A second Trump presidency would lead to a sea change for climate-related lawsuits in the nation’s courts.
In recent years the courts have become a major battleground over climate and environmental regulations, as everyone from powerful corporations to groups of teenagers has sued to fight for or against efforts to slow global warming.
Among these cases are numerous high-profile suits in federal courts attacking Biden-era climate policies, including Environmental Protection Agency rules on power-plant emissions and other forms of air pollution. One of the most immediate actions of a future Trump administration could be to stop defending those cases in court or to switch sides, ceding them to the challengers.
“With a Trump administration, it’s significantly more likely than in prior transitions that they will simply change their litigation position,” said Sam Sankar, a senior vice president at Earthjustice, an environmental law organization. A Trump win could mean “very hard days for those folks at the Justice Department,” he said.
Some experts also said that a second Trump administration could be much more successful at defending its own climate and environmental policies in the courts than the first Trump administration was. That administration weakened a wide array of climate and environmental protections, but many of its actions were later overturned because the changes weren’t made according to the rules.
“They just sort of barreled through, ignoring the procedures,” said Michael Gerrard, founder of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University in New York. That made the changes susceptible to legal challenge. The “win rate” for federal agencies defending major rules during Mr. Trump’s presidency was just 31 percent, far lower than his predecessors’, according to a study published in Texas A&M Law Review this year.
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