about a given NEPA case.
That means virtually every NEPA process could now be subject to the same high level of scrutiny that the court imposed on the EPA in Ohio v. EPA. “This is a dramatic intensification of the stringency of judicial review across a number of domains,” Bagley said.
It is ironic, at best, that these sharp new limits on executive agencies’ ability to regulate carbon pollution came from the same Court that vastly expanded the president’s immunity under the law.
“This is a court that is hostile to environmental regulation,” Ann Carlson, a UCLA environmental law professor and the former acting head of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration from 2022 to 2023, told me. “I don’t think there’s any other way to view it.”
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Overturning the basis for America’s tailpipe emissions rules could actually raise prices at the pump — according to the Trump administration itself.
It hasn’t attracted much attention, but a document filed by the Trump administration last week admits to something important: The Trump administration believes that it is going to make gasoline more expensive for Americans.
That disclosure came in a technical analysis filed by the Environmental Protection Agency to support its attempt to repeal all carbon dioxide rules under the Clean Air Act. The document is meant to bolster the EPA’s case that carbon dioxide is not a dangerous air pollutant, and that the agency should therefore withdraw all tailpipe pollution limits for cars and trucks.
The document also shows that President Trump will struggle to meet his own campaign promises around energy. When he ran for president last year, Trump promised to cut energy and electricity prices by “at least half” within 12 months of taking office.
Now, the president’s policies are — by his own administration’s admission — likely to cause energy prices to rise. At least compared to the world where those policies never went into effect.
The admission comes on page 10 of the filing in a chart and associated discussion. It’s a confusing image at first glance, so take a look at it, then I’ll walk through it.
Reconsideration of 2009 Endangerment Finding and Greenhouse Gas Vehicle Standards | Draft Regulatory Impact Analysis
The rollback would affect light-duty, medium-duty, and heavy-duty vehicles — that is, everything from a small Toyota Corolla sedan to a Freightliner Cascadia semi. Because of that, the chart shows both gasoline prices (in red) and diesel prices (in black).
The solid black and red lines are what the government projected would happen to gasoline and diesel prices two years ago based on then-current policy. (They’re labeled AEO 2023 Reference because they came from the Energy Information Administration’s 2023 Annual Energy Outlook, the big yearly compendium of long-term market trends.)
The dashed black and red lines are what the government projected would happen to gasoline and diesel prices in its most recent 2025 Annual Energy Outlook. As you can see, in that report, federal analysts considerably downgraded their forecast for future gasoline and diesel prices — projecting gas prices, in particular, as much as 75 cents cheaper than in 2023. (These lines are labeled AEO 2025 Reference.)
The dotted red and black lines are what the government now thinks will happen when it rolls back the EPA’s tailpipe pollution rules. (These lines are labeled 2025 Alt Transportation, which is the name of the deregulatory scenario in the annual energy report.) As you can see, these — the Trump rollback scenario — come in far above the current 2025 forecast, particularly for gasoline. In other words, the Trump administration believes that rolling back the EPA tailpipe standards will raise gasoline prices.
The document itself acknowledges this: “For the AEO 2025 Alternative Transportation case, the difference compared to AEO 2023 is smaller, yet still lower than the prices in the AEO 2023, and the difference remains relatively stable over time.”
In other words, the document concedes that gas prices under Trump’s rollback will be more expensive — that is, much closer to the 2023 projections — than they were projected to be with the Biden-era regulations in place. The Trump document argues that’s okay: As long as gas prices are cheaper now than they were projected to be in 2023, Americans will have less to save by driving more fuel-efficient cars, so the EPA can roll back its pollution rules without worrying about the resulting increase in gas prices.
It’s an odd argument, one that relies heavily on the global decline in gasoline price forecasts from 2023 to 2025, which has little to nothing at all to do with Trump’s policymaking. As the filing says elsewhere, global gasoline markets can go up and down for many reasons, including “(1) changes in U.S. policies; (2) international incidents (e.g., wars); (3) changes in policies by international organizations (e.g., OPEC); and (4) changes in supply and demand of gasoline and diesel.” If gasoline prices go up significantly in the future, it could throw one argument for Trump’s rollback into question.
The problem for the EPA — and for the president — is that removing gas mileage rules means that American consumers will, as a whole, consume more gasoline. That might be good for the oil and gas industry, and it might slightly reduce the costs of a new car or appliance. But it will drive up energy costs as well — especially for Americans who already own a car or who are not in the market for a new appliance.
This analysis also makes Trump’s rollback oddly captive to the vagaries of Chinese policy. One reason that global gasoline price forecasts have stalled since 2023 is because Chinese gas demand has plateaued due to the explosive growth of that country’s EV industry. The Trump EPA is saying, in essence: Because China has switched en masse to EVs, it’s cheaper for Americans to keep driving gasoline cars. The follow-on innovation effects of this — the fact that American carmakers will fall behind — are not considered in the sample.
But the concession points to a deeper problem for Trump. The president campaigned on a promise to cut energy costs for Americans upon taking office. But over the past seven months, his administration has aggressively rolled back energy efficiency and fuel economy rules. It has imposed tariffs on some energy imports and moved to crack down on some zero-carbon forms of electricity production. At the same time, Trump has personally demanded that OPEC increase drilling to lower gasoline prices.
This Trump rollback — and the resulting rise in projected gasoline demand — comes as the overall energy cost environment has grown more inflationary. As I’ve previously written, electricity prices show every sign of rising in the coming years because of natural gas supply constraints, the Trump administration’s renewables policy, and equipment shortages. The president only has five months left — and a year at most — to cut energy prices in half, as he once promised during the campaign. He better get cracking.
On GM eating the tariffs, California’s utility bills, and open-sourcing climate models
Current conditions: U.S. government forecasters are projecting hurricane season to ramp up in the coming weeks, with as many as nine tropical storms forming in the Caribbean by November • Southern Arizona is facing temperatures of up to 114 degrees Fahrenheit • Northeast India is experiencing extremely heavy rainfall of more than 8 inches in 24 hours.
Secretary of Energy Chris Wright said his agency is preparing to rewrite previously published National Climate Assessments, which have already been removed from government websites. In an interview with CNN’s Kaitlan Collins, Wright said the analyses “weren’t fair in broad-based assessments of climate change.” He added: “We’re reviewing them, and we will come out with updated reports on those and with comments on those reports.”
The former chief executive of the fracking company Liberty Energy, Wright once eschewed the outright rejection of climate science that other Trump administration officials espouse. But as the Environmental Protection Agency works to withdraw the legal finding that gave the federal government the right to regulate planet-heating emissions under the Clean Air Act, Wright has ratcheted up his rhetoric. Earlier this week, he claimed that “ceaseless repeating from the media, politicians and activists claiming that climate change is making weather more dangerous and severe is just nonsense.” In response, my colleague Robinson Meyer noted on X: “This is a new and big turn from Secretary Wright. I’ve been pretty careful to never call him a climate change denier because while his claims about the science have been incredibly opinionated, I could see the ‘true’ thing he was trying to say. But this is just brazenly wrong.”
Days after the Department of the Interior revoked a designation opening millions of acres off the United States’ shores to offshore wind, the agency on Thursday launched “a full review of offshore wind energy regulations to ensure alignment” with “America’s energy priorities under President Donald J. Trump.” The review aims to examine “financial assurance requirements and decommissioning cost estimates for offshore wind projects, to ensure federal regulations do not provide preferential treatment to unreliable, foreign-controlled energy sources over dependable, American-made energy,” according to the press release announcing the move.
This is just the latest in a series of actions the administration has taken targeting renewables, particularly wind. For more on Trump’s all-out war against America's biggest source of non-emitting energy, here’s my colleague Jael Holzman.
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The Chevrolet Bolt.Bill Pugliano/Getty Images
General Motors is preparing to import batteries from Chinese giant CATL despite steep tariffs imposed by Trump. The automaker is buying the batteries to power the second-generation Chevrolet Bolt electric vehicle, in what The Wall Street Journal described as “a supply-chain Band-Aid for a company that touts extensive investments in U.S. battery manufacturing.”
The imports are meant to hold GM over for two years until the Detroit giant and its Korean partner LG Energy Solution can complete work on U.S. manufacturing sites to provide a domestic source of lower-cost batteries, according to Journal reporter Christopher Otts. GM’s EV sales surged in July following the introduction of the electric version of the popular Chevrolet Equinox SUV, in one of the brightest spots for the American EV market this summer.
California lawmakers are proposing a radical solution to curb rising electricity rates. Bills moving through the state’s legislature would use money raised from state bonds to help pay for the hugely expensive process of expanding the power grid and upgrading its equipment to better withstand wildfires, Canary Media’s Jeff St. John reported. The legislation would force the state’s big three utilities to accept public financing for a portion of the tens of billions of dollars they plan to spend on the power lines. The proposals come as steep rate hikes across the country become a political hot button ahead of next year’s midterm elections. As Robinson put it, “when you look across the power system, virtually every trend is setting us up for electricity price spikes.”
The sustainability data company Watershed announced a new partnership this morning with the Stanford Sustainable Solutions Lab to preserve the EPA’s model for carbon accounting. Dubbed “Cornerstone,” the project “will be a hub for open access” to software designed to assess Scope 3 emissions, the planet-heating pollution that comes from indirect downstream activities in a supply chain. “By combining the most trusted environmental data models and keeping them open to the world, we hope to help companies and organizations build and maintain momentum on sustainability,” Watershed’s co-founder Christian Anderson said in a statement. Wesley Ingwersen, the former EPA lead and architect behind the federal model, will serve as the initiative’s technical director.
The British government’s decision in May to hand back sovereignty over the Chagos Island to Mauritius more than two centuries after seizing the Indian Ocean archipelago and forcing out its residents to make way for a military base created a political uproar in the United Kingdom earlier this year. But British rule over the island chain yielded at least one major benefit beyond military defense. A new study found that the supersized Marine Protected Area the U.K. established in 2010 protected large ocean animals throughout much of their lifecycle. Scientists tracked sea turtles, manta rays and seabirds in the nearly 250,000-square-mile sanctuary. In total, 95% of tracking locations showed the area “is large enough to protect these wandering animals” which travel far to forage, breed and migrate. By contrast, the study from Exeter and Heriot-Watt universities found that seabirds in marine areas with smaller than 40,000 square miles “would be less well protected.”
Congressional Democrats will have to trust the administration to allow renewables projects through. That may be too big an ask.
How do you do a bipartisan permitting deal if the Republicans running the government don’t want to permit anything Democrats like?
The typical model for a run at permitting reform is that a handful of Republicans and Democrats come together and draw up a plan that would benefit renewable developers, transmission developers, and the fossil fuel industry by placing some kind of limit on the scope and extent of federally-mandated environmental reviews. Last year’s Energy Permitting Reform Act, for instance, co-sponsored by Republican John Barrasso and Independent Joe Manchin, included time limits on environmental reviews, mandatory oil and gas lease sales, siting authority for interstate transmission, and legal clarity for mining projects. That passed through the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee but got no further.
During a House hearing in July, California Representative Scott Peters, a Democrat, bragged that a bill he’d introduced with Republican Dusty Johnson to help digitize permitting had won support from both the Natural Resources Defense Council and the American Petroleum Institute — two advocacy groups not typically speaking in harmony. (He’s not the only one taking a crack at permitting reform, though: Another bipartisan House effort sponsored by House Natural Resources Committee chairman Bruce Westerman and moderate Maine Democrat Jared Golden would limit when National Environmental Policy Act-mandated reviews happen, install time limits for making claims, and restrict judicial oversight of the NEPA process.)
But unless Democrats trust the Trump administration to actually allow renewables projects to go forward, his proposal could be dead on arrival. Since the signing of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act on July 4, the executive branch has been on the warpath against renewables, especially wind. With the Trump administration’s blessing, OBBBA restricted tax credits for renewable projects, both by accelerating the phaseout timeline for the credits (projects have until July of next year to start construction, or until the end of 2027 to be placed in service) and by imposing harsh new restrictions on developers’ business relationships with China or Chinese companies. Mere days after he signed the final bill into law, Trump directed the Internal Revenue Service to write tougher guidance governing what it means to start construction, potentially narrowing the window to qualify still further.
“I think all of this fuzz coming out of the Trump administration makes trust among Democrats a lot harder to achieve,” Peters told me this week.
In recent weeks, Trump’s Department of the Interior has issued memos calling for political reviews of effectively all new renewables permits and instituting strict new land use requirements that will be all but impossible for wind developments to meet. His Department of Transportation, meanwhile, insinuated that the department under the previous administration had ignored safety concerns related to radio frequencies while instituting onerous new setback requirements for renewables development near roadways.
Peters acknowledged that bipartisan permitting reform may be a heavy lift for his fellow Democrats — “a lot of Democrats didn’t come to Congress to make permitting oil and gas easier,” he told me — but that considering the high proportion of planned projects that are non-emitting, it would still be worth it to make all projects move faster.
That said, he conceded that his argument “loses a lot of force” if none of those planned non-emitting projects that happen to be solar or wind can get their federal permits approved. “How can I even make a deal on energy unless I get some assurance that will be honored by the President?” Peters told me.
Other energy and climate experts broadly supportive of investment-led approaches to combatting climate change still think that Democrats should push on with a permitting deal.
“All of this raises the importance of a bipartisan Congressional permitting reform bill that contains executive branch discretion to deny routine permits for American energy resources,” Princeton professor and Heatmap contributor Jesse Jenkins posted on X. “Seems like there's a lot of reasons for both sides to ensure America's approach to siting energy resources doesn't keep ping-ponging back and forth every four years.”
But permitting reform supporters are aware of the awkward situation the president’s unilateral actions against renewables puts the whole enterprise in.
“The administration’s recent measures are suboptimal policy and no doubt worsen the odds of enacting a technology-neutral permitting reform deal,” Pavan Venkatakrishnan, an infrastructure fellow at the Institute for Progress, told me.
At the same time, he argued that Democrats should still try to seek a deal, pointing to the high demand for electrons of any type. Not even the Trump administration can entirely choke off demand for renewables, so permitting reform could still be worth doing to ensure that as much as can evade the administration’s booby traps can eventually get built.
“Projects remain at the mercy of a burdensome regulatory regime,” Venkatakrishnan said. “Democrats should remain committed to an ambitious permitting deal — the best way to reduce deployment timelines and costs for all technologies, including solar-and-storage.”
Venkatakrishnan also suggested that Democrats could, in a bipartisan deal, seek to roll back some of the executive branch actions, including the Interior memo subjecting wind and solar to heightened review or the executive order on the definition of “begin construction.” There would be a precedent for such an action — the 2024 Manchin-Barrasso permitting reform bill attempted to scrap the pause on liquified natural gas approvals that the Biden administration had implemented. But then of course, that didn’t ever become law. (Manchin and congressional Republicans were able to clear the way to permitting a specific project, the Mountain Valley Pipeline in a larger bipartisan deal.)
What could unlock a deal, Yogin Kothari, a former congressional staffer and the chief strategy officer of the SEMA Coalition, a domestic solar manufacturing group, told me, would be the Trump administration getting actively involved. “The administration is probably going to have to lead,” Kothari said. “It’s going to be up to folks in the administration to go to the Hill and say, We do need this, and this is what it’s going to mean, and we’re going to implement this in good faith.”
This would require a delicate balancing act — the Trump administration would have to think there’s enough in a deal for their favored energy and infrastructure projects to make it worth perhaps rolling back some of their anti-renewables campaign.
“The administration is going to have to convince Democrats that it’s not permitting reform just for a subset of industries,” i.e. oil, gas, and coal, “but it is really technology neutral permanent reform,” Kothari said. “On the Senate side, it comes down to whether seven Senate Democrats feel like they can trust the admin to actually implement things in a way that is helpful across the board for energy dominance.”
One reason the administration itself may have to make commitments is because Congressional Democrats may not trust Republicans to stand behind legislation they support and vote for, Peters told me.
“Obviously we’d have to get some face-to-face understanding that if we make a deal, they’re going to live by the deal,” he said.
Peters pointed to the handful of Republicans who successfully negotiated for a longer runway for renewable tax credits, only to see Trump move almost immediately to tighten up eligibility for those tax credits as reason enough for skepticism. He also cited the cuts to previously agreed-upon spending that the Trump administration pushed through Congress on a party line vote as evidence that existing law and deals aren’t necessarily stable in Trump’s Washington.
“If we do a deal — Republicans and Democrats in Congress, the House and Senate, get together and make an agreement — we have to have assurance that the President will back us,” Peters told me.
No bipartisan deal is ever easy to come by, but then historically, “everybody lives by it,” he said. “I think that may be changing under this administration, and I think it makes everything tougher.”