But it is only a beginning. The West Virginia case v. The Environmental Protection Agency is the product of a coordinated, multi-year strategy by Republican attorneys general, conservative legal activists and their financiers, many with links to the oil and coal industries, to use the judiciary to rewrite the environment. weakening the capacity of the executive to deal with global warming. Through the federal courts there are more climate cases, some with new legal arguments, each carefully selected for its ability to obstruct the government’s ability to regulate greenhouse gas industries and businesses. “The case of West Virginia v. EPA is unusual, but it is emblematic of the bigger picture. “AGs are willing to use these unusual strategies more,” said Paul Nolette, a political science professor at Marquette University who has studied attorney generals. “And the strategies are becoming more and more complex.” The plaintiffs want to get into what they call the state administration, the EPA and other federal agencies that set rules and regulations that affect the US economy. That should be the role of Congress, which is more accountable to voters, said Jeff Landry, Louisiana’s attorney general and one of the leaders of the Republican team that is suing. But Congress has barely addressed the issue of climate change. On the contrary, for decades it has delegated power to organizations because it lacks the expertise of experts who write complex rules and regulations and who can respond quickly to changing science, especially when Capitol Hill is at a dead end. West Virginia v. EPA, No. 20–1530 in the court file, is also notable for the tangle of connections between plaintiffs and Supreme Court justices who will decide their case. Republican plaintiffs share many of the same donors behind efforts to nominate and confirm five of the Republicans on the bench – John G. Roberts, Samuel A. Alito Jr., Neil M. Gorsuch, Brett M. Kavanaugh, Amy Coney Barrett . “It’s a tweak,” said Lisa Graves, executive director of the progressive monitoring team True North Research and a former senior Justice Department official. “They are gathering lawyers to bring the case to the same judges they have chosen.” The pattern is echoed in other climate cases filed by Republican attorney generals and now moving to lower courts: Plaintiffs backed by the same network of Conservative donors who helped former President Donald J. Trump appoint more than 200 federal judges, many now able to rule on climate affairs next year. At least two of the cases present an unusual approach that demonstrates the aggressive nature of the legal campaign. In these lawsuits, the plaintiffs challenge regulations or policies that do not yet exist. They want to thwart President Biden’s efforts to deliver on his promise to move the country away from fossil fuels, while at the same time aiming to prevent a future president from attempting something similar.

The Stakes for Climate

Victory for the plaintiffs in these cases would mean that the federal government could not dramatically reduce exhaust emissions due to the impact of vehicles on the climate, even though transport is the largest source of greenhouse gases in the country. The government would also not be able to force utilities to replace fossil fuel power plants, the world’s second-largest source of global warming pollution, with wind and solar energy. And the executive could not consider the financial cost of climate change when assessing whether to approve a new oil pipeline or similar project or environmental regulations. These restrictions on climate action in the United States, which has channeled more gaseous gases into the atmosphere than any other nation, are likely to undermine the world’s goal of reducing enough emissions to prevent global warming. by an average of 1.5 degrees Celsius compared to the pre-industrial era. This is the limit beyond which scientists say the probability of catastrophic hurricanes, droughts, heat waves and fires increases significantly. The Earth has already warmed by an average of 1.1 degrees Celsius. “If the Supreme Court uses it as an opportunity to really stifle the EPA’s ability to regulate climate change, it will seriously impede US progress toward resolving the problem,” said Michael Oppenheimer, a professor of geosciences and international relations at Princeton University. . The ultimate goal of the Republican activists, say people involved in the effort, is to overturn the legal dogma by which Congress has delegated power to federal agencies to regulate the environment, health care, workplace safety, telecommunications, financial sector and others. Known as “respect for Chevron”, following a 1984 Supreme Court ruling, this doctrine argues that courts must adhere to reasonable interpretations of ambiguous statutes by federal agencies in the theory that services are more expert than judges and more accountable to voters. “Judges are not experts in the field and are not part of any political branch of government,” Deputy Judge John Paul Stevens wrote in his opinion on a unanimous court. However, many conservatives say the ruling violates the separation of powers by allowing executives rather than judges to say what the law is. In one of his most famous views as a judge of the Court of Appeal, Deputy Judge Gorsuch wrote that Chevron had allowed the “executive bureaucracies to swallow vast sums of basic judicial and legislative power”. The constitutional dispute is not necessarily political, because Chevron’s assessment applies to the actions of representatives in both republican and democratic governments. But conservative hostility to dogma may be partly rooted in distrust of established bureaucracies and certain kinds of know-how. In the month since Mr. Trump took office, his then-head of strategy, Stephen K. Bannon, has summed up one of their top goals as “dismantling the administration.” According to Michael McKenna, a Republican energy lobbyist working for Trump’s White House, Chevron’s acceptance has long been a target for conservatives. “The original crew has been moving steadily toward Chevron’s significant re-enrollment for years,” he wrote in an email. “They are going to be rewarded with a substantial and material victory.” The roots of this victory were planted in 2015, when Mitt McConnell, a Republican from Kentucky, became the leader of the majority in the Senate and led his party in a sustained campaign to deny President Barack Obama the opportunity to nominate a federal. He declined to confirm the candidates, expecting a Republican government to fill the courts with judges who shared his belief in minimal government. It was also spurred on by the dying coal industry in Kentucky, which could be eliminated by new EPA rules aimed at slowing down fossil fuel pollution. “The fight against EPA is ‘mom and apple pie’ in Kentucky,” said Neil Chatterjee, a former McConnell energy policy aide. Mr. McConnell’s effort ensured that Mr. Trump inherited not only an open seat on the Supreme Court, but 107 additional vacancies. Then came Leonard A. Leo. At the time, Mr. Leo was executive vice president of the Federalist Society, the conservative legal group that helped secure the appointments of Chief Justice Roberts and Associate Justice Alito to the Supreme Court and served as the ideological and tactical machine behind the overthrow efforts. Roe vs. Wade. Some of the many donors to the Federal Society include Koch Industries, which has fought climate action. the Sarah Scaife Foundation, created by the heirs of Mellon Oil, Aluminum and Banking. and Chevron, the oil giant and plaintiff in the case that created Chevron’s distinction. Mr. Leo worked with Donald F. McGahn II, a White House aide to Trump’s adviser and another longtime member of the Federal Reserve, to review and nominate candidates for the presidency. Mr McGahn was honest about his criteria. Speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference in 2018, Mr. McGann was asked about the White House’s focus on reversing Chevron. “Well, it’s not a coincidence,” he said. “It’s part of a bigger, bigger plan, I guess.” “There is a coherent plan here where, in fact, judicial choice and deregulation efforts are really the other side of the same coin,” McGann added. Mr Leo also helped lead the Judicial Crisis Network, a nonprofit advocacy group that campaigned to help Associates Justices Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Coney Barrett reach the Supreme Court and install dozens of other like-minded judges on lower courts. In total, Mr. Trump has appointed three Supreme Court justices, 54 appellate judges and 174 district judges. By comparison, Mr. Biden has appointed 68 federal judges to date. In 2020, Mr. Leo resigned as head of the Federal Society to run CRC Advisors, a right-wing political strategy firm. In this role, he has operated at the center of a constellation of defense groups and outspoken donors who share a similar goal: Use the courts to promote conservative and libertarian purposes. One of CRC Advisors’s largest clients is the Republican Attorney General’s Association. Another is the Concord Fund, the defense team that is the latest incarnation of the Judicial Crisis Network. The fund is also by far the biggest financial supporter of the Republican Attorney General’s Association. Since 2014, …