{"id":488335,"date":"2026-02-20T19:57:08","date_gmt":"2026-02-20T19:57:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/488335\/"},"modified":"2026-02-20T19:57:08","modified_gmt":"2026-02-20T19:57:08","slug":"trump-lies-about-supreme-court-to-achieve-climate-change-protection-demolition","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/488335\/","title":{"rendered":"Trump lies about Supreme Court to achieve climate change protection demolition."},"content":{"rendered":"

Sign up for Executive Dysfunction<\/a>, a weekly newsletter that surfaces under-the-radar stories about what Trump is doing to the law\u2014and how the law is pushing back.<\/p>\n

This week the Environmental Protection Agency took the momentous\u2014and disastrous\u2014step of repealing the government\u2019s \u201cendangerment finding\u201d that greenhouse gases \u201charm public health or welfare,\u201d which is a prerequisite for regulating these pollutants under the Clean Air Act. The text<\/a> of the Clean Air Act and robust congressional debates<\/a> at the time of its enactment bely EPA\u2019s central justification<\/a> for repealing the endangerment finding and the greenhouse gas emission standards for motor vehicles\u2014that the Clean Air Act of 1970 was concerned only with local and regional pollutants. It wasn\u2019t. But EPA\u2019s repeal<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

Most significantly, EPA mangles Massachusetts v. EPA, the 2007 case in which the Supreme Court decided that greenhouse gases are \u201cair pollutants\u201d for the purposes of the Clean Air Act. According to EPA, that case involved an interpretation of the statute\u2019s general definition of \u201cair pollutant\u201d and was not a decision specific to the law\u2019s section 202(a)(1), which governs the regulation of motor-vehicle emissions. Thus, EPA contends that \u201cMassachusetts did not consider or have reason to interpret the scope of the EPA\u2019s authority\u201d under the portion of the Clean Air act releveant to vehicle emissions.<\/p>\n

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This proposition is flatly wrong. Indeed, in Massachusetts v. EPA, the Supreme Court granted certiorari<\/a> to decide a specific question: \u201cWhether the EPA Administrator has authority to regulate carbon dioxide and other air pollutants associated with climate change under section 202(a)(1).\u201d In its opinion<\/a>, the court reiterated this question: \u201cThe first question is whether \u00a7202(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 \u2018judgment\u2019 that such emissions contribute to climate change.\u2019\u201d And in the next sentence the Supreme Court provided the answer: \u201cWe have little trouble concluding that it does.\u201d<\/p>\n

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<\/a> is the narrowest principle necessary to resolve the controversy. And that principle is that greenhouse gases are \u201cair pollutants\u201d that may be regulated under section 202(a)(1). EPA\u2019s suggestion that the Supreme Court decided the broader question but not the narrower 202(a)(1) question turns basic legal reasoning on its head.<\/p>\n

EPA\u2019s mischaracterization of Supreme Court caselaw is not confined to Massachusetts v. EPA.\u00a0The 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<\/a> the court\u2019s opinion, EPA could regulate the vast majority of the emissions\u2014over 90 percent\u2014that were at stake in the case. And, fourth, Justice Scalia\u2019s majority opinion reaffirmed the holding in Massachusetts v. EPA, which it described as \u201c\u2019authoriz[ing] EPA to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from new motor vehicles\u2019\u201d if the agency \u201cform[ed] a \u2018judgment\u2019 that such emissions contribute to climate change.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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 \u201cgeneration shifting\u201d 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 \u201cthere is an obvious difference between (1) issuing a rule that may end up causing an incidental loss of coal\u2019s 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.\u201d\u00a0The court viewed the first category as an uncontroversial consequence of standard environmental regulation\u2014indeed, it is a ubiquitous consequence of practically all regulation. Only the second category is impermissible for power-sector standards.<\/p>\n


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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\u2019s earlier vehicle regulations for greenhouse gases, the market shift that resulted from the regulation was minor and clearly \u201cincidental,\u201d 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\u2019s 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\u2019s ability to put in place any greenhouse gas standards for motor vehicles, including ones that did not have this feature.<\/p>\n

Lee Zeldin, the EPA Administrator, repeatedly says<\/a> that his primary concern is with following the law. His characterization of the key Supreme Court cases on EPA\u2019s authority to regulate greenhouse gases tells a very different story.<\/p>\n

Delivered every Thursday morning.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Sign up for Executive Dysfunction, a weekly newsletter that surfaces under-the-radar stories about what Trump is doing to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":488336,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[49,48,6093,1376,295,172163,66,1130,3903],"class_list":{"0":"post-488335","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-environment","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-climate-change","11":"tag-donald-trump","12":"tag-environment","13":"tag-jurisprudence","14":"tag-science","15":"tag-slate-plus","16":"tag-supreme-court"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/488335","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=488335"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/488335\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/488336"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=488335"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=488335"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=488335"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}