Federal Climate Policy
Listing Trump’s Environment and Energy Executive Orders
I’m counting 35 so far. But I wouldn’t be shocked to learn that I’d missed something.
I’ve put together a list of all the Trump 2.0 executive orders that I could identify dealing with environment or energy. Just to keep you reading, I should tell you that the most important ones are near the end. Whatever you might say about Trump, no one can question his zeal for eliminating environmental protections.
CONTINUE READINGWhy Repeal the Endangerment Finding?
The aims may be overturning Mass v. EPA and avoiding new rulemakings.
Much will be said about the weakness of the various justifications EPA and the Department of Energy offered yesterday about why greenhouse gases do not endanger public health and welfare under the Clean Air Act. Those justifications are, indeed, remarkably weak. For example, DOE’s argument that economic damages appear to be lower than economists estimate …
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CONTINUE READINGStates Become “Norm Sustainers” on Environmental Justice
Guest Contributor Sharmila L. Murthy explains how state Attorneys General are acting as important counterweights to the federal government on environmental justice.
Guest contributor Sharmila L. Murthy is a Professor of Law and Public Policy at Northeastern University In the wake of misleading and inaccurate characterizations by the Trump Administration that wrongly label environmental justice activities as illegal discrimination, the Attorneys General of California, Massachusetts, and New York, joined by the Attorneys General of Arizona, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Minnesota, …
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CONTINUE READINGTrump’s Funniest Executive Orders
Yes, they’re destructive and often cruel. But sometimes, they’re also unintentionally funny.
Imagine some later historian flipping through the pages of the Federal Register and coming upon Executive Order 14264, “Maintaining Acceptable Water Pressure in Showerhead.” Think of it: he went to incredible lengths to attain the ultimate power, and this is what Trump does with it. Or there’s the one where he aims the full might of the U.S. government at the goal of “Ending Procurement and Forced Use of Paper Straws.” Who says Americans can’t dream big anymore?
CONTINUE READINGWhy is EPA at War with Its Own Employees?
The Drain is a weekly roundup of environmental and climate news from Legal Planet.
While many of us prepared to celebrate Independence Day last week, a group of employees from the Environmental Protection Agency were bravely speaking out about what they see as their boss “recklessly undermining the EPA mission” of protecting human health and the environment. In a now-infamous letter sent to EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin, hundreds of …
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CONTINUE READINGShortchanging the Environment While Making NEPA More Chaotic
Trump replaced a coherent set of rules governing the executive branch with a welter of agency-specific regulations.
In one of Trump’s first executive orders, he eliminated a centralized system that Jimmy Carter initially set up to issue regulations governing environmental impact statements. Instead, he called on each agency to issue its own regulations, which seems to have caused the predictable amount of confusion. There seems to be little rhyme or reason in the variations
CONTINUE READINGThe Quiet Erosion of Federal Legal Internships
Guest Contributor Emma Rose Shore, a UCLA Law student, reflects on the current administration’s attack on civil servants and the cancellation of summer internships.
One morning last October, I got really exciting news. After an interview with a senior attorney at the Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Enforcement and Compliance, I was offered a position in the National Environmental Training Institute’s Summer Honors Program (NETI). My giddiness must have been obvious, because the interviewer asked if I wanted to …
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CONTINUE READINGThe Emperor’s New Endangerment Theory (Wrap-Up)
Trump’s EPA says carbon emissions from U.S. power plants are too insignificant to regulate.
U.S. power plants emit 1.5 billion tons of carbon dioxide a year, a little less than the entire country of Russia. The Trump Administration is proposing to end all regulation of carbon emissions by power plants, on the theory that these emissions should be considered insignificant. They have some complicated legal arguments , but the arguments break down the more closely you look at them.
CONTINUE READINGThe Emperor’s New Endangerment Theory (Part III)
How did EPA get to the absurd conclusion that 1.5 billion tons of carbon emissions aren’t significant? Well might you ask.
There is a very good chance that a court would strike down a EPA’s current finding that carbon emissions from the U.S. power sector are too insignificant to regulate. EPA’s effort to explain its ultimate conclusion rests on a hodgepodge of poorly analyzed considerations, which obviously have been reverse engineered to lead to EPA’s preferred conclusion.
CONTINUE READINGThe Emperor’s New Endangerment Theory (Part II)
To justify a decision not to regulate CO2 from power plants, EPA had to twist statutory language beyond all recognition.
According to EPA, carbon emissions from the U.S. power sector are too insignificant to warrant regulation. This is a bizarre conclusion: U.S. power sector’s emissions are around 6.5 billion tons, just below Russia’s total emissions from all sectors. To reach this conclusion, EPA has proposed a novel reading of the Clean Air Act. In EPA’s view, before it could regulate those emissions, it would first have to make a formal finding that they “cause or significantly contribute” to climate change, and (2) that this has to be judged on the basis of the sector’s percentage of total global carbon emissions. The statute doesn’t say either of those things.
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