For all his bluster and bloviating, President Trump’s actual environmental policy agenda has been pretty paltry. While his administration is doing everything it can to allow the Koch brothers to pollute as much as possible, it turns out that the courts are serving as a relatively reliable roadblock.
That’s the core finding of a new report by Dena Adler from Columbia Law’s Sabin Center, which provides a detailed picture of climate litigation in the second year of the Trump administration, from what actions Trump’s taking to how good and decent people are responding.
The report categorizes the litigation into five buckets: defending Obama-era policies, enforcing transparency and scientific integrity laws, making climate part of the environmental review process, pushing climate protections through the courts, and then finally the cases being made for deregulating and otherwise reducing how much the government protects Americans from climate change.
It also gives a comprehensive lay of the land of ongoing litigation, and concludes with what rulings and outcomes we’ve already seen.
Overall, the report looks at 154 relevant cases, a subset of which are executive branch moves to deregulate climate change in Sabin Center’s deregulation tracker (others are things like FOIA cases). So how successful has the administration been in legally justifying its climate change denial?
In 2017 and 2018, there were a dozen cases that relied on climate change “as an issue of fact or law” in the process of rolling back Obama-era regulations. These are the cases where the issue is climate change itself, and not some other technical issue about whether or not the executive branch has the authority to act, if someone has standing to sue, et cetera.
In those twelve cases centered on climate change, courts have ruled in Trump’s favor zero times. Trump’s already lost or had a case dismissed 10 times, and two are pending. As the report details, all these losses “are building a body of precedent” to prevent the government from deregulating and making “decisions that lack an evidentiary basis.”
On the other side of the same “policy should be based in fact” coin, courts have also consistently “found that the Trump administration violated requirements of environmental review” on the Keystone XL permit, coal lease moratorium, and offshore oil leases. These rulings make it clear that despite being personally untethered from reality, the “administration cannot shirk statutory obligations to conduct environmental review… or promote fossil fuel extraction beyond the limits of its statutory authorities to act.”
This makes sense. As we’ve discussed before, the Administrative Procedures Act requires policy decisions to be justified by facts. Unsurprisingly, facts have proven to be a reliable way to stymie Trump.
As the report’s conclusion reads: “extralegal rollbacks and other attempts to undermine climate protections by overreaching executive authority, violating statutory requirements for environmental review, or flouting administrative law have been constrained by the courts through vigilant litigation.”
Or, in English: Trump’s attempts to break the climate are breaking the law.
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