The lawsuit is the latest salvo in a long-running battle over the future of coal and how to regulate the nation’s heavily polluting power plants, which are major producers of greenhouse gases that warm the planet. It also is the most significant test to date of the Trump administration’s efforts to eliminate or weaken former President Barack Obama’s regulations to reduce the United States’ contribution to global warming.
It is a case that could go all the way to the Supreme Court. If justices there were to ultimately decide in favor of the Trump administration, it could weaken the ability of future presidents to regulate carbon dioxide pollution from power plants, experts said, and make it harder for the United States to tackle climate change.
“It would have a devastating effect on the ability of future administrations to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act,” said Richard L. Revesz, a professor at New York University who specializes in environmental law, referring to a 1970 law that requires the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate hazardous air pollutants.
The court challenge, , led by New York’s attorney general, Letitia James, argued that the Trump administration’s EPA had no basis for weakening an Obama-era regulation that set the first-ever national limits on carbon dioxide pollution from power plants.
The Obama-era rule, the Clean Power Plan, required states to implement plans to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 2022, and encouraged that to happen by closing heavily polluting plants and instead generating electricity using natural gas or renewable energy. Carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere is a major contributor to global warming because it traps the sun’s heat.
“The science is indisputable. Our climate is changing. Ice caps are melting,” James said in a statement. She called the Trump administration plan a “do-nothing rule.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.