Trump lies about Supreme Court to achieve climate change protection demolition.

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This week the Environmental Protection Agency took the momentous—and disastrous—step of repealing the government’s “endangerment finding” that greenhouse gases “harm public health or welfare,” which is a prerequisite for regulating these pollutants under the Clean Air Act. The text of the Clean Air Act and robust congressional debates at the time of its enactment bely EPA’s central justification for repealing the endangerment finding and the greenhouse gas emission standards for motor vehicles—that the Clean Air Act of 1970 was concerned only with local and regional pollutants. It wasn’t. But EPA’s repeal contains even more flaws. In particular, the agency relies on three key Supreme Court climate change cases to support its action but mischaracterizes each of them.

Most significantly, EPA mangles Massachusetts v. EPA, the 2007 case in which the Supreme Court decided that greenhouse gases are “air pollutants” for the purposes of the Clean Air Act. According to EPA, that case involved an interpretation of the statute’s general definition of “air pollutant” and was not a decision specific to the law’s section 202(a)(1), which governs the regulation of motor-vehicle emissions. Thus, EPA contends that “Massachusetts did not consider or have reason to interpret the scope of the EPA’s authority” under the portion of the Clean Air act releveant to vehicle emissions.

This proposition is flatly wrong. Indeed, in Massachusetts v. EPA, the Supreme Court granted certiorari to decide a specific question: “Whether the EPA Administrator has authority to regulate carbon dioxide and other air pollutants associated with climate change under section 202(a)(1).” In its opinion, the court reiterated this question: “The first question is whether §202(a)(1) of the Clean Air Act authorizes EPA to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from new motor vehicles in the event that it forms a ‘judgment’ that such emissions contribute to climate change.’” And in the next sentence the Supreme Court provided the answer: “We have little trouble concluding that it does.”

EPA would be wrong even in the absence of this explicit language in the opinion. Its revisionist reading of Massachusetts also conflicts with that bedrock principle that a case holding is the narrowest principle necessary to resolve the controversy. And that principle is that greenhouse gases are “air pollutants” that may be regulated under section 202(a)(1). EPA’s suggestion that the Supreme Court decided the broader question but not the narrower 202(a)(1) question turns basic legal reasoning on its head.

EPA’s mischaracterization of Supreme Court caselaw is not confined to Massachusetts v. EPA. The agency also provides a grievously misleading account of the 2014 Supreme Court opinion in Utility Air Regulatory Group v. EPA. That case has four key components. First, the Supreme Court held that EPA lacked the authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from certain stationary sources. Second, however, it also held that the agency had the authority to regulate the greenhouse gas emissions of other sources. Third, as a result of these two holdings, as Justice Antonin Scalia noted in announcing the court’s opinion, EPA could regulate the vast majority of the emissions—over 90 percent—that were at stake in the case. And, fourth, Justice Scalia’s majority opinion reaffirmed the holding in Massachusetts v. EPA, which it described as “’authoriz[ing] EPA to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from new motor vehicles’” if the agency “form[ed] a ‘judgment’ that such emissions contribute to climate change.’”

Yet, in its repeal of the endangerment finding, EPA repeatedly refers to the first component of this decision to cast doubt on its authority to regulate greenhouse gases. But the agency never mentions the remaining three components, which are significantly more important and which paint a very different picture.

Similarly, EPA misconstrues the core holding of West Virginia v. EPA, decided in 2022, which struck down certain EPA greenhouse gas emission standards for power plants. The problem that the court identified was that the regulation was premised on the requirement of a specified proportion of “generation shifting” from dirtier power sources to clean ones: from coal to natural gas and from coal and natural gas to renewables. The court held that EPA did not have the authority to require such generation shifting in Clean Air Act power-sector standards. But the court recognized that “there is an obvious difference between (1) issuing a rule that may end up causing an incidental loss of coal’s market share, and (2) simply announcing what the market share of coal, natural gas, wind, and solar must be, and then requiring plants to reduce operations or subsidize their competitors to get there.” The court viewed the first category as an uncontroversial consequence of standard environmental regulation—indeed, it is a ubiquitous consequence of practically all regulation. Only the second category is impermissible for power-sector standards.

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In its regulation of the greenhouse gas emissions of vehicles, which started in the Obama administration, EPA has never required a specific market shift from internal combustion engine vehicles to electric vehicles. These regulations are therefore conceptually different from the one struck down in West Virginia v. EPA. Also, in EPA’s earlier vehicle regulations for greenhouse gases, the market shift that resulted from the regulation was minor and clearly “incidental,” since manufacturers primarily met the regulatory standard by making their internal combustion vehicles more efficient. And, even if a court were to find that the Biden administration’s later standards were impermissibly premised on large market shift toward EVs, the proper remedy would be to strike down those standards, not to eliminate EPA’s ability to put in place any greenhouse gas standards for motor vehicles, including ones that did not have this feature.

Lee Zeldin, the EPA Administrator, repeatedly says that his primary concern is with following the law. His characterization of the key Supreme Court cases on EPA’s authority to regulate greenhouse gases tells a very different story.

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