You’re reading Dispatch Energy, a regular dive into the politics, policy, and innovation shaping America’s energy future, featuring a roster of subject-matter experts including Alex Trembath, Philip Rossetti, Lynne Kiesling, Rory Johnston, and Roger Pielke Jr.
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You → read → Trembath
This month, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) formally proposed eliminating federal regulations on greenhouse gas emissions, the principal cause of global climate change, under the Clean Air Act.
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Agency → propose → Act
This comes after last year’s rescission of the EPA’s “endangerment finding,” the scientific basis for those regulations, and this summer’s partial repeal of specific regulatory rules advanced by the Biden Administration.
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This → come → Administration
This is merely the latest escalation of a nearly 20-year fight, with the Obama and Biden administrations championing emissions regulations as a key tool in the climate policy toolbelt and successive Trump administrations warning that the rules would cause catastrophic spikes in domestic energy prices.
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rules → champion → prices
Federal emissions regulations have been, and will remain, modest in real-world impact.
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regulations → remain → impact
Breaking out of this partisan cycle will require Democrats to admit that Clean Air Act regulations will not contribute meaningfully to decarbonization, while Republicans need to understand that some sort of federal regulations may be preferable to the mess of state-based rules and “climate liability” lawsuits that are likely to result from vacating EPA’s authority.
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that → break → authority
The EPA gained the authority to regulate greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane through a narrowly decided Supreme Court case.
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EPA → gain → case
During the second George W. Bush administration, 12 states, led by Massachusetts, petitioned the agency to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act, which had historically only covered “criteria pollutants” like sulfur and nitrogen oxides, ozone, and particulate matter.
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which → lead → oxides
The EPA denied the petition, and the Supreme Court ultimately sided with the petitioners in Massachusetts v. EPA in 2007.
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Court → deny → 2007
Since then, the EPA has had the authority to determine and execute regulations against any emissions the agency deemed to “endanger public health or welfare.”
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agency → have → health
Ozone, particulates, carbon monoxide, lead, and the other criteria pollutants are significantly more toxic than carbon dioxide and methane, which are emitted when fossil fuels are combusted but are also exhaled from animal life, including humans.
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fuels → emit → humans
Greenhouse gases are emitted in vastly larger volumes than most conventional pollutants—indeed, since the carbon in fossil fuels bonds with oxygen during combustion, the greenhouse emissions are actually more massive than the fuel burned to produce them.
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emissions → emit → them
Carbon is not a trace compound of a trivial economic activity; it is the essential element of the fossil fuels that provide the vast bulk of energy to modern human societies.
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that → provide → societies
Mitigating carbon emissions is not as technically simple as methods used to address criteria pollutants, such as installing smokestack scrubbers to reduce the pollution contributing to acid rain or catalytic converters in personal vehicles to prevent smog.
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Mitigating → mitigate → smog
And indeed, the Obama administration at one point endorsed a congressional effort to preempt these regulations.
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administration → endorse → regulations
The American Clean Energy and Security Act, also known as the Waxman-Markey legislation, would have created a national cap-and-trade program for carbon emissions, obviating the need for more traditional “command and control” regulations like those under the Clean Air Act.
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Act → know → Act
But after Waxman-Markey died in Congress, EPA regulations became the Obama White House’s preferred regulatory approach to climate change.
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regulations → die → change
Since then, these regulations have accomplished little, if any, emissions mitigation.
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regulations → accomplish → mitigation
President Barack Obama’s EPA proposed the Clean Power Plan in 2015 (which the Supreme Court stayed in 2016), President Donald Trump’s EPA proposed a different, much more limited version of the rule in 2019 (which the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals vacated in 2021), and President Joe Biden’s EPA proposed separate emissions rules for power plants and tailpipes in 2023.
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EPA → propose → 2023
Only one of these rules, Biden’s emissions standards for light- and medium-duty vehicles, ever went into effect, and that rule was functionally redundant to the longstanding Corporate Average Fuel Economy regulations overseen by the Department of Transportation.
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rule → go → Transportation
And of course Trump’s EPA has since repealed the whole of the Biden-era emissions regulation regime, and then some.
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EPA → repeal → regime
But even before these recent repeals, the judiciary spent much of the last decade narrowing the potential scope of federal emissions regulations.
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judiciary → spend → regulations
In the 2016 Clean Power Plan stay and in 2022’s West Virginia v. EPA ruling, the Supreme Court asserted that regulations on the electric power sector had to be enforced at the level of individual power plants, not the sector as a whole.
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regulations → assert → whole
This made it much harder to write regulations that would, for instance, compel a systemic shift from coal to gas or gas to zero-carbon sources like solar and nuclear.
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that → make → solar
With that ruling in hand, the Biden administration wrote power plant regulations predicated on deeply unrealistic assumptions about carbon capture technology and hydrogen co-firing at natural gas plants.
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administration → write → plants
Had Trump not taken back power in 2024, it’s likely that Biden’s “Clean Power Plan 2.0” would have been further picked apart by courts over its technical shortcomings.
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Plan → take → shortcomings
So it would be little exaggeration to say that, over 20 years, federal greenhouse emissions regulations have accomplished nothing in the real world.
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regulations → say → world
That uninspiring history has not led to the boring, staid policy discussion one might expect of regulations that have never really taken effect.
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that → lead → effect
When EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin announced plans to rescind the endangerment finding, climate scientist Michael Mann called the scientific statement “the primary tool that we have had to actually regulate carbon emissions and meet our obligations under various global agreements to address the climate crisis.”
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we → announce → crisis
Meanwhile, Zeldin described his regulatory repeal as “the largest deregulatory action in the history of the United States.”
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Zeldin → describe → States
For all the reasons articulated above, these repeals will have little impact on the trajectory of U.S. emissions, which have been steadily declining since 2007 for technological, not regulatory, reasons.
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which → articulate → reasons
But the Trump administration should tread carefully here, too.
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administration → tread → ?
Just as a national cap-and-trade program would have preempted the Clean Air Act emissions rules, EPA’s authority arguably preempts state-level emissions regulations and other forms of emissions liability.
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authority → preempt → liability
As experts at the law firm Van Ness Feldman recently observed, the Trump administration’s proposals “may complicate that argument because EPA has proposed that it lacks authority.”
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it → observe → authority
These issues will get adjudicated at the highest level next month when the Supreme Court hears Suncor v. Boulder, which could have implications for dozens of similar climate lawsuits around the country today.
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which → adjudicate → country
However the court rules in that case, it’s time to stop this partisan merry-go-round.
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it → rule → round
Neither the climate nor the U.S. energy system benefit from another round of sweeping repeals and bespoke rulemakings, nor from the open season of U.S. corporate climate liability the courts are currently sustaining.
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courts → benefit → liability
As of 2022, Congress has codified the EPA’s authority to regulate greenhouse emissions as well as criteria pollutants.
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Congress → codify → emissions
At least until Congress relitigates national emissions policy, those regulations should be consistent and modest, and they should preempt the mess of retroactive torts and consumer protection litigation underway in the U.S. court system right now.
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they → relitigate → system
Achieving this policy and political equilibrium will not be easy.
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policy → achieve → ?
…and 13 more, not listed.
The Aporia
