by Steve Milloy, E&E Legal Senior Policy Fellow and Junkscience.com Founder
As Appearing on The Daily Wire
The DOJ is leaving open the possibilty that Biden-era EPA regulations can still prevail.
It is the kind of blunder that makes you wonder how it ever got this far. Trump’s own Justice Department is undercutting the administration’s effort to rein in federal climate overreach.
In February, Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) scrapped the Obama-era endangerment finding, the legal foundation for the whole federal climate regime — the basis for a sprawling federal campaign that Congress never clearly approved. That 2009 finding gave Washington, D.C. the excuse to regulate greenhouse gases and use the Clean Air Act as a blunt instrument against cars, trucks, power plants, and the energy economy itself.
Remove that finding, and the whole regulatory scheme starts to fall apart, leaving the EPA’s climate authority without a real legal footing.
Yet the Justice Department’s position in Suncor Energy v. Boulder County is a mess. While the Trump EPA is trying to unwind the federal climate regime, the DOJ appears to be leaving the door open to the same broad Clean Air Act theory that made the regime possible in the first place. Climate activists will happily exploit that contradiction.
