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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 everycourt 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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The administration is doubling down on an April 20 end date for the traffic control program.
Congestion pricing has only been in effect in New York City for three months, but its rollout has been nearly as turbulent as the 18-year battle to implement it in the first place.
Trump’s Department of Transportation escalated its threat this week to retaliate against New York if the state’s Metropolitan Transit Authority, or MTA, does not shut down the tolling program by April 20.
The federal agency reposted a CBS New York story on social media that purported it had agreed to allow congestion pricing to remain in place through October, calling the story “a complete lie.”
“Make no mistake — the Trump Administration and USDOT will not hesitate to use every tool at our disposal in response to non-compliance later this month,” the agency said in the post.
The post did not say what those tools might be, but a previous post from Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy on March 20 made a veiled threat to withhold funding from the state if it did not shut down the tolling program. “The billions of dollars the federal government sends to New York are not a blank check,” he said.
Duffy notified the MTA on February 19 that he was rescinding federal approval of its congestion pricing program, which charges a $9 fee for drivers who enter New York City’s central business district. The toll had only just gone into effect in early January, but there was already evidence that it was reducing traffic. The MTA immediately filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York challenging Duffy’s actions.
The CBS New York story reported on a joint letter that the MTA and USDOT submitted to the presiding judge mapping out a timeline for the case to proceed. The MTA agreed to file an amended complaint by April 18, and the DOT agreed to respond to it by May 27. Following that, the timeline allows for the back-and-forth over evidence leading up to a ruling to potentially stretch until late October. Both parties called for the judge to reach a decision based on written arguments, without a formal trial.
Despite agreeing to this timeline for the case — the whole point of which is to determine the legality of DOT’s order to terminate congestion pricing — the DOT maintains that New York City must stop charging drivers by April 20.
The MTA refuses to do so. “Congestion pricing is in effect,” Regina Kaplan, the attorney for the MTA, said during a pretrial conference call on Wednesday. “We believe it's working, and as we stated in our complaints, we don't intend to turn it off unless there's an order from your honor that we need to do so.”
In response, Dominika Tarczynska, from the U.S. attorney’s office, told the judge that Duffy is “still evaluating what DOT’s options are if New York City does not comply, and there has been no final decision as to, what, if anything will occur on April 20.”
The president’s executive order is already too late to save at least one Arizona plant.
The Trump administration is trying to save coal again. But despite the president’s seemingly forceful actions, there’s little indication he’ll be any more successful at it this time than he was the last time around.
Backed by coal miners in hard hats and high visibility jackets, Trump on Tuesday announced a series of executive orders meant to boost “beautiful, clean coal.” The orders lift barriers to extracting coal on public lands, ask the Department of Energy to consider metallurgical coal a critical mineral, push out compliance with some air quality rules by two years, instruct the Department of Energy to use emergency authorities to keep coal plants open, and direct theattorney general to go after state climate laws that Trump claimed “discriminate” against greenhouse gas-emitting energy sources like coal.
What’s not clear is how much these orders will boost the coal industry, let alone save it. It’s not even clear whether the specific plant Trump said he was saving will burn coal again.
During the announcement, Trump said that his administration would keep open the Cholla Generating Station, an Arizona coal plant that began operating in 1962. The plant’s final two units were slated to be retired this year.
“We will ensure our nation’s critical coal plants remain online and operational,” Trump said. “To that end, I’m instructing Secretary Wright to save the Cholla coal plant in Arizona.”
But according to Arizona Public Service, the utility that co-owns the plant, the plant has already stopped generating power. A spokesperson told me the utility was “aware” of the president’s statement and is “evaluating what it means for the plant.” APS plans on preserving the site, possibly for nuclear power and has “procured reliable and cost-effective generation that will replace the energy previously generated by Cholla Power Plant,” the spokesperson said.
The Department of Energy didn’t return a request for comment.
Trump’s orders repeatedly cite Section 202 of the Federal Power Act, which allows the Secretary of Energy “during a continuance of a war in which the United States is engaged or when an emergency exists” to allow energy facilities to continue to operate on a temporary basis that otherwise would not.
In 2017, the first Trump administration used Section 202 to allow two coal plant units in Virginia to continue operating occasionally when necessary for grid reliability, despite their having been due to close to comply with air quality regulations. Two years later, the electricity market PJM told the Department of Energy that a new transmission line had rendered the emergency authorization unnecessary, and the plants closed in 2019.
The executive orders “don’t seem to realize that natural gas killed coal and if they aren’t banning fracking, none of this matters,” Grid Strategies president Rob Gramlich wrote on X. “Nothing here seems to change the economics, and it’s the economics that have held coal-fired power production down.” (Gramlich is also a Heatmap contributor.)
Of course, the United States has plenty of coal. But many of its uses — including electricity generation — can be easily substituted with other sources, such as natural gas. That’s why U.S. coal production has been falling since 2008.
“Coal is increasingly uncompetitive in deregulated electricity markets,” Seaver Wang, director of climate and energy at the Breakthrough Institute, told me. That’s because operating a coal-fired power plant comes with all sorts of extra costs that natural gas doesn’t, including the transportation and storage of coal — compare the barges and trains required to move rocks to the neat pipelines gas flows through. The energy research group Energy Innovation has foundthat nearly all coal plants are more expensive to run than the combinations of wind, solar, and storage that might replace them.
“I don’t see the demand drivers for this to remotely bring coal back. I have no idea who would ever invest as a result of this executive order or related policies,” Wang said.
While existing coal plants may stick around for another few years as a result of heightened demand or relaxed regulatory burdens, that’s a far cry from building new coal plants or opening new coal mines. A large coal plant hasn’t opened in the United States since 2013. In 2024, wind and solar generation surpassed coal generation on the grid, according to Ember.
Some 12.3 gigawatts of coal capacity are scheduled to be retired in 2025, according to the Energy Information Administration, making up two-thirds of planned retirements by capacity this year. But coal retirements have also been slowing down, according to EIA data. The 7.5 gigawatts retired last year was the least since 2011.
Jefferies analysts estimated that over 12 gigawatts of coal capacity is due for retirement in 2028. That could be pushed back thanks to the relaxation of the mercury and air toxics rules the president announced Tuesday.
“There is logic to delaying coal retirements to serve incremental high-density load customers like data centers,” the Jefferies analysts wrote. “Not all coal retirements are alike, and the economic-driven transitions will continue to draw support, but the calculus will change with more expensive renewables and natural gas alternatives from tariffs and potential changes to the Inflation Reduction Act.”
This is not the first time a Trump White House has tried to rescue this declining industry. During his first term, then Secretary of Energy Rick Perry proposed that coal and nuclear plants at risk of closing because of low demand have guaranteed payments, known as cost recovery, in order to stay open. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, with a Republican majority, said no to Perry by a vote of 5-0.
Despite the president’s promises throughout his campaign, the coal industry shrunk by a huge degree during his first term, part of a longer trend that brought down coal’s share in the electricity generating sector from about half in 2007 to 16% in 2023. During Trump’s time in office, coal mining jobs declined from 51,000 to 38,000 during the pandemic, and have recovered only to 40,000 today.
When it comes to mines, Wang said, investors would likely be leery of putting money into the sector, given the strong likelihood that a future Democratic administration would be far less friendly to coal. Coal investors “are going to be accounting for the fact that any policy swings are short lived,” Wang told me.
“We all know that lead times for mines are long. Everyone knows this administration only has four years in office. I don’t really expect that this will drive a lot of investment interest,” Wang said.
The critical mineral designation for coal, if it makes it through the Department of Energy’s process, may not change much initially, Wang explained. It could lead to some “beneficial outcomes in terms of agency prioritization,” he said. But much critical minerals policy is still being worked out, and there are few programs that specifically and programmatically target the critical minerals included on lists maintained by either the Department of Energy or the United States Geological Service.
“A lot of the politicking over critical minerals designation is about the expectation of future outcomes that would arise from broad bipartisan interest in critical minerals as a category,” Wang said.
And unlike with other critical minerals, the U.S. is essentially self-sufficient for coal’s industrial and energy uses. We’re not talking about graphite here, let alone praseodymium.
At least so far, the coal industry has not thrilled to having a more friendly figure in the White House, although the share prices of some coal companies are up in afternoon trading. Coal exports in January, the most recent month for which there is data, stood at 7.7 million short tons, compared to 8.4 million short tons a year prior. Central Appalachia coal prices stand at $78 per short ton, compared to $77.35 a year ago.
If nothing else, the announcements provided Trump with the type of photo-op he craves. He even got the opportunity to bash Hillary Clinton. “One thing I learned about the coal miners … they want to mine coal. She was gonna put them in a high-tech industry where you make little cell phones and things,” he told the audience in the White House. Of course, Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick on Sunday touted the “army of millions and millions of people screwing in little, little screws to make iPhones” that Trump’s tariffs will also help generate. But no matter what the president says or does, the coal industry may still be screwed.
Current conditions: States left flooded from recent severe storms are now facing freezing temperatures • Firefighters are battling blazes in Scotland due to unusually warm and dry weather • Hospitals in India are reporting a 25% rise in heat-related illnesses compared to last year. Yesterday the country’s northern state of Rajasthan reached 115 degrees Fahrenheit, about 13 degrees higher than seasonal norms.
President Trump’s sweeping new tariffs came into effect at 12:01 a.m. on Wednesday, rattling the world’s markets and raising the risk of a global trade war. The levies, which include a 104% tariff on Chinese imports, triggered a mass sell-off in U.S. Treasury bonds, hiking yields as investors worry about a potential recession and flock to alternative safe-haven investments. The price of oil fell for the fifth day in a row to its lowest since 2021, with Brent futures at about $61 per barrel, well below the $65 level that oil producers need in order to turn a profit drilling new wells nationwide. As Heatmap’s Robinson Meyer explained recently, the tariffs are an outright catastrophe for the oil industry because they threaten a global downturn that would hurt oil demand at a time when oil cartel OPEC+ is increasing its output. Trump’s slate of tariffs will impact the cost of just about everything, from gasoline to e-bikes to LNG to cars. China imposed retaliatory tariffs, increasing them from 34% to 84% in response to the U.S. escalation. Meanwhile, the European Union will vote today on whether to impose its own retaliatory fees. European shares plummeted, as did Asian and Australian stocks.
As Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo reported today, a new study published in the journal Nature Climate Change finds that the transition to clean energy could create a world that is less exposed to energy price shocks and other energy-related trade risks than the world we have today. “We have such a concentration of fossil resources in a few countries,” Steven Davis, a professor of Earth system science at Stanford and the lead author of the study, told Pontecorvo. Transition minerals, by contrast, are less geographically concentrated, so “you have this ability to hedge a little bit across the system.”
The White House issued several executive orders on Tuesday aimed at boosting U.S. coal production and use, pointing to rising electricity demand from artificial intelligence. The series of orders direct federal agencies to:
Trump also said he plans to invoke the Defense Production Act to spur mining operations, “a move that could put the federal purse behind reviving the fading industry,” Reutersreported. Coal is the dirtiest fossil fuel, and its use has been in decline since 2007. As of last year, wind and solar combined surpassed coal for U.S. electricity generation.
President Trump signed a separate executive order on Tuesday that targets climate laws at the state level and seeks to remove threats to U.S. “energy dominance,” including “illegitimate impediments to the identification, development, siting, production, investment in, or use of domestic energy resources — particularly oil, natural gas, coal, hydropower, geothermal, biofuel, critical mineral, and nuclear energy resources.” The order references “state overreach” and suggests that some state and local governments are overstepping their constitutional authority in regulating energy through interstate trade barriers or fines on energy producers. It calls out New York and Vermont for their climate change superfund laws that require fossil fuel companies to pay for their planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions. And it mentions California’s carbon cap-and-trade system.
The executive order directs the U.S. attorney general to compile a list of all state and local laws “purporting to address ‘climate change,’” along with ESG, environmental justice, carbon taxes, and anything involving “carbon or ‘greenhouse gas’ emissions,” and put a stop to their enforcement. “The federal government cannot unilaterally strip states’ independent constitutional authority,” New York Governor Kathy Hochul and New Mexico Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham said in a statement. “We are a nation of states — and laws — and we will not be deterred. We will keep advancing solutions to the climate crisis that safeguard Americans’ fundamental right to clean air and water, create good-paying jobs, grow the clean energy economy, and make our future healthier and safer.”
Wood Mackenzie issued its annual U.S. wind energy report this week. It finds that 2024 marked the worst year for new onshore wind capacity in the past decade, with just 3.9 gigawatts installed. Through 2029, the firm expects developers to install another 33 gigawatts of onshore capacity, 6.6 gigawatts of offshore capacity, and carry out 5.5 gigawatts of upgrades and refurbishings. The five-year outlook marks “a 40% decrease quarter-on-quarter from a previous total of 75.8 gigawatts.” The report warns of enduring “uncertainty” thanks to the Trump administration’s attacks on the wind industry. “Growth will happen, but it’s going to be slower,” wrote Michelle Lewis at Electrek. “[Trump] has managed to get some projects canceled, and he’ll make things more of a slog over the next few years.”
President Trump has pulled the U.S. out of international talks to decarbonize the shipping industry and vowed to reciprocate against any fees on U.S. ships, Politicoreported. The International Maritime Organization's Maritime Environmental Protection Conference is unfolding this week in London, where negotiators are trying to agree on a policy to curb shipping pollution through carbon taxation. Shipping accounts for about 3% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Trump reportedly sent a letter to the conference saying “the U.S. rejects any and all efforts to impose economic measures against its ships based on GHG emissions or fuel choice. Should such a blatantly unfair measure go forward, our government will consider reciprocal measures so as to offset any fees charged to U.S. ships and compensate the American people for any other economic harm from any adopted GHG emissions measures.”
“What’s next, a mandate that Americans must commute by horse and buggy?”
–Kit Kennedy, a managing director at the Natural Resources Defense Council, in response to Trump’s executive orders aimed at revitalizing the U.S. coal industry.