Zeldin's EPA And Its Farcical GHG Policy Will Likely Face A Supreme Court Decision, Though Not For Years

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In a secondary justification for undermining the endangerment finding, the Trump EPA questions the accuracy of consensus climate science. The agency relies in part on a new draft ‘critical review’ report commissioned by the Department of Energy and written by five fringe scientists. It has not been peer-reviewed. As Texas A&M climate scientist Andrew Dessler noted, “The authors of this report are widely recognized contrarians who don’t represent the mainstream scientific consensus. If almost any other group of scientists had been chosen, the report would have been dramatically different. The only way to get this report was to pick these authors.”

The administration did cite one mainstream climate science paper. But that paper’s lead author, Zeke Hausfather, a former Yale Climate Connections contributor, immediately said that the EPA had gotten his findings “completely backwards.” “This is a general theme in the report,” Hausfather told E&E News, which fact checked some of the report’s many faulty scientific claims. “They cherry-pick data points that suit their narrative and exclude the vast majority of the scientific literature that does not.”

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The EPA’s proposed rollback of the endangerment finding is open to public comments until September 15, and the agency will hold virtual public hearings on August 19 and 20. After responding to the public comments, the EPA will finalize the rule. Assuming the EPA moves ahead with the rollback, lawsuits will soon follow, and the case will gradually be appealed up to the Supreme Court. This whole process is expected to take several years. In the meantime, Trump’s EPA will likely proceed with unwinding dozens of federal regulations related to climate pollution that were supported by the endangerment finding.

There are three broad potential outcomes from an eventual Supreme Court decision. First, the justices might rule that the EPA’s proposal violates the Clean Air Act and decades of Congressional support for EPA climate-related regulations. Such a decision would require the EPA to reissue a broad swath of climate pollutant regulations in the ensuing years. Alternatively, the court could issue a relatively narrow decision in the EPA’s favor, ruling that one of its secondary justifications for questioning the endangerment finding is valid. This could mean that the EPA would have the discretion to decide whether to regulate climate pollutants – a decision that could potentially change with each new presidential election, creating long-term uncertainty for the regulated industries.

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https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2025/08/the-republican-campaign-to-stop-the-u-s-epa-from-protecting-the-climate/