Update: On Thursday, the Senate voted 50-49 to send a measure revoking mining prohibitions on U.S. forest land near the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness to President Donald Trump for a signature.

For over four decades, Paul Schurke has woken up before dawn in the frozen Minnesota wilderness, ready to get to work. As the sun rises above the southern edge of the boreal forest, Schurke brings food and water to a packed kennel of restless Canadian Eskimo dogs.

The trails upon which he guides dogsled tours through the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, an expanse of forests and lakes that borders Canada where temperatures can dip to -40°F, are quiet.

But for the clank of the harnesses, panting and the sound of sled runners squeaking against the snow — a sound called a “shush” — visitors on sled dog adventures in the wilderness get to experience something rare in modern life: silence.

“You got a shush and a pant and a jingle going on all day long. Otherwise, it’s dead silent,” Schurke said.

That serenity is threatened by a controversial copper mine proposed by Twin Metals, a subsidiary of the Chilean conglomerate Antofagasta, that would tunnel under a lake and river just upstream from Schurke’s lodge.

While mining in the area is currently restricted by a 2023 order, congressional Republicans are moving to use a fairly obscure legislative tool called the Congressional Review Act to reverse those Biden administration-era restrictions and push the project toward the finish line.

Just over one year into President Donald Trump’s second term, a fight over the future of the region’s water quality — and its $13 billion recreation economy — has reignited.

If built, the din of trucks and cracking rock would regularly pierce the solitude that Schurke’s clients come to enjoy. But the noise is just one of the many ways that adventure tourism business owners in northern Minnesota fear the mine could impact the region, which includes a protected expanse of 4.1 million acres with thousands of lakes that attract hundreds of thousands to hunt, fish, canoe, dogsled and camp each year.

The copper sulfide mine, originally proposed over a decade ago but delayed by opposition since, would cut into land just north of the start of a massive watershed that runs north into the Arctic Ocean, and just upstream of Schurke’s lodge. The waters in the lakes are so pristine that state environmental monitors say you can dip a cup in and drink it — but the mine threatens to dredge up minerals that would release the pungent smell of sulfuric acid and contaminate the water.

“There are 2,000 lakes within 15 miles of town and they’re all braided together in this vast maze of interconnected channels of rivers and streams,” Schurke said. “Any damage done to this water then percolates 1,200 miles across the north country.”

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A blast from the past

The Senate debate that started up again on Wednesday night is taking place over 1,000 miles from Ely, a sleepy town of just over 3,000 people that serves as an entry point to the Boundary Waters. The proposed Twin Metals mine site sits just outside of that area in the Superior National Forest.

The Boundary Waters is visited by as many as 250,000 people a year, which makes it the most visited federal wilderness area in the country. It’s the kind of place people go to get lost from the world. Locals like to tell stories about the hikers and canoeists who, due to extended trips without access to phones or internet, remained blissfully unaware of the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the civil unrest in Minneapolis in 2020 after the murder of George Floyd.

But Ely, for all the Patagonia and North Face-wearing clientele it welcomes these days, is historically a proud mining town with mineral deposits running deep in its veins.

Pioneers arrived in the area in the mid-1800s in search of gold, but it was the iron ore under the soil that helped turn the town into a bustling community, according to longtime resident Bill Erzar.

Erzar comes from a long line of miners. His grandfather worked in the Zenith iron ore mine, which closed in the 1960s, for 45 years. His dad worked in the Pioneer mine after World War II, before it also closed in the late 1960s. Erzar worked in U.S. Steel’s Minntac mine, about an hour’s drive south of Ely.

These days, Erzar thinks back fondly on the days when the mines were bustling. Ely had numerous movie theaters, grocery stores, women’s clothing stores and lumber yards. Kids would wander the main street on summer nights. There were plenty of restaurants that young couples would flock to for date night.

Ely, to hear Erzar recall of his childhood, was something akin to the set of a nostalgic post-war Americana film.

“Heck, in the summertime, there were kids walking up and down Main Street from all the way down by the Dairy Queen, back and forth,” he said. “We walked from the Dairy Queen or root beer stand up to the state theater. We’d walk a couple times a night if we didn’t have a vehicle.”

And it’s that vision of the past that makes Erzar a supporter of the Twin Metals mine. In his view, Ely could use an economic engine — and he’s confident the environmental harms that his neighbors like Schurke worry about can be managed.

“Our economy here is in pretty big trouble. Ely used to have a population of nearly 6,400 people. There used to be 1,775 kids in the school system when I was in school. Right now, I think we’re at 490,” he said.

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A lobbying blitz

Twin Metals got close to starting construction on the project in 2019, when the first Trump administration reversed an Obama-era denial of lease applications for the area and renewed Twin Metals’ leases.

The American subsidiary and its Chilean parent company have spent roughly $7.7 million on lobbying since 2020, according to the nonprofit OpenSecrets. They say that the mine will create 750 jobs directly, and help sustain another 1,500 in the community indirectly.

But opponents of the project aren’t convinced that the jobs will make up for the harms caused to a local economy that has grown to rely on out-of-towners renting snowshoes and canoes.

A 2020 Harvard study analyzing the expected impacts of the Biden administration’s 20-year-ban on mining in the area found that the mine would put 4,490 existing local jobs at risk, and threaten growth in an economic sector that is expected to bring in between 5,000 and 23,000 more jobs in coming decades.

And the mine owner’s commitment to environmental protection has been questioned by opponents, who note the parent company was fined $775,000 by the Chilean government earlier this year for failing to comply with water management regulations at another coppermine it owns.

On Wednesday night, the Boundary Waters area became the latest battlefront in the Trump administration’s sustained attacks on public lands when the Senate picked up a measure originally introduced by Republican Rep. Pete Stauber in the House, which voted to advance the measure in January. Stauber represents the congressional district that spans northern Minnesota.

The bill Stauber introduced makes use of a little-known legislative tool that is generally intended to give a new Congress the ability to reverse rules passed by federal agencies within a certain time frame. But the new use of the tool for a public lands decision has drawn protests from environmentalists and public lands advocates who say using it a year into a congressional term sets a dangerous precedent that could undermine public lands across the country.

While Republicans had hoped to have a vote on the measure Wednesday night, Democratic Sen. Tina Smith derailed the effort, holding the floor for hours. She said she would do so to give her colleagues “every opportunity to change their minds and do the right thing.”

“This is a special place beloved by Minnesota and the country, and this mine poses an unacceptable threat. We can mine responsibly here in the United States to access the critical minerals we need. But this mine, in this place, using this unprecedented process, is not the way to do it.”

Schurke said he will live with the consequences of the Senate’s vote for years, even if the impact from the pollution may take time. He said opening up the mine is something akin to a “Pandora’s box” that will continually cause harm in the area for years to come.

“It’s going to take a while for the sulphuric acid to percolate into the watershed, and that’s a gift,” he said. “But I’m going to notice the sound and the light pollution and the dust pollution. All that will be immediate.”

A coalition of 21 Democratic-led states and local governments sued the Environmental Protection Agency on Tuesday to block it from loosening federal air pollution standards for mercury and other hazardous air pollutants from coal- and oil-fired power plants, arguing the toxins are particularly harmful to pregnant women and children.

The coalition argued the repeal is unlawful because the agency didn’t provide a reasoned basis for a change that could elevate exposure to toxins that pose serious risks to the nervous system, cardiovascular health and early childhood development.

They are asking the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit to determine the repeal is unlawful, and order the agency to reverse it.

“The Trump administration has made a significant step backwards, allowing more toxic air pollution that will harm our communities,” Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul said in a statement.

Raoul’s office led the coalition alongside Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison.

They said that mercury emissions also impact Lake Michigan, rivers and other water bodies. That pollution harms recreation and commercial fishing economies, as well as Native American tribes that rely on them for subsistence fishing.

The lawsuit is the second to challenge the EPA’s February rollback of the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards. A coalition of environmental and public health groups including Earthjustice, the American Lung Association and the Natural Resources Defense Council sued earlier this week.

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The standards the Trump EPA repealed were finalized by the Biden administration in 2024. The repealed updates were the first significant revisions to the rules since they were implemented in 2011.

Between 2011 and 2017, mercury emissions from power plants dropped 81.7%, according to an analysis by the Center for American Progress.

In announcing the repeal, the EPA said that the Biden administration’s revisions imposed higher costs on industry than warranted. The agency argued the existing 2012 rule had already driven steep reductions in toxic emissions and that newer requirements exceeded what available and affordable technologies could justify.

Note: This story has been updated to reflect that, after this story was first published, the Trump administration’s so-called "God Squad” voted to exempt oil and gas drilling in the Gulf of Mexico from Endangered Species Act protections.

The Trump administration’s efforts to roll back protections under the Endangered Species Act were dealt a blow on Monday when a federal judge vacated a series of changes that critics said weakened the law’s ability to protect imperiled animals and plants.

U.S. District Judge Jon Tigar, in the Northern District of California, sided with a coalition of environmental groups that had challenged the changes, which they said were the first major overhaul to the ESA in decades.

Among other things, the judge rejected provisions that challengers said narrowed the criteria federal agencies must consider when evaluating whether major projects will harm endangered species and set an “artificially high” standard for whether indirect impacts from a project must be considered.

The Fish and Wildlife Service and National Marine Fisheries Service, which jointly administer the ESA, promulgated the challenged rules.

“Insofar as the Services exclude from consideration at the last step scientific evidence of effects that are not ‘reasonably certain,’ they cannot meaningfully be said to have taken that evidence into account in making the ultimate jeopardy determination,” Judge Tigar, an Obama appointee, wrote. “That violates the ESA.”

Judge Tigar also vacated language in the rules allowing habitat destruction to go unchecked so long as it doesn’t diminish critical habitat relied upon by endangered species “as a whole.” He said that would enable piecemeal destruction the statute prohibits.

The decision marks a setback for the Trump administration as it finalizes more proposed rules to alter ESA protections, which can cause delays for major projects as protections for endangered animals and plants are worked out.

Attorneys for the plaintiffs told Landmark that some of the proposed revisions “flatly contradict” the Monday ruling.

Earthjustice senior attorney Ben Levitan — who helped represent challengers the Center for Biological Diversity, WildEarth Guardians and the Sierra Club — said the decision “sends a strong signal to the Trump administration that its pending plans to further weaken the rules will violate the law.”

“Extinction is forever, and today’s ruling strikes down regulations that deprived vulnerable species of a last chance at survival,” he said.

The rules at the heart of the case originated during President Donald Trump’s first term and were only partially revised under President Joe Biden, leaving conservationists unsatisfied.

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The second Trump administration had asked that the rules be remanded while it takes on its new overhaul, which is expected to be finished in October. The judge declined to wait.

The decision also came just a day before the U.S. Department of Defense and other agencies met as part of a committee dubbed the “God Squad” and voted to exempt oil and gas exploration in the Gulf of Mexico from the ESA process.

The “God Squad” name reflects the committee’s power to effectively sentence a species to extinction.

That committee has rarely convened in the law's 50-year history. It has the authority to override ESA protections when other national interests are deemed to outweigh them. Doing so could put roughly two dozen endangered species in the region at risk, including the Rice’s whale and certain species of sea turtles.

The meeting comes as the U.S. continues its war against Iran, which has led to rising energy prices.

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Andrew Mergen, a professor at Harvard Law who spent decades working on environmental issues for the U.S. Department of Justice, told Landmark that the Trump administration’s effort to bypass environmental protections for endangered species — both through rulemaking and the potential exemptions — undermines a process of protection for endangered creatures that has been respected not only by environmentalists but also federal agencies like the Department of Defense.

The Defense Department may not have always done everything the environmentalists wanted in terms of protection, but it did a lot, he said. And the Trump administration is trying to do virtually nothing.

“This cynical, callous move that would not have occurred without President Trump will be shocking to many, many members of the military and national security apparatus who have long understood that we can do more than one thing well,” he said.

A huge coalition of Democratic-led states and cities has joined the legal fight challenging the Trump administration’s repeal of the 2009 endangerment finding, a rule that formed the legal basis for a large swath of American climate regulations.

The lawsuit filed Thursday in the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals is at least the second to target the Environmental Protection Agency’s February decision to repeal the finding, which originally held that six greenhouse gases including carbon dioxide threaten public health.

The latest effort — led by Massachusetts on behalf of 24 states, 12 municipalities and other governments — marks an inflection point in one of the biggest legal fights that will take place in the second Trump administration.

The heaviest hitters are now all in the arena. And legal experts expect the case to head to the Supreme Court.

“Climate change is real, and it’s already affecting our residents and our economy,” Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell said.

The office she now leads spearheaded the legal challenge that ultimately forced the government to create the endangerment finding two decades ago.

“When the federal government abandoned the law and the science, everyday people suffer the consequences.”

The EPA’s argument

The endangerment finding is a key regulatory determination that greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane pose a threat to human health and therefore must be regulated under the Clean Air Act (CAA).

It was finalized by the Obama administration in 2009 after years of litigation, which culminated in the Supreme Court’s landmark 2007 decision in Massachusetts v. EPA. That ruling clarified that greenhouse gases qualify as pollutants under the CAA and directed the EPA to determine whether they endanger public health and welfare.

When it finalized the repeal in February, however, the EPA said it had determined that the 2009 rule exceeded the agency’s authority under the CAA.

While that sounds like a contradiction, the Trump administration argued the CAA only addresses regional pollution — not carbon emissions on a global scale — and further determined that eliminating greenhouse gas emissions from American vehicles would have a negligible impact on climate change.

In other words, the EPA’s position boils down to its determination that reducing one of the biggest sources of greenhouse gas emissions on the planet wouldn’t directly solve climate change. And regulations to curb emissions “would be unreasonable given their futility and the immense burdens they place on regulated parties, consumers and the economy.”

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The agency reached its conclusion in part by applying the Supreme Court’s “major questions doctrine,” which is a legal principle that says agencies cannot regulate matters of vast economic or political consequence without clear authorization from Congress.

That doctrine was significantly advanced in the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision in West Virginia v. EPA, which invalidated an Obama-era climate regulation addressing power plants.

The EPA also argued that the court’s earlier reading of the CAA allotted the EPA too much interpretive discretion. Under the recent Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo Supreme Court decision, the courts said that judges — not executive agencies — are best to determine the meaning of laws when they are unclear or ambiguous.

Sharmila Murthy, a law professor at Northeastern University School of Law, told Landmark she isn’t convinced that the EPA’s efforts to reframe the endangerment finding in light of the major questions doctrine or the Loper Bright decision on discretion will stand.

The Supreme Court has already clearly addressed the issue, she said.

“The Supreme Court, in Massachusetts v. EPA, found that the text of the Clean Air Act was unambiguous and that the ‘sweeping definition’ of ‘air pollutant’ included greenhouse gases,” Murthy said. “The court did not rely on … deference.”

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What does the Clean Air Act say?

While the endangerment finding most directly relates to Section 202 (a) of the CAA, which regulates emissions from cars and trucks, the finding has been used to justify virtually every major climate rule in the U.S., including rules to rein in power plant emissions.

The law does not explicitly make a distinction between global and regional pollution, as the Trump administration has now done. The EPA did not challenge the overwhelming science that shows climate change poses numerous risks to the health and safety of people across the country, and the globe.

While Massachusetts and its fellow challengers did not lay out a legal argument in the lawsuit they filed, a similar coalition had rejected the Trump administration’s legal rationale in comments submitted during the rulemaking process.

They said that the CAA “clearly directs that greenhouse gases are pollutants,” adding that the Supreme Court “unequivocally held that greenhouse gases are air pollutants subject to” the law in Massachusetts v. EPA.

The arguments are similar to those that have been presented by environmental groups that sued within days of the endangerment finding repeal being announced.

A group of young people have also challenged the decision in court, arguing the EPA’s decision violates their constitutional rights to life, liberty and religious freedom “by unleashing pollution that injures their fundamental rights when the agency’s singular job is to control and limit pollution harmful to their lives.”

(Note: Landmark’s previous analysis of the legal arguments can be read more in-depth here.)

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‘Tortured legal acrobatics’

The litigation will first proceed in the D.C. Circuit, before potentially landing in the Supreme Court.

While the D.C. Circuit is viewed as a favorable venue for the challengers, legal experts told Landmark that there are some behind-the-scenes legal dramas to pay attention to. The first is that the timeline of the case will matter quite a bit.

President Donald Trump has nearly three years left in his term, which means plaintiffs have an incentive to drain the clock as long as possible. That strategy would bank on the belief that a president who wants to keep the endangerment finding around will replace Trump in 2029, and immediately reconsider the repeal.

If that happens before the case advances to the Supreme Court, the high court may never have the opportunity to consider the Trump EPA’s legal arguments.

Patrick Parenteau, a professor emeritus at Vermont Law and Graduate School, told Landmark that “it is not clear this is going to get to SCOTUS before the clock runs out on Trump.”

He added that the D.C. Circuit could vacate and remand the rule for any number of reasons before getting to the substance of the endangerment finding’s legality. Notably, the court could find issues with how the EPA went about vacating the endangerment finding in violation of the procedural requirements of the Administrative Procedure Act.

“The only way for Trump to score a quick victory is to get a favorable decision out of the D.C. Circuit and have SCOTUS” refuse to take the case, he said. “I don’t see any plausible scenario for that to happen.”

Parenteau also isn’t convinced that the votes to uphold the Trump administration’s deregulatory move are there. But not everyone shares his confidence.

Joe Goffman, who was assistant administrator in the Biden administration’s Office of Air and Radiation, told Landmark that the EPA has given conservatives on the court “enough to work with,” depending on what the conservative justices want to do.

“If the answer is they want to reverse or de-commission Massachusetts v. EPA, which I believe is what they want to do, then the strength or weakness of the agency’s arguments as well as the court’s commitment or lack thereof to stare decisis is irrelevant,” he said.

But he and others said that the EPA’s position is a perversion of the Clean Air Act, no matter how they dress it up.

“What’s provocative about this entire effort is the sheer perversity of the administration’s position, and what I fear the court’s ultimate position will be,” Goffman said, noting that the decision appears to be a desperate effort to undermine the growing momentum behind electric vehicles and clean energy technology.

“What we’re seeing is tortured legalistic acrobatics” aimed at undermining that momentum, he said.

Despite declining to take up similar questions several times before, the Supreme Court said on Monday that it would consider arguments that could determine whether dozens of climate change lawsuits against major oil and gas companies can proceed to trial in state court.

For those who have followed the saga of these climate change cases so far, the issues might sound familiar. The court specifically agreed to hear Suncor Energy’s and Exxon Mobil’s arguments that a lawsuit brought against them by Boulder, Colorado, is preempted by federal law and the Constitution.

The energy companies are appealing a 2025 decision by the Colorado Supreme Court, which allowed Boulder’s case, alleging the oil and gas industry lied about the dangers of climate change for decades and should help pay to adapt, to head to trial.

While Boulder, and dozens of other states and municipalities with similar concerns, filed its lawsuit in state court under state common law theories, the companies have repeatedly said that the case should be heard in federal court, where it would likely be dismissed.

Michael Gerrard, a professor at Columbia Law School, noted that the Supreme Court also asked the parties to discuss whether the justices even have jurisdiction over the dispute at this stage.

Gerrard told Landmark that the Supreme Court typically doesn’t take up cases until there has been a final judgment. And if the justices decide they do not have jurisdiction at this stage, then it “would allow the Court again to dodge deciding the merits.”

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So what happens next? Gerrard said that he suspects that fossil fuel industry defendants will push to temporarily pause proceedings in the dozens of other lawsuits that they are facing and that raise similar arguments.

And he noted that some will now wonder how President Donald Trump’s recent decision to repeal the endangerment finding — a 2009 legal determination by the Environmental Protection Agency that greenhouse gas emissions are covered by the Clean Air Act (CAA) — might impact the dozens of climate change lawsuits. The thinking there is that, if the CAA doesn’t actually regulate greenhouse gas emissions, then doesn’t that by default mean it is something for the states to pursue?

A coalition of over a dozen environmental and public health groups sued the Environmental Protection Agency on Wednesday, seeking to block the Trump administration’s repeal of a cornerstone rule used to regulate greenhouse gas emissions.

The lawsuit filed in the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals is the first of several that are expected after the EPA finalized its repeal of the so-called endangerment finding, which has been used to justify regulations limiting greenhouse gas emissions from cars, trucks and power plants.

The challengers include the American Public Health Association, the Center for Biological Diversity, the Environmental Defense Fund, the Sierra Club and others.

“Nobody but Big Oil profits from Trump trashing climate science and making cars and trucks guzzle and pollute more,” said David Pettit, an attorney for the Center for Biological Diversity. “Consumers will pay more to fill up, and our skies and oceans will fill up with more pollution.”

He continued: “The EPA’s rollbacks are based on political poppycock, not science or law, and the courts should see it that way.”

The EPA said last week when it unveiled the repeal that it was doing so after deciding that the 2009 rule exceeded the agency’s authority under the Clean Air Act (CAA) which the Trump administration views as limited to regional pollution and not carbon emissions that cause global climate change.

The CAA does not make a direct distinction between global or regional pollution, and the endangerment finding was originally finalized after the Supreme Court said in the 2007 case Massachusetts v. EPA that the CAA covers greenhouse gases. The endangerment finding has provided the legal framework on which the EPA has regulated six greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide and methane.

While the endangerment finding most directly relates to the part of the CAA that regulates emissions from cars and trucks, section 202(a), the finding has been used to justify virtually every major climate rule in the U.S., including rules to rein in power plant emissions.

In comments submitted last year, 22 Democratic state attorneys general plus their municipal counterparts from around a half dozen major cities had previewed their legal arguments. That group of attorneys general is also expected to challenge the rule shortly.

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The group, led by Massachusetts, said that the CAA “clearly directs that greenhouse gases are pollutants” under the law, adding that the Supreme Court “unequivocally held that greenhouse gases are air pollutants subject to” the law in the 2007 Massachusetts v. EPA case.

“The executive branch cannot re-write Congress’s work or overrule the Supreme Court because it would prefer to prioritize its own policy preferences over the law,” the group said.

You can read Landmark’s coverage of last week’s announcement here, and our analysis of the legal arguments in the original rule right here.

The Trump administration has finished its work repealing one of the most consequential climate change rules in U.S. history known as the endangerment finding, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin announced on Thursday.

Speaking alongside President Donald Trump in the White House Roosevelt Room — a room named after former presidents who championed environmental conservation — Zeldin said he is “proud to deliver the single largest deregulatory action in U.S. history on behalf of American taxpayers and consumers.”

The 2009 endangerment finding expanded the scope of pollutants regulated under the Clean Air Act, determining that six greenhouse gases — including carbon dioxide and methane — threaten public health and welfare.

While it most directly relates to the section of that law that regulates emissions from motor vehicles, section 202(a), the finding has been used to justify virtually every major climate rule in the U.S., including rules to rein in power plant emissions.

The EPA’s move will undoubtedly trigger a long and fierce legal fight between the EPA and Democratic-led attorneys general and environmental groups.

Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell, whose office was integral in the earlier legal fight to force the federal government to regulate greenhouse gases in the first place, had a curt message for the administration: “I’ll see them in court.”

“EPA’s unlawful rescission of the 2009 endangerment finding shows just how far this administration will go to grant favors to polluters—ignoring clear Supreme Court precedent, basic facts, and decades of scientific research, all at the expense of our health and welfare,” she said in a statement.

The deregulatory move comes as a part of Trump’s broader efforts to eliminate roadblocks standing in the way of oil, gas and coal development. Zeldin also said that the EPA had finalized a rule to repeal “off-cycle credits,” which encourage automakers to install devices that automatically shut off engines to avoid burning gas while idling.

When it unveiled the proposed repeal back in August, the EPA argued that the agency had overstepped its legal authority when making the original rule. That’s despite the Supreme Court itself saying in its 2007 decision in Massachusetts v. EPA that the court had “little trouble concluding” that the Clean Air Act allows the federal government to regulate greenhouse gases.

The agency relied on two recent Supreme Court decisions that said agency action with major economic or political implications must be explicitly authorized by Congress, and restricted agencies from filling in the blanks on ambiguous statutes.

Those arguments will now be tested in court, first by the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals and then, potentially, by the Supreme Court itself.

The near-term impacts appear to be some level of uncertainty for the auto industry (though it appears unlikely that major auto makers will retool their production lines while legal challenges play out), and potential uncertainty for other industries as the EPA uses the endangerment finding repeal to undercut other rules that have sprung from it.

The decision could also spur states like California to consider whether, by saying the Clean Air Act doesn’t authorize regulations for greenhouse gases, it can craft more robust rules of its own. The Clean Air Act typically preempts state laws.

(Seemingly cognizant of public image and the potential headaches from near-term regulatory uncertainty, Ford Motors told the EPA in comments submitted in September that customer demand is rising for plug-in hybrid vehicles and that modest vehicle emissions regulations would be helpful to maintain.)

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That same thinking could also help states and municipalities in lawsuits that claim the oil and gas industry should help pay for damages caused by climate change, since they misled the public about the dangers of burning oil and manufactured reliance on their products for decades.

A key defense by the fossil fuel industry in those cases is that those state law claims are pre-empted by the Clean Air Act, and the American Petroleum Institute said in comments submitted on the proposed endangerment finding repeal that it supported only a narrow repeal that is limited to emissions from cars and trucks. In other words, the federal government can regulate greenhouse gas emissions, just not from one of the largest sources of climate-warming pollution.

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Environmental groups have warned in recent days that the repeal would lead to more climate-warming emissions, which means more ferocious and destabilizing storms, droughts and wildfires. All of that means more economic impacts as climate change strains the country’s insurance, supply chain and public health systems.

“Zeldin’s decision is not supported by the science, which shows that the pace of global warming is accelerating faster than expected,“ said Dominique Browning, the co-founder of the Moms Clean Air Task Force.

She continued: “It is not supported by public health data, by economics, by morality, or even, simply, stewardship of our Earth. It is not supported by the very evidence we are all feeling at home every month, as heat waves intensify and storms are turbocharged.”

A federal judge has rejected the Justice Department’s effort to preemptively kill a Michigan climate lawsuit, repurposing a previous Supreme Court decision that gave the first Trump administration room to try to exclude undocumented immigrants from the 2020 Census.

U.S. District Judge Jane Beckering, a Biden appointee, dismissed the DOJ’s lawsuit on Jan. 24 after finding the lawsuit was too speculative, since Michigan hadn’t actually filed a climate change lawsuit when the federal government tried to step in.

While Michigan had eventually filed the type of lawsuit the DOJ feared — a lawsuit claiming major oil and gas companies colluded to undermine renewables development, filed just a day before Beckering’s decision — the judge said the state had only begun to talk to outside firms and consider a lawsuit when it was sued last year.

“The federal government has failed to cite any case in which a court has preemptively enjoined a party from bringing a broad swath of unspecified claims against unspecified members of a given industry simply because that party has begun investigating whether a litigation strategy may have merit,” Beckering, a judge for the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Michigan, said.

The DOJ didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

A Trump win turns sour for the administration

In her decision, Beckering repeatedly cited previous preemption cases to determine that the DOJ climate suit wasn’t yet ripe for judicial review, and that the federal government didn’t have standing for lack of concrete harms.

Among those cases she cited was a case in which paint manufacturer Sherwin-Williams tried to preemptively shield itself from lead paint liability. But Beckering repeatedly returned to the Supreme Court’s 2020 decision in Trump v. New York.

In that case, the high court’s conservative majority said that a lawsuit filed by a coalition of Democratic-led states and non-profits challenging the first Trump administration’s plan to exclude undocumented immigrants from the calculations used to allocate seats in the House of Representatives was premature.

While President Donald Trump had issued a memo during his first term stating that the government would exclude those individuals from the Census, the high court’s conservative majority said that the specifics of how the order should be executed had not been revealed or implemented, and so the case was unripe.

(Note: The first Trump administration eventually abandoned the effort after a second lawsuit was filed by the plaintiffs in that case. The Supreme Court’s three liberal justices dissented in the Trump v. New York decision).

Daniel Farber, a law professor at UC Berkeley Law School, told Landmark that there is nothing unusual about a judge citing precedent — past case reasonings inform evolving legal doctrine —- but said he is “sure that the judge wasn’t oblivious to the irony of using Trump v. NY against the administration.”

The high court’s “reasoning in Trump v. NY was a nice illustration of a larger point: to have standing, the plaintiff needs to show a concrete injury and a clear chain of causation,” Farber said.

“The threat that at some point Michigan might bring a lawsuit that would somehow adversely affect oil company finances, which in turn would have some conceivable impact on U.S. policy, was nowhere even close to meeting those requirements,” he added.

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Trump’s crackdown on climate in courts and elsewhere

Soon after taking office in January 2025, Trump began to aggressively pursue policies to help support the fossil fuel industry.

The administration has made it easier to drill on public lands, issued permits to make it easier to ship natural gas overseas and recently oversaw regime change in Venezuela in the name of opening up that country’s oil reserves to American companies.

The fossil fuel industry has also been pushing Congressional Republicans to pass a law shielding them from legal liability for climate change harms. The American Petroleum Institute, a prominent trade group that is often at the heart of climate change lawsuits filed by states and local governments, has identified that immunity as a top priority for 2026.

The Trump administration’s pre-emption lawsuit against Michigan was one of two cases, alongside another against Hawaii, that were filed in late April to more directly shield the industry from those cases.

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Two other cases were filed by the DOJ a day later against New York and Vermont challenging their climate Superfund laws, and legal experts said at the time that all four were highly unusual if not unprecedented.

Hawaii filed a lawsuit against the fossil fuel industry just a day after the DOJ sued.

There are currently 11 U.S. states and dozens of city, county and tribal governments with active lawsuits against major oil and gas companies, according to the Center for Climate Integrity. They broadly claim the industry should be held accountable for intentionally deceiving the public for decades about the climate change harms of oil and gas use.

Michigan has become the first U.S. state to file a climate-focused antitrust lawsuit against Big Oil, alleging the industry coordinated to illegally protect itself from clean energy competition through “capture-and-kill tactics” and aggressive litigation.

The lawsuit, filed in Michigan federal court on Jan. 23, alleges oil and gas companies have known for decades that their products cause climate change, but still coordinated to undermine the build-out of renewable energy technology like electric vehicles and solar panels that could have averted the crisis.

Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel said specifically that ExxonMobil, Chevron and others used “capture-and-kill tactics and aggressive patent litigation” to block competition from those technologies and “dismantle” early solar energy and electric vehicle charging network development.

They acted “as a cartel, agreeing to reduce the production and distribution of electricity from renewable sources and to restrain the emergence of electric vehicles and renewable primary energy technologies in the United States,” Nessel said.

The state’s lawsuit, in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Michigan, alleges the industry’s actions violated the U.S. Clayton Act and Michigan Antitrust Reform Act. The violations effectively “locked” Michigan consumers into fossil fuel dependence and elevated energy prices that would have been reduced with greater competition, it said.

Ted Boutrous, an attorney for Chevron with the law firm Gibson Dunn, said in a statement provided to Landmark that the lawsuit “is baseless as demonstrated by multiple related court dismissals,” referring to the dozens of lawsuits seeking climate-related damages that have been filed by states and municipalities across the U.S.

Several of those cases are approaching trials after surviving motions to dismiss, but others in places like New York, New Jersey and Puerto Rico have also been dismissed.

Exxon, Shell and the American Petroleum Institute (API) didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.

‘Capture and kill’

Michigan’s lawsuit included several examples where oil and gas companies allegedly “abandoned renewable energy projects, used patent litigation to hinder rivals, suppressed information concerning the hidden costs of fossil fuels and the viability of alternatives” and used trade associations like API to “coordinate market-wide efforts to divert capital expenditures away from renewable energy — all to further one of the most successful antitrust conspiracies in United States history.”

For instance, the suit claimed Exxon was first to develop hybrid gas-electric vehicle technology in the 1970s, and even partnered with Toyota to develop a hybrid gas-electric vehicle. The state also alleged Exxon delayed the deployment of EV battery tech by buying patents or abandoning projects, including as recently as 2009.

Chevron, meanwhile, acquired 125 patents for nickel-metal hydride (NiMH) rechargeable batteries after acquiring Texaco in 2000. gah Toyota, which brought the first Prius to market in 1997, had released a RAV4 EV for commercial fleets in 1998 using NiMH batteries and planned to bring it to consumer markets in 2001.

But Chevron, after acquiring the patents, sued Toyota and Panasonic for patent infringement, just as the RAV4 EV was set to become commercially available, and the resulting settlement delayed Toyota’s use of the batteries until 2010.

On the energy production side, the lawsuit claims Exxon, BP, Chevron and Shell were market leaders in the solar industry as early as the 1970s, but “acted in concert to dismantle their solar operations and used litigation to deter new market entrants.”

All of that has impacted the ability of Michigan to build a clean economy, the state said.

“In the world that would have existed but for defendants’ conspiracy, EVs would not be a fringe technology or a luxury alternative,” the state said in the lawsuit.

It continued: “They would be a common sight in every neighborhood—rolling off assembly lines in Flint, parked in driveways in Dearborn, charging outside grocery stores in Grand Rapids, and running quietly down Woodward Avenue.”

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A ‘serious’ lawsuit

Eleanor Fox, an expert in antitrust law at New York University Law, told Landmark that the state’s complaint is “a serious lawsuit” that is “well drafted” and “compelling,” assuming the allegations are proven.

But she noted there are several significant challenges for successful antitrust cases.

It can be difficult to prove that parties had an express agreement to coordinate, for instance. And, she said, it is not unusual for companies to act in lockstep in concentrated markets — essentially, the companies don’t need backroom meetings to understand the potential threats that face their industry.

“But the complaint is a very substantial one. It sounds to me very credible that the oil industry had and has these collaborations,” Fox said. “If they did and do, it is a serious social problem.”

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A new antitrust use in the climate legal fight

The lawsuit, which was prepared with the help of outside law firm Sher Edling, is the first state climate suit to focus heavily on antitrust allegations. (Two lawsuits raising antitrust claims against Big Oil in the climate context were filed by Puerto Rico municipalities, but those were dismissed last year by trial courts.)

Sher Edling has also worked on many of the other climate damages lawsuits filed by governments against the fossil fuel industry. There are currently 11 state cases pending, alongside dozens of cases filed by municipalities. Courts have rejected motions to dismiss in several of those cases, and those are currently moving toward discovery and potential trials.

But antitrust claims have been wielded on the other side of the equation by allies of the fossil fuel industry in court to try to push back against investor efforts to limit the use of fuels like coal.

The most prominent of those lawsuits was filed by a coalition of 11 Republican-led state attorneys general in 2024 against multinational institutional investors BlackRock, State Street Corporation and Vanguard Group. They alleged the companies, using their shares as leverage, illegally coordinated to pressure coal companies to reduce output in favor of renewable energy.

In August, U.S. District Judge Jeremy Kernodle, an appointee of President Donald Trump in the Eastern District of Texas, rejected a motion to dismiss filed by the investment firms.

A group of Republican attorneys general led by Florida’s James Uthmeier this week built on that effort by issuing a “warning letter” to the climate activist group Ceres, alleging its efforts to pressure firms to steer investments away from fossil fuels may run afoul of state and federal antitrust law.

A get out of jail free card?

As the state and municipality climate damages lawsuits mature, a renewed effort to grant the fossil fuel industry immunity has developed.

The American Petroleum Institute, one of the prominent trade organizations that Michigan and others allege helped coordinate the industry’s efforts to undermine climate science and renewables, has identified that immunity is a top priority for 2026.

In addition to “abusive state climate lawsuits,” the organization also said that it would like to see industry immunity from state climate Superfund laws like those passed in Vermont and New York.

The Trump administration has struck what critics see as a novel deal with Utah for shared stewardship of national forests in the state, raising concerns among environmentalists that it is setting the stage for mass logging.

The deal, announced last week, updates a previous agreement established between the federal and state governments. It lays out a cooperative framework for the management of federal forests when it comes to approvals for everything from logging to cattle grazing.

While similar agreements have been struck before — including by Utah itself, and more recently by Idaho and Montana — critics told Landmark that Utah’s deal goes much further, and appears to establish a framework to potentially make good on a longstanding priority for Republicans in the West.

Namely, they said, the deal appears geared to enable a rush of logging and extraction on public lands.

“The purpose of these good neighbor agreements was to focus on fire-safe communities,” Laura Welp, the Southern Utah Director at the Western Watersheds Project, told Landmark. “This new agreement really expands the role of the state in managing the forests and doing landscape-level restoration projects, which is basically clear-cutting.”

It is no secret that increasing American logging and timber production is a goal of the Trump administration.

This latest agreement comes nearly a year after President Donald Trump signed an executive order demanding expanded timber production on federal lands, one of several ways that the administration has targeted the public domain. Administration officials have also proposed rolling back the so-called “Roadless Rule” that protects around 58 million acres of untouched federal land, and the Department of Justice has asserted that the president can abolish national monuments meant to protect historic and archaeological sites.

Republicans have also tried, and failed, to pass laws to sell off millions of acres of public lands in the west. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum has referred to the lands as America’s “balance sheet,” and supporters of a sell-off have said the land can be used to build housing and to expand oil and gas drilling in the United States.

The state of Utah also launched an unsuccessful lawsuit to gain control of the federal lands within its borders.

U.S. Forest Service Chief Tom Schultz, a former timber industry lobbyist with the Idaho Forest Group, said when announcing the deal that Utah and the Forest Service have a “shared vision” to expand timber production and “landscape-scale restoration” to reduce wildfires.

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Agreements between states and the Forest Service are explicitly authorized in U.S. law, and two prior agreements were reached between the agency and Utah during both the first Trump administration and then the Biden administration.

The statute authorizing the cooperative agreements does include restrictions, stating that the federal government is the only body authorized to identify trees for logging and must oversee sales.

While earlier efforts to sell off public lands have failed after receiving fierce opposition from sportsmen, environmentalists, hikers and even the courts, critics told Landmark the new deal between Utah and the Forest Service looks like a back door to get the same results.

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With the federal government still holding deed to the land, they argue that the deal’s provisions emphasizing timber production, livestock grazing and water projects show the state is likely eager to quickly issue approvals for those projects relying on legal shortcuts to do so.

Those shortcuts include categorical exclusions to essentially bypass most meaningful public comment normally required by the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), the nation’s keystone environmental review law.

Categorical exclusions are typically meant to be used to quickly approve projects with little or no environmental impacts, and critics of the deal said approving massive timber projects does not fit that bill.

Steve Bloch, the legal director for the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, told Landmark that the latest document’s emphasis on recreation and timber sales is especially worrisome, noting that the timber industry has long eyed the Dixie National Forest in southern Utah for logging in particular.

This agreement “is just another facet of that long-running effort fo the state to call the shots on federal public lands,” Bloch — who said he is still reviewing the agreement to determine whether legal action is warranted, or whether it is best to challenge individual approvals that stem from it instead — said.

In the days after Zohran Mamdani decisively won the race for New York City mayor, a small group of environmental advocates quickly planned a meeting to discuss how to best approach the new administration.

They were excited — “fucking psyched,” Pete Sikora, an organizer with the group New York Communities for Change (NYCC), said — and hopeful that the new mayor could be a strong ally in making the city a global beacon for climate action.

But hours before the meeting and about 150 miles up the Hudson River, Gov. Kathy Hochul’s administration issued approvals for a controversial and bitterly fought-over underwater natural gas pipeline that will feed Brooklyn, Queens and Long Island. The activists postponed their meeting, and instead organized a protest outside the governor’s office in Manhattan.

They rescheduled for the following week. But that meeting was also nearly derailed when Hochul told a court that day the state would delay implementation of a law requiring new construction to have all-electric heat and appliances.

“Every time we have a call scheduled, she announces something terrible,” Cecilia Ellis, an organizer with the group New York Public Interest Research Group, said during the meeting, which Landmark sat in on. “I think we should stop meeting.”

For the activists, Hochul’s moves were disappointing but not surprising. But the timing underscored a difficult dynamic that not only they, but also Mamdani, will face over the next four years: much of his agenda could be constrained by Albany’s considerable power over the city’s affairs.

The state’s leverage has been a long-standing point of friction between lawmakers in Albany and the city for decades, and has its roots in New York’s lengthy constitution. That document establishes that state law preempts many local laws, and a 1929 court decision in a case over a state law addressing tenement conditions in the city affirmed the state’s ability to pass laws directly impacting the city.

In the near-century since, and as the city’s government has grown more complex and sophisticated, the Big Apple’s leadership has had to battle the state over issues ranging from congestion pricing to local school control.

When it comes to things like energy infrastructure permitting, a labyrinth of state, local and federal laws or regulations can be triggered, with the state getting a leg up in many situations.

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As Mamdani settles into Gracie Mansion, those dynamics will influence his ability to make good on not only his best-known promises to build substantial amounts of affordable housing, but also any efforts to have the city more fully address climate change.

“Much of the relationship between the state and the city is complex and moves in multiple directions when it comes to climate change,” Michael Burger, the executive director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University and a former environmental attorney for the city, told Landmark.

He continued: “There is a good deal that the city can accomplish on its own. But when it comes to regulating things like energy and emissions and transportation, there is often a complex overlap, or intersection, with state law.”

Mamdani didn’t place a particularly heavy emphasis on climate change during his mayoral run, though he did oppose the Williams’ Northeast Supply Enhancement gas pipeline that Hochul approved shortly after his win. As an assemblyman, he also opposed building a natural gas peaker plant in Queens and has pushed for the state to build publicly owned renewable energy.

More directly, he also promised to retrofit hundreds of public schools with modern HVAC systems, green spaces and rooftop solar — a goal that ties in with his message to make the city a more livable one. His platform also indirectly touches on sustainability through its focus on building dense housing stock near mass transit hubs.

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And while improving public school efficiency may sound niche in a city as sprawling as New York, it isn’t. Buildings account for the vast majority of New York City’s greenhouse gas emissions, and a recent study found that burning fuels for space and water heating accounts for around 40% of the city’s total greenhouse gas emissions.

Enter what could be an area where Mamdani will have a lot of relatively quiet leverage: Local Law 97. The law, passed in 2019, requires reduced emissions in most buildings with at least 25,000 square feet in order to help make the city carbon neutral by 2050

The measure requires increasingly strict compliance measures, and the mayor will have sway over upcoming deadlines — specifically, whether to give big building owners some amount of leeway to comply with the law or pass regulations that require stringent adherence.

Mamdani, for his part, has promised to strictly enforce the law — a position among many that has created friction with the city’s powerful real estate lobby. The outgoing mayor, Eric Adams, came under fire during his administration for rules that delayed compliance deadlines and gave large building owners the ability to buy renewable energy credits to offset their emissions, which critics said gave well-heeled companies the ability to buy their way out of their obligations.

“If the mayor wanted to change certain regulations to make things harder, make buildings do more on-site, the mayor can exert significant control over the rulemaking process,” Katrina Wyman, a professor at NYU School of Law, told Landmark, noting that the next set of Local Law 97 targets will take effect in 2030 and include much more difficult obligations for building owners than those that have already been imposed. “That’s very important.”

Legal experts also noted that Mamdani has more direct power over things like bike lane development, expanding fast and free bus access, enforcement of existing environmental laws that relate to everything from waste disposal to pollution remediation and even potential litigation. That could mean pushing for lawsuits against local polluters, or something broader — like joining or filing bigger picture litigation against fossil fuel companies.

For organizers on that call shortly after Mamdani’s election, the new mayor presents a clear opportunity for them to push for greater climate action. During the call, they discussed pushing for a city program that would install energy-efficient HVAC systems known as heat pumps so that smaller buildings with one to two families can decarbonize too.

The program, envisioned as a subsidy, would benefit not only the climate but also create jobs for the laborers needed to install the technology. An infusion of $10 million could help get 1,000 heat pumps installed across the city.

On Thursday, as Mamdani is sworn in as the 112th mayor of the city, climate organizers plan to be there “shivering on some platform seats” but feeling the warmth of optimism, Sikora, of the NYCC, told Landmark this week.

“We’ll be in the crowd both proud to have helped elect him, and ready to hold him to it,” Sikora added. “It’s going to take a lot of people power to get what this city needs from Albany and, even with an ally in City Hall, nothing’s a given.”

The Trump administration took one of its biggest swings yet at federal climate policy this past week, proposing to repeal a key finding that serves as the legal foundation for a number of major environmental regulations that require reductions in U.S. emissions.

The proposed repeal of the 2009 endangerment finding, which essentially said that the federal government should regulate greenhouse gases due to their threat to human health, was announced by U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin on Tuesday. The decision almost surely sets the agency on a collision course with environmental groups and Democratic attorneys general that are poised to sue as soon as they can.

That was likely always going to be the case.

What was less clear heading into the announcement was exactly what this proposed repeal would look like. More importantly, it was unclear how exactly the agency would try to justify a move that basically contradicts the vast majority of climate science that points to greenhouse gases as the cause of climate change, and climate change as a deadly and costly growing phenomenon.

Those questions have finally been answered, at least somewhat: The proposal largely dodges questions of science and focuses on the legal argument that Congress never gave the EPA the authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. The argument relies heavily on interpretations of recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions that have together already restricted the powers of administrative agencies like the EPA.

“It’s hard to avoid the thought that EPA and the administration are beckoning to the court to make new law here,” Joe Goffman, a former assistant administrator in the EPA’s office of air and radiation during the Biden administration, told Landmark.

Goffman said SCOTUS precedent — including the landmark case Massachusetts v. EPA that said greenhouse gases qualify as air pollutants that can be regulated under the Clean Air Act, and later cases upholding the resulting endangerment finding that said they should be regulated under that law — would typically be seen as “fatal to the agency’s action here.”

The endangerment finding under Section 202(a) of the Clean Air Act is the landmark determination that greenhouse gas emissions — including carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, hydrofluorocarbons, perfluorocarbons and sulfur hexafluoride — in the atmosphere threaten the public health and welfare of current and future generations.

While the section specifically addresses EPA regulatory authority for motor vehicle engines, the determination has been cited by federal agencies when crafting rules to curb greenhouse gas emissions from the power sector as well.

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The proposed rule unveiled by the Trump EPA, however, argues that the agency never lawfully had the authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions that don’t pose a local or regional public health danger.

While that geographic restriction is not mentioned in the Clean Air Act specifically, the EPA is seizing upon recent SCOTUS decisions to make its case.

One of those recent decisions is West Virginia v. EPA, which established the so-called “major questions” doctrine that says agency action with major economic or political implications must be explicitly authorized by Congress. The other is the recent Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo case, which restricted agency ability to fill in the blanks when laws have vague provisions

.In other words, the EPA is saying those relatively new decisions have clarified the scope of the EPA’s power. Rules restricting greenhouse gas emissions have an economy-shifting power and the EPA shouldn’t be given deference to infer the Clean Air Act gives it the power to regulate global emissions due to climate change concerns.

“The agency did not have the benefit of the Court’s decisions in Loper Bright and West Virginia, among other applicable precedents, when issuing the endangerment finding in 2009,” the EPA said in its proposed rule.

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Goffman, the former Biden EPA official, said that the Supreme Court has already had plenty of opportunity to weigh in directly on the endangerment finding, and the vehicle emissions rules that have been based upon it. Those issues have been heavily litigated, and the high court declined to take up the issues previously after the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld their legality.

Whether the high court will remain consistent, however, is unclear, Goffman said.

“The litigation and judicial history to this point weigh very heavily in favor of the DC Circuit and then the Supreme Court endorsing the legal basis for the Endangerment Finding and for EPA‘s authority to set greenhouse gas emission standards for cars and trucks, including by taking account of the availability of electrification in setting those standards,” he said.

“That said, the Court seems to treat precedent with extreme casualness, if not indifference,” Goffman continued. “So I have no confidence that, however clear and robust the precedent may be up until this point, it will bind the court.”

A coalition of environmental groups has asked a federal court to immediately block the Trump administration from building an immigrant detention center in the Florida Everglades, known as “Alligator Alcatraz.”

In a lawsuit filed Friday, groups the Center for Biological Diversity and Friends of the Everglades said that federal, state and local officials violated the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and other laws by fast-tracking construction of the project without thorough environmental reviews or public input.

NEPA is a cornerstone of U.S. environmental law that mandates detailed environmental review for major federal actions and gives the public an opportunity to weigh in on potentially harmful projects.

The groups, which filed an expedited motion for a temporary restraining order and preliminary injunction blocking pre-construction activities, said the planned U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility would imperil wetlands and sensitive ecosystems where iconic and endangered species like the Florida panther and bonneted bat live.

“This scheme is not only cruel, it threatens the Everglades ecosystem that state and federal taxpayers have spent billions to protect,” said Eve Samples, executive director of Friends of the Everglades, in a statement.

Defendants the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, ICE, Miami-Dade County and the Florida Division of Emergency Management didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.

The lawsuit brings the two environmentalist groups into the heart of one of the most contentious policy areas of the Trump administration so far.

The “Alligator Alcatraz” facility — named after the nearby animals that proponents say will deter migrants from trying to run tied with the shuttered island prison near San Francisco — was announced by Florida officials last week to help with immigrants picked up as a part of the Trump administration’s crackdown on undocumented immigrants nationwide.

Over 55,000 immigrants are currently being detained by ICE, according to a tally by NBC News. 

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The facility would be built on a 39-square-mile parcel in the Everglades that is currently the site of an airstrip west of Miami. The land is in or adjacent to Big Cypress National Preserve, a protected and ecologically sensitive area. It is owned by Miami-Dade County, and officials have said funding will come from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, an agency the Trump administration is looking at eliminating.

The environmentalists called their lawsuit a “striking echo” of a decades-old fight over the same airstrip — one that helped spur the creation of NEPA in 1970.

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In the earlier battle, Friends of the Everglades successfully fought a planned jetport that would have been the largest airport in the world at the time of its completion.

The project was ultimately scuttled after public pressure from environmentalists, who convinced the federal government to analyze the environmental impacts of the project.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday issued three important opinions addressing environmental legal issues, paving the way for a nuclear waste storage facility in West Texas and giving regional appellate courts jurisdiction over important Clean Air Act (CAA) cases.

The series of decisions came alongside a major decision in United States v. Skrmetti, which upheld a Tennessee ban on youth gender-affirming care and received considerable attention soon after it was issued.

Here’s what you need to know about the climate law cases decided on Wednesday by the high court.

NRC v. Texas

In this case, the Supreme Court rejected an effort by Texas — alongside oil and gas interests — to block a federal plan to temporarily store nuclear waste in the state.

SCOTUS ruled 6-3 on procedural grounds, finding the challengers lacked standing to sue, since they weren’t technically parties when the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) licensed the storage facility in 2021.

Under the Atomic Energy Act, the justices said a party must successfully intervene in a licensing decision or be an applicant in order to seek judicial review of an NRC license.

The decision removes a major roadblock for the nuclear storage site, which was proposed by Interim Storage Partners LLC to help address a growing nuclear waste storage problem.

It also comes amid renewed interest in nuclear power to meet growing U.S. energy demands.

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The license, which authorizes storage of around 40,000 tons of radioactive waste in West Texas for 40 years, was previously blocked by a Trump-appointed district court judge and the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote the court’s dissent, joined by Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito. The dissent from the three conservatives said that the challengers had participated in the licensing, and suggested that the NRC’s rule for more formal participation may have been too formal.

Beyond that, the dissenting justices said that the Nuclear Waste Policy Act only authorizes the storage of spent nuclear waste in two locations: at a reactor or on federal land. Since the Interim Storage Partners license relates to a private site, the license violates that law, the justices said.

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Oklahoma v. EPA

In this case, a 9-0 court determined that the regional U.S. appeals courts are the appropriate venue for individual challenges to certain U.S. Environmental Protection Agency decisions related to CAA National Ambient Air Quality Standards.

Those standards essentially require pollution reductions from industries in high-emitting states. The CAA also requires states to develop state implementation plans (SIPs) detailing how they will comply with the standards and ensure that pollution from their industries doesn’t drift across state lines and make it more difficult for other states to achieve the standards.

The Oklahoma v. EPA case stemmed from the EPA’s rejection of 21 of those state plans under 2015 emissions standards for ozone. The EPA said that the plans didn’t adequately address concerns that emissions from the states would not cross borders.

The states — including Oklahoma and Utah — and industry groups sued in various U.S. circuit courts of appeals challenging the disapprovals. But the 10th Circuit said that the appropriate venue for those cases is the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. Under the CAA, the D.C. Circuit oversees legal challenges to EPA actions that have national impacts, as opposed to regional or local impacts.

While the state plans were rejected en masse, the Supreme Court said the individual rejections were indeed locally applicable.

The challenges will now proceed in the regional appeals courts, which are considered more friendly to the challengers.

EPA v. Calumet Shreveport Refining LLC

Another CAA venue case, this one also revolves around whether certain EPA decisions are nationally or locally impactful.

The high court on Wednesday sided 7-2 with the EPA, finding that small refineries can only challenge a 2022 agency decision to reject multiple petitions seeking exemptions from federal Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) requirements in the D.C. Circuit.

Just as in Oklahoma v. EPA, the decision rested on whether the denials were national or regional. SCOTUS said the denials are locally or regionally applicable, but fall within the “nationwide scope or effect” exemption of the CAA that requires cases be heard in the D.C. Circuit.

Under the RFS program, oil refiners and importers must blend increasing amounts of renewable biofuels like corn-based ethanol each year. But small refineries that process less than 75,000 barrels of crude oil a day can request exemptions if the blending requirements will cause undue hardship.

After several small refineries requested those exemptions, the EPA said in 2022 that it believes the extra costs can be passed through to customers, and thus would not be too much of a burden.

Small refineries challenged the denials in multiple regional circuit courts, calling them impermissibly retroactive (since they related to years that had already passed), contrary to law and arbitrary and capricious.

Most of the regional circuit courts dismissed the cases or transferred them to the D.C. Circuit, but the 5th Circuit retained jurisdiction over challenges filed there and ruled in favor of the refineries.

Hours after President Donald Trump signed measures nullifying waivers that allow California to set stricter vehicle air emissions limits than the federal standards, the western state and several allies filed a groundbreaking lawsuit calling the move illegal.

The federal lawsuit filed by California and nine other states claims the move exceeded the president’s legal authority and violated the Congressional Review Act (CRA), and asks the court to void the resolutions.

If left standing, the resolutions would effectively kill California’s effort to phase out gasoline-powered vehicles in favor of electric ones — and would impact several other states that have adopted California’s stricter emissions rules under the Clean Air Act (CAA).

“Trump’s all-out assault on California continues – and this time he’s destroying our clean air and America’s global competitiveness in the process,” California Gov. Gavin Newsom said in a statement. “We are suing to stop this latest illegal action by a President who is a wholly-owned subsidiary of big polluters.”

Legal experts have told Landmark that issues raised in the lawsuit tread on uncharted and potentially dubious legal territory.

The revocations were issued under the CRA, which allows lawmakers in a newly-formed Congress to quickly nullify recent rules after a simple majority vote. The law also has language that would suggest that judicial review of CRA actions is not allowed.

In the lawsuit, the states note that both the Senate parliamentarian and the Government Accountability Office (GAO) previously concluded the waivers aren’t technically “rules” subject to repeal under that law.

And since the Senate ignored those conclusions, breaking from precedent, the states argue that the waivers weren’t properly revoked.

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Jeff Holmstead, an attorney at the law firm Bracewell and former EPA official during the Bush administration, told Landmark that he thinks the challengers have an “uphill battle.”

That’s because the CRA “clearly prohibits judicial review” of actions by Congress under the law, he said, and there likely aren’t constitutional questions around the Senate’s decision to ignore the advisories of its parliamentarian and the GAO.

(Note — Holmstead pointed out this provision of the CRA specifically: “No determination, finding, action, or omission under this chapter [i.e., the CRA] shall be subject to judicial review.”)

“The resolution overturning the California waivers was passed by both houses of Congress and signed by the president,” he said. “I don’t see how it can be struck down in court.”

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The waivers in question pertain to California’s clean car and trucks programs, which are part of the state’s big-picture plans to cut greenhouse gas emissions 85% by 2045.

The transportation sector accounts for the largest share of California’s greenhouse gas emissions, or roughly 39%.

The CAA explicitly gives California the ability to seek permission to establish stricter pollution limits than the national standards. It has received such approval numerous times in recent decades.

Lawyers for the Trump administration have concluded that the president has the power to completely abolish national monuments designated by past presidents under the Antiquities Act, setting up a likely fierce legal fight over American public lands.

The memo released by the U.S. Department of Justice on Tuesday but dated May 27 reverses a 1938 legal opinion that has been cited to argue national monuments designations cannot be revoked by presidents once established.

The Trump administration has now concluded that the Antiquities Act allows the president to determine that national monuments “either never were or no longer are deserving of the Act’s protections” and can be eliminated “entirely” or reduced in size.

The DOJ didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

The new opinion sets the stage for President Donald Trump to try to reduce dozens of protected national monuments, including ones recently protected by former President Joe Biden.

The Washington Post has reported that the administration is considering shrinking six national monuments to allow for more mining and oil development.

A ‘rare’ legal opinion

Legal experts told Landmark that it is rare for the DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel to reverse earlier opinions.

Jeff Beelaert, a partner at the law firm Givens Pursley who worked in the DOJ between early 2016 and 2021, said the new opinion recognized that presidents have on occasion adjusted the acreage of national monuments.

He said only Congress has outright abolished national monuments — and that the new opinion appears to put the Chuckwalla National Monument near Joshua Tree National Park and the Sáttítla Highlands National Monument in Northern California in jeopardy.

“It is a dramatic shift for the Department of Justice,” he said.

Susan Jane Brown, a lawyer at the law firm Silvix Resources, said the opinion “definitely runs headlong into uncharted – and legally dubious – territory, upending more than 100 years of jurisprudence.”

She called the memo “an existential threat to national monuments” that “threatens to make national monuments the ultimate political football, where administrations hostile to conservation abolish monuments only to have those actions reversed in subsequent administrations; and back again ad infinitum.”

Christine Ann Klein, a professor at the University of Florida Levin College of Law, said that the memo sets up a legal fight that will likely be decided, ultimately, by the U.S. Supreme Court.

“It seems likely that the current Supreme Court would uphold the administration's assertion that it can revoke monument designations,” Klein said.

She added, however, that there is a “wrinkle” since a strict textual reading of the Antiquities Act — in which Congress did not explicitly give the president authority to shrink or abolish national monuments — would not necessarily support the DOJ’s argument.

“It will be interesting to see whether the Court's textualism impulse or its broad executive authority impulse will prevail.”

A renewed effort to shrink public lands protections

Trump, during his first term, had sought to reduce the size of two Obama-era monuments in southern Utah — Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante — but was challenged in court.

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Indigenous and environmental groups challenging the reductions argued the Antiquities Act doesn’t explicitly give presidents the power to reduce the size of national monuments, only to establish them.

That litigation was stayed after Trump lost the 2020 election and Biden took over the White House, meaning the legal strength of the new DOJ memo is largely untested.

More recently, in April, environmental groups sued to block Trump’s decision to open parts of the Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument to commercial fishing, which did not directly shrink that protected area.

Mark Squillace, a professor at the University of Colorado Law School, noted that “many of our most treasured parks” began as national monuments, including the Grand Canyon in Arizona, Zion in Utah, Olympic in Washington and Glacier Bay in Alaska.

“Perhaps more importantly, we should remember that these are public lands,” he said, which means that protecting the lands should be the government’s “management priority.”

“In this sense, doubts about the president's authority should be resolved in favor of protecting those resources,” he said, “because once they are gone, they are likely lost forever.”

A Washington woman whose mother died during a 2021 heat wave in Seattle claims in a new lawsuit that Big Oil is responsible for her death, since the deadly weather is “directly linked” to the use and sale of their products.

The lawsuit was filed against firms like Exxon, BP, Chevron and Shell in Washington state court — and represents what legal experts say is the first-ever wrongful death lawsuit stemming from a climate disaster.

Julie Leon's daughter, Misti Leon, said in the lawsuit that the companies knew for decades that burning fossil fuels would cause climate change, but actively undermined the public’s knowledge of those risks to secure economic dependence on their products.

Those decades of deception, the lawsuit claims, led directly to the June 2021 heat wave in the Pacific Northwest that strained Seattle’s energy grid, buckled roads, overloaded emergency rooms and ultimately killed 65-year-old Julie after she overheated in her car.

“Defendants have known for all of Julie’s life that their affirmative misrepresentations and omissions would claim lives. Julie is a victim of Defendants’ conduct. Her lifespan is a bridge between cause and effect,” the lawsuit said.

Tim Bechtold, an attorney for Leon, told Landmark that, in traditional tort law, if someone causes harm to another, they should be accountable for it. He thinks that the case will make good on advances in climate attribution science and could spur others to take action as well.

“If it turns out that a lot of people are being harmed by these companies and experiencing personal damages, then it’s only natural that those companies should be held accountable,” he said.

BP declined to comment. The other oil companies didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

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At a high level, the allegations are similar to those in dozens of other lawsuits that have been filed by states and local governments. Those cases also claim that fossil fuel firms misled the public for decades about the threat of using their products. They generally raise public nuisance, product liability and consumer protection claims and seek billions to help mitigate and prepare for flooding, drought, fires and other severe weather made more likely by climate change.

Among those cases, the city and county of Honolulu, Massachusetts and Rhode Island have survived motions to dismiss and are gearing up for or are currently in discovery.

But adding the wrongful death element to the case will make it much more difficult for Leon’s lawyers.

“It’s more difficult to prove attribution for a specific individual than for a statistical population,” Michael Gerrard, a professor at Columbia Law School, told Landmark.

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Gerrard pointed out that no U.S. case has yet been finished, and that internationally, the cases are more of a mixed bag.

The European Court of Human Rights last year found in favor of thousands of Swiss women who claimed extreme heat was harming them, and that the government failed to act. But a German court just this week rejected a Peruvian farmer’s claims that an energy company is responsible for increased flood risk near his home.

Gerrard expects the oil companies to first challenge the lawsuit on procedural grounds, like arguing the case is preempted by federal law. Long after that, if the case survives, one might expect specific questions around the facts of Leon’s specific case like the degree to which the companies are directly responsible for the 2021 heat wave and whether other actions could have saved the woman’s life.

Here’s what else we’re watching:

• Young people are suing Trump to block his energy emergency executive orders: Twenty-two young people represented by the non-profit law firm Our Children’s Trust filed a new lawsuit in Montana federal court, seeking to block President Donald Trump’s executive orders that seek to “unleash” American energy.
  
  The youth claim there is no energy emergency in the United States and that agencies like the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and U.S. Department of the Interior — by carrying out the president’s executive orders — are contributing to climate change harms that especially impact children and violate their due process rights to life and liberty under the U.S. Constitution.

• Shell is being forced to fork over climate risk data in a Rhode Island case: A Rhode Island federal judge told Shell that it must comply with a discovery request to provide documents related to the flooding and storm risk at its bulk storage and fuel terminal in Providence.
  
  The Conservation Law Foundation’s lawsuit against Shell claims the company is failing to prepare the terminal adequately for climate change impacts, which puts nearby waterways and the community that uses them at risk. The lawsuit claims Shell’s facility is already causing spills of oil, ethanol and other toxic chemicals, and that more could come as climate change further exacerbates extreme weather.

• Trump’s plan to land SpaceX rockets in wildlife refuge gets legal scrutiny: Environmental groups are seeking records from the U.S. Air Force and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service related to plans to build launch pads for SpaceX rockets in sensitive marine habitat in the Pacific Ocean.
  
  The Center for Biological Diversity filed the lawsuit in Hawaii federal court seeking to compel the government to comply with its Freedom of Information Act request, and claims repeated rocket landings could disrupt sensitive wildlife, including protected species, migrating birds and other marine life.

A Peruvian farmer has lost his decade-long fight to hold a German energy company liable for climate damages — but the ruling may have strengthened the legal path for future climate lawsuits.

German Judge Rolf Meyer, in Hamm, dismissed farmer Saul Luciano Lliuya’s case after determining the alleged harms from the energy company RWE’s emissions weren’t large enough to sustain the lawsuit.

But the decision is being heralded as an important precedent by Lliuyu’s attorneys and others who say Meyer also determined a polluter could theoretically be forced to slash emissions or pay damages if larger harms were argued.

The decade-old case has been closely watched as a test whether a company like RWE — which has never operated in Peru, but was described in court as one of the largest polluters in the world — could be held responsible for contributing to climate change that is melting Andean glaciers and increasing the flood risk at Lliuya’s home.

The farmer had argued that RWE, which is phasing out its coal-fired power plants, should be forced to pay at least $17,500 of a $3.5 million flood defense project needed to stop flooding near his home.

RWE said in a statement that it is on track to become carbon neutral by 2040, and said the German industrial sector overall has done a good job of cutting greenhouse gas emissions compared to other countries.

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"We regard it as an entirely misplaced approach to turn courtrooms into a forum for NGOs' demands on climate protection policies," the utility said in a statement after the ruling.

Lliuya’s representatives, meanwhile, saw a huge silver lining in the defeat.

“It is true that the court itself did not consider the flood risk for my client to be sufficiently high,” said Roda Verheyen, a lawyer for Lliuya, in a statement.

“But one thing is clear: today’s ruling is a milestone and will give a tailwind to climate lawsuits against fossil fuel companies, and thus to the move away from fossil fuels worldwide.”

Here’s what else we’re watching:

• U.S. Supreme Court refuses to block copper mine on Native American land: The high court declined to hear Native American group Apache Stronghold’s case seeking to block the Rio Tinto copper mine in Arizona. The group had argued that developing the massive copper mine on a stretch of land in the Tonto National Forest known as Oak Flat would violate their religious rights.
  
  The denial — in which Justices Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas dissented — essentially upholds a lower court order to transfer the federal land to the developer, and marks a significant blow after years of legal fighting that began when the land swap was first approved in 2014.
  
  

• The White House kills greenhouse gas emissions guidance in NEPA reviews: The Council on Environmental Quality submitted a notice to the Federal Register that it is ending a Biden-era guidance for federal agencies to consider climate change and greenhouse gas emissions when permitting energy projects. Under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), agencies must consider the environmental harms associated with major projects — but the executive branch has in the past exercised significant leeway in defining what factors are considered.
  
  It’s not the first change to NEPA under the Trump administration, which has sought to unravel longstanding CEQ rules and to limit the amount of time spent on projects at the U.S. Interior Department.
  
  

• The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals gave Arizona tribes a lifeline in their fight against a major power line: The appeals court reversed a lower court finding that the Tohono O’odham Nation filed a lawsuit challenging the path of the SunZia Transmission Line too late. The tribe had claimed the pathway of the massive transmission line that would carry New Mexico wind energy to roughly 3 million customers in California violated the National Historic Preservation Act, and would disturb sacred lands in Arizona.
  
  The court wrote that the tribe had “plausibly alleged” that the Interior Department violated an earlier agreement they reached with the department “by authorizing construction before properly identifying all historic properties affected by the Project and ensuring that any adverse effects would be avoided, minimized, or mitigated.”
  
  

• Massachusetts residents look to block construction on an offshore wind farm 20 miles from Martha’s Vineyard: Residents of Nantucket, Mass., filed a lawsuit alleging the U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management and other federal departments violated the Endangered Species Act, the Marine Mammal Protection Act and other laws when they approved the New England 1 and 2 offshore wind projects.
  
  Like many lawsuits challenging wind farms near New England, the challengers claim that the wind farms will harm endangered whales, among other things.
  
  

• New York judge blocks Trump admin’s effort to kill NYC’s congestion pricing plan: A New York federal judge issued a temporary restraining order blocking the U.S. Transportation Department from “terminating” the city’s congestion pricing plan, which levies a fee on motorists entering lower Manhattan.
  
  U.S. District Judge Lewis Liman’s order will expire June 9.

A defiant California has pledged to file a lawsuit after Republicans in the U.S. Senate broke with precedent and voted to nullify a waiver that allows the state to set stricter vehicle air emissions than the federal standard.

The threat from the country’s largest state came shortly after Republicans on Thursday voted 51 to 44 to overturn California’s Clean Air Act waiver via the Congressional Review Act (CRA) — despite determinations by the Senate parliamentarian and Government Accountability Office (GAO) that the waiver isn’t a rule subject to repeal under that law.

The vote and impending lawsuit set the stage for a legal showdown that experts have told Landmark is essentially unprecedented: The CRA, which allows lawmakers in a newly-formed Congress the ability to quickly nullify recent rules, does not have a judicial review provision.

And while the CRA and GAO determinations are non-binding, it is extremely rare for the Senate to ignore their guidance.

California Attorney General Rob Bonta said in a statement that “this reckless misuse of the Congressional Review Act is unlawful,” and characterized the vote as Senate Republicans “bending the knee” to President Donald Trump.

“The weaponization of the Congressional Review Act to attack California’s waivers is just another part of the continuous, partisan campaign against California’s efforts to protect the public and the planet from harmful pollution,” he said.

The House had voted in April to nullify the waiver, which was granted under a specific provision of the Clean Air Act (CAA) that gives California the ability to seek permission to establish stricter pollution limits than the national standards.

California, which has big-picture plans to cut greenhouse gas emissions 85% by 2045, has received such approval numerous times in recent decades. The CAA also allows other states to adopt California’s standards, and 13 have done so.

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While the national standards are the only ones that technically apply in most states, many say the sheer size of California’s economy alongside those of other states make its regulations a de-facto national standard.

Here’s what else we’re watching:

• NYC’s climate law survives court challenge: The New York State Court of Appeals — the highest court in the state — ruled that a New York City law that requires reductions in building emissions is not preempted by state law. The decision is a major win for proponents of Local Law 97, which seeks to reduce emissions from large buildings in the city by 40% by 2030. The law had been challenged by building and real estate owners.
  

• EPA sends Clean Water Act warning shot to blue states, tribes: U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin published a memorandum “clarifying the specific and limited role that states and tribes play in the federal licensing and permitting processes under Clean Water Act (CWA) section 401.”
  
  Section 401 requires developers and other applicants for federal permits to apply for licenses to demonstrate that they won’t significantly damage water quality.
  The memo aligns the EPA with the positions taken by fossil fuel interests, which unsuccessfully challenged a Biden-era CWA rule that expanded the power of states and tribes to veto infrastructure projects using Section 401 over broad water quality impacts including impacts to fish habitat or impacts from runoff. The first Trump administration had finalized its own rule that limited review to only direct discharges of pollution from things like pipes.
  
  Industry said the Biden rule exceeded the EPA’s authority under the CWA, and that states like New York had inappropriately cited climate change impacts — which can cause indirect water quality concerns — when denying a permit to build a natural gas pipeline.

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• National monuments legal fight starts over coral reef habitat: Native Hawaiian cultural practitioners and environmentalists filed a lawsuit challenging an order by Trump that would open up parts of the Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument to commercial fishing.
  
  The monument, which includes pristine coral reefs and small islands near Hawaii, was first designated under the Antiquities Act in 2009 and then expanded in 2014. The lawsuit claims that the Antiquities Act gives a president power to designate or expand national monuments — but not shrink them. Watch out for this argument should the Trump administration target other national monuments (it’s the same argument that was used when the first Trump administration tried to shrink Bears Ears National Monument in Utah).
  
  The lawsuit also made more technical arguments that the Interior and Commerce Departments violated the National Environmental Policy Act, Magnuson-Stevens Act and the Endangered Species Act when they implemented the order.
  

• Trump admin sides with Texas in BlackRock ESG fight: The U.S. Federal Trade Commission and U.S. Department of Justice, as the country’s antitrust enforcers, expressed support for a lawsuit Texas filed last year alleging investment funds BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street illegally conspired to drive down coal production as a part of an industry drive for “net zero” standards. The firms, which manage a collective $27 trillion for investors, are currently seeking to dismiss the lawsuit and have called the case half-baked (they also maintain substantial fossil fuel investments and have reduced their focus on environmental concerns in recent years).
  

• Environmentalists want a piece of the blue state electric vehicle funding fight: Non-profit environmental groups including the Sierra Club, the Natural Resources Defense Council and others asked to join a lawsuit challenging the Trump administration’s funding freeze of $5 billion in electric vehicle grants. The main lawsuit was filed earlier this month by a coalition of 17 Democratic state attorneys general.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency plans to weaken the first-ever federal restrictions for certain “forever chemicals” in drinking water, which were finalized by the Biden administration just last year.

The Trump administration’s announcement on Wednesday suggested that it believes at least some of the restrictions on certain per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) run afoul of the Safe Drinking Water Act — though environmental groups, of course, are already planning lawsuits in the other direction.

PFAS are a class of chemicals that have been used in thousands of commercial and consumer products, including firefighting foams, semiconductors and stain-resistant fabrics. They’re called “forever chemicals” because they don’t easily break down in the environment or once ingested by humans, and have been linked to some cancers.

Here’s what you need to know about the EPA’s decision, and the likely legal fight to come.

The rule in question

EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin’s announcement picked apart the first-ever federal regulations for PFAS in drinking water, which set tight limits that essentially required public water systems to eliminate the chemicals in tap water.

The regulations were finalized under the Safe Drinking Water Act, which gives the EPA authority to set drinking water standards for public water providers across the country. More specifically, the regulations set strict limits ranging from 4 to 10 parts per trillion for five specific PFAS and limits for various other PFAS if they are detected in a mix.

The EPA said that it would extend compliance deadlines for water providers by two years — until 2031 — and establish potential exemptions for two of the most notorious PFAS. The first is PFOA, or C8, which was previously used in Teflon. The second is PFOS, which was previously used in products like 3M’s Scotchgard as a stain repellent.

The EPA also said it would rescind and reconsider its regulatory determinations for three other PFAS, including GenX, in order to ensure the rules comply with the Safe Water Drinking Act. It also said it would review the limits for mixtures of PFAS.

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Did the rules violate the Safe Drinking Water Act to begin with?

Some public water systems in the U.S. were surprised to find out their levels exceeded the legal limits, and were facing what they said were potentially billions of dollars in compliance costs.

Those costs would compound with recent mandates to replace lead pipes that could, though major multi-billion dollar settlements with PFAS polluters like 3M could help with the PFAS bills alongside $9 billion in federal dollars for chemical cleanup in the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.

In addition to water provider concerns, the limits were challenged in court by industry groups including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the American Chemistry Council, American Fuel and& Petrochemical Manufacturers, the Recycled Materials Association and others.

Those groups told the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals that the rule exceeded the EPA’s authority under the Safe Drinking Water Act, arguing the rule overstated the benefits of imposing the limits while underestimating costs.

The case has been held in abeyance, due to the change in presidential administration.

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Make America Healthy Again?

Environmental groups — and prominent voices in the PFAS space, including actor and activist Mark Ruffalo — quickly denounced the decision by Zeldin, who had supported forever chemicals legislation when he was a US congressman.

(Note: The Trump administration actually kicked off regulatory efforts to address PFAS, though the Biden administration’s work was considered much more robust.).

Attorney Katherine O’Brien of the nonprofit environmental law firm Earthjustice said in a statement that Zeldin’s decision “is an illegal and cynical move that will needlessly perpetuate the epidemic of disease from PFAS contamination across our country.”

Emily Donovan, the co-founder of the group Clean Cape Fear — which was started in response to PFAS contamination in North Carolina — called it a “clear victory for the trillion-dollar chemical industry.”

She added that the Trump administration promised to “Make America Healthy Again” but said that “rescinding part of the PFAS drinking water standards does no such thing.”

But Matthew Holmes, the CEO of the National Rural Water Association, said that delaying the implementation of the PFAS rule is “the right thing for rural and small communities.”