Elizabeth Kolbert

So that's certainly a big concern among those scientists who are left at the EPA.

So the endangerment finding goes back to a 2007 Supreme Court decision, Massachusetts versus the EPA, which Richard Lazarus, a Harvard law professor, has called the most important environmental decision.

decision the court has ever issued.

And in that decision, the EPA was sort of dragging its feet on doing anything about climate change, and Massachusetts decided to sue.

And it revolves around this section of the Clean Air Act that basically compels the EPA to

to regulate dangerous air pollutants, specifically dangerous air pollutants coming out of the tailpipes of cars.

And the EPA had just basically been trying to sidestep this.

And the court said, you've got to decide either the CO2, the greenhouse gases coming out of cars are dangerous or not.

And if they are dangerous, you've got to regulate them.

So, that case basically set in motion this process of, quote-unquote, deciding whether CO2 is dangerous, which was really not much of a decision.

Eventually, in the first year of the Obama administration, we got this finding, yes, carbon dioxide, which causes global warming.

is a threat to public health, is a danger.

And then there was sort of a separate endangerment finding regarding emissions from power plants, CO2 and greenhouse gas emissions from power plants.

And those findings form the basis of everything the EPA has done since to try to rein in carbon emissions.

And it's been...

You know, an almost 20-year battle now as we've gone through different administrations.

But even under Trump won, even under Trump's first sort of scandal-scarred EPA administrator, Scott Pruitt...

The endangerment finding has always been accepted as settled.

But what distinguishes Zeldin's EPA is the willingness or eagerness to take on the endangerment finding.

Let's try to take this through the courts and see what happens again, because now we have a new Supreme Court.