Michael Gerrard

transportation emissions were a country, it would be the sixth largest greenhouse gas emitting country in the world.

Well, some of them are.

Montana has in its state constitution an environmental rights provision, and that led to an important trial a couple of years ago saying that the state was violating its state constitution by ignoring climate change.

Hawaii has a similar provision, and there was a settlement in a lawsuit last year in which Hawaii agreed to clean up its transportation system.

New York and Pennsylvania also have similar laws, and those are now being litigated.

In addition, there are about two dozen lawsuits around the country brought by states and cities against the fossil fuel companies seeking money damages for climate change.

Those have been going on for almost 20 years.

We don't have final decisions yet.

We'll see what happens in those.

Well, environmental advocates are obviously outraged, and we're soon going to see lawsuits in the Federal Circuit Court in DC challenging this action by the endangerment finding.

That'll probably make its way to the Supreme Court, and we'll see what happens there.

But meanwhile, there's activity in a lot of the states.

The states continue to have the power to regulate greenhouse gases.

not from motor vehicles.

That's preempted.

But in stationary resources, lots of other things, states still have the power.

And many states are using that power to regulate their emissions and to encourage more renewable energy.

Well, in 2019, when the endangerment finding was first issued, there was a ton of scientific evidence that fossil fuels were the principal cause of climate change and that climate change was having terrible problems.

There's now 10 tons of evidence showing that.

The Trump administration did bring in a group of six well-known contrarian scientists to issue a report saying climate change isn't so bad.