Elizabeth Kolbert

That's not, you know, we're not telling them anything that they don't know.

It turns out, you know, what was keeping previous administrations from doing this was a sense of, well, that's just not how government should work.

And now we've thrown those protocols to the wind and anything goes until the court catches up with you, at which point you may not be able to undo the damage.

Well, the Clean Air Act was written, or what we consider the Clean Air Act, was written in 1970 at a time when climate change was known about in certain circles, but it wasn't a major issue.

It wasn't really being widely discussed.

And the science was still pretty new.

You could make the argument that the Clean Air Act was extremely forward-thinking and

In that it left open these possibilities.

Well, we are going to discover new pollutants.

And that's one of the things we're arguing about.

Does the Clean Air Act have room as you discover new things that are dangers to regulate those?

And once again, according to the 2007 Supreme Court decision, yes, you do.

But what they are arguing now in this, you know, sort of contrary to that decision.

They being the Trump administration, and there's sort of a grab bag of legal arguments, but they all do revolve around the wording of the Clean Air Act.

And one of their arguments is that something is only a pollutant if it affects you in a local or regional way.

Now, greenhouse gases are global, they're well mixed, and their effect is not direct.

So it's not directly when you breathe in that CO2.

It's the indirect effects of dumping it in the atmosphere and warming the earth.

And they're arguing that that is not what the Clean Air Act meant by pollutant.

So we have this very textual exegesis argument.