Michael Barbaro

And that is that this case gets before the Supreme Court.

And if that happens, there is a lot of hope in the conservative movement that the landmark decision

Climate change case, Massachusetts versus EPA, could be overturned or significantly weakened.

So their hope is that the endangerment finding ends up before the Supreme Court in such a way that a conservative majority of the Supreme Court would overturn the original Supreme Court ruling that allows the endangerment finding to have ever come into existence.

You hit the nail on the head.

And if that happens, a future president would not be able to reinstate regulations addressing greenhouse gas emissions unless and until Congress explicitly said, go do that.

And let's presume for just a moment, Lisa, that our legal system does allow the endangerment finding to go away.

I want to talk about the repercussions of that on the environment, on industry.

And let's just start with the impact on industry that now operates under these regulations that I presume suddenly would start to go away.

Well, one thing that industry would get is the certainty that it has said it always wants, right?

It would know that it would not face what has been a decade and a half of whiplash.

Democrats come in and start to regulate power plants and automobiles and the rest, and then a Republican administration comes in and removes or weakens them.

There would be a new playing field, and it would not include regulatory restrictions.

So the question is, will this lead to industries polluting more?

Right.

And yeah, we don't know.

I mean, it is certainly possible that because companies have already put billions of dollars into clean technology, whether it's for EVs or pollution controls in power plants, that they will continue to do so.

There's also...

public pressure and, you know, companies very much care about how they are seen and whether they are stepping up to a challenge like climate change.

But the reality is, left completely unshackled, as this EPA is about to do, we don't really know how industry will react.