As part of the 2026 Hot Topics in Environmental Law Summer Lecture Series, VLGS summer faculty and environmental law expert @Sean Donahue, a partner at Donahue, Goldberg, Herzog and Davidson, discusses federal environmental policy under the second Trump administration. In this podcast replay of his lecture, “Federal Climate Policy: Demolition and Reconstruction,” he provides a history of the profound changes in environmental legislation and policy over the past decade, contrasts the current Trump administration's policy efforts with those of the first Trump administration, and examines the ongoing demolition of climate policy at the federal level. He also discusses possible policy directions for environmental progress despite these challenges.
Narrator
This podcast is a production of the Maverick Lloyd School for the Environment, a Vermont law and graduate school.
Christophe Courchesne
Hello and welcome to the Hothouse Earth Podcast. I’m Professor Christophe Courchesne, faculty director of the Environmental Law Center and associate dean for Environmental and experiential programs here at Vermont Law and Graduate School. Each summer, the Environmental Law Center hosts its Hot Topics and Environmental Law Lecture series, bringing together summer faculty and invited experts to speak on current issues in environmental law and policy.
All of our lectures are available on our Hot Topics Playlist and Vermont Law and Graduate School’s YouTube Channel.
Today, we hope you enjoyed this episode of the 2026 Hot Topics series. Let's listen.
I am pleased to welcome Sean Donahue. Sean is a partner at Donahue, Goldberg, Herzog and Davidson, where his practice is focused on appellate litigation with a focus on complex environmental and administrative law cases in federal and state appellate courts.
A graduate of the University of Chicago Law School, Sean served as a law clerk to then D.C. Circuit Judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg and to Justice John Paul Stevens of the Supreme Court. After entering practice at Jenner and Block, he spent four years at the appellate section of the Department of Justice's Environmental and Natural Resources Division. At least I think that's what it's still called. Maybe that's about to change. Since establishing his own practice in 2022, Sean has represented environmental and public health organizations in numerous major environmental and clean energy cases in the Supreme Court and Courts of Appeal. He's taught courses in environmental law, climate change law, civil procedure, constitutional law, and other subjects at Iowa College of Law, Washington and Lee University School of Law, Georgetown University Law Center, and Stanford Law School.
And here at VLGS, Sean returns to us this summer as a longtime summer faculty member to teach his course next week. Federal environmental policy under Trump two. Today, his talk will focus on federal climate policy, demolition and reconstruction. So please join me in welcoming Sean Donahue.
Sean Donahue
Thank you so much, Christophe, and good to be with everybody, and I look forward to being there in person very soon. So I'm going to try to give a kind of overview of sort of federal environmental policy with a focus on climate over the last ten years, but with a focus on the last two, and then gaze into the very murky future a little bit at the end.
But recognizing the last ten years have been extremely eventful, filled with many terrible events, especially, but other events too. I'll try to cover a few themes, with recognition that this is a bit of an overambitious effort. So Trump won the 2017 to 21 era, now seems like a long and almost gauzy, fondly remembered period when we thought we knew what a sort of extreme departure in federal governance looked like.
Trump came in with a pretty clear stance toward environmental regulation, particularly climate. He was going to rebuild the coal industry. He had already called climate change a hoax. It was clear that there very dramatic change from the Obama years. What was coming, and indeed it did. His administration embarked on a series of rollbacks of Obama regulatory programs and across the sort of major categories of greenhouse gas emitters, motor vehicles, power plants, and then other big initiatives.
The rollback in motor vehicles basically focused on greatly reducing the stringency of greenhouse gas emission standards and attacking California's authority under its special dispensation under the Clean Air Act, to have its own more stringent standards, basically arguing that California should not be allowed to regulate greenhouse gas pollutants under that program and and purporting to take away California's authority.
And then, of course, repealing the Clean Power Plan, the Obama administration's signature climate initiative, and replacing it with a different set of emission standards for power plants called the Affordable Clean Energy, or ACE Rule. That was just extremely unambitious. It was basically focusing on running efficient power plants, but not achieving significant reductions. It wasn't totally clear any reductions that would occur.
And then in some other areas, Clean Water Act and and air toxics, rolling back regulations and adopting much more narrow ones in the Clean Water Act case of rule based on Justice Scalia's narrow understanding of federal jurisdiction over wetlands. The Trump administration, the first go-round, is widely believed to have been quite unsuccessful, and its administrative actions very high rate of failure in the courts.
The Institute for Policy Integrity, NYU, has a tracker that tabulated them as having succeeded in defending 54 sort of environment, energy kinds of initiatives and having lost in court on 192 ones. That's not a good ratio there at at times that the numbers were even looking worse than that. So there was one one of the sort of at least common accounts of this period is that they tried to do a lot of big things.
They weren't that great at it. Partly it was that they had people running departments who weren't particularly into environmental law, administrative law. Another thing that was certainly part of that era was that industry was ambivalent about going as big as the administration suggested it might. The endangerment finding as a good example, a lot of industry big corporations and high-emitting sectors had their own climate commitments.
They had CEOs who said, We believe in climate change and we're active in Europe and other places that have ambitious climate goals. Folks will recall there was a big discussion of whether we should pull out of the Paris climate agreement. Trump eventually did that in June of 2017, but there was a lot of pushback, including from industry and a lot of sort of statements that, well, we plan to honor our commitments or we're going to do this kind of workaround to show that we still care about climate change.
So I think we will get to this in a moment. But the industry's sort of ambivalence about having the federal government run as an anti-climate mitigation, pro-fossil-fuel promotion kind of enterprise was one thing that kind of really limited the ambition and efficacy of some of the rollbacks of that that era. With respect to the civil service, Trump was never a friend of, you know, civil service people, particularly folks in agencies like EPA and NOAA and Fish and Wildlife Service.
And there were discussion and budget proposals from the administration that we're going to make massive cuts in these agencies. But that didn't happen. And Congress, particularly after the midterms where Trump was lost, Democrats won a lot of seats. That just didn't happen. And so over the course of Trump won, you had a reduction in an EPA staff, but it was in the order of under 10%, which can be a lot.
But I the numbers I got were 5 to 8%. But a lot of folks within the agency sort of made it through. And there was a sense that Trump, who was elected without a popular majority, was a bit of an aberration and that if you could make it through, there could be a restoration with a new president. So and on the last day of the Trump administration and in a in a development that was felt kind of consistent with that view, that that there would be a kind of return to normalcy.
They D.C. Circuit struck down the Trump administration's effort to repeal the Clean Power Plan and said, you read the the Clean Air Act too narrowly and grudgingly. And so you sort of didn't take seriously your obligation under the statute. And so big, big decision at the very last day of the administration. There is another trend going on. The Supreme Court is getting more conservative, partly because of Trump's appointments, and it is signaling discomfort with a lot of kinds of federal regulation, but especially in the area of environment and most especially climate, there's sort of a sense that effort by the first Trump administration to kind of sync up its rationales for these rollbacks with what
are perceived to be trends within the Supreme Court against ambitious programs, etc.. I mean, that's part of what the administration did in repealing the Clean Power Plan that kind of said this was too ambitious. We don't have this authority. This was extremely expensive and novel and weird when I think the Obama administration would've said, wait a minute, this was designed to sort of fit practice in the power sector, be as cheap as possible, be as realistic to reflect input from industry and states and others who were kind of active in the area.
So you have some trends of the Trump executive branch sort of anticipating and trying to build upon a sharp sort of rightward shift on the court, at least in terms of federal administrative views on environmental statutes. Okay. The Biden administration, at the very beginning, we see what has become a trend in the sort of back and forth between Democratic and Republican administrations.
A lot of day one announcements. We are putting things back on the proper course, a lot of commitments and executive orders to review all these big rollback rules for vehicles and power plants and hazardous air pollutants and water, etc., And getting right back in the Paris Agreement Day one commitment to do so. A part of what the Biden administration did was sort of try to restore use of statutes like the Clean Air Act to go after climate change, climate pollution in a serious way across the board of environmental Law of Clean Water Act, etc. They did adopt a bunch of major rules that both, for example, restored California's authority to have its own emissions standards,
pulling back the Trump administration's effort to block California and across a bunch a bunch of big rules now in the area of power plants. The Supreme Court asserted itself early and granted a review of the aforementioned decision, which was called the American Lung Association, the D.C. Circuit, and became known as West Virginia and the Supreme Court.
It did so even though there were a lot of arguments that the Clean Power Plan, which had never gone into effect because the Supreme Court itself had stated shortly after it was adopted, was sort of a dead letter or was going to be replaced by a quite a different rule. The S.G. made that argument to the court, made the argument that actually the Clean Power Plan is not very stringent because the trends in the sector have moved faster than we anticipated.
And so the targets that the Clean Power Plan set been achieved are certainly going to be achieved ahead of schedule absent regulation. So these arguments are all made. A majority of the court were concerned about the assertion of what it saw as an assertion of broad authority. And here I think that Trump won the way the rule was set up, the way that the Trump EPA characterized the Clean Power Plan probably had an effect, that this was a an effort to regulate the whole economy on using a an ambiguous and old statute.
So the court grants cert. Everybody knows that's not a good sign. They did it. You know, they didn't need to do it. You have restoration of regulation of hazardous air pollutants from power plants, which the Trump administration had sort of repudiated without actually repealing. And that's the the mercury in air toxics Rule. Appropriate, necessary finding. So a complicated picture.
The Biden administration did try to do some big things through rulemaking, but it was pretty aware that the court was going to be looking over its shoulder with considerable skepticism. And in addition to the West Virginia decision, which is comes out in June of 2022 and is a, you know, pretty strong repudiation of doing big things with the clean interacts, certainly for the power sector and announces the major questions doctrine, which almost seems tailor made to go after and establish a high bar for climate regulation, at least under the existing statutes.
But that's not all that you have the court kind of moving forward in other ways as well. In the Sackett case, Clean Water Act jurisdiction over wetlands. The Court basically adopts as that the authority, the interpretation of the statute. Justice Scalia's narrow reading that has the effect of excising a vast portion of the country's west wetlands from Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act jurisdiction.
And I'll jump forward to near the end of 2024 when the court issues the super bright decision on overturning the Chevron precedent and saying that agencies don't get deference in their interpretations of federal statutes, that decision is obviously consequential in a lot of complex ways for environmental regulation, but it's also, I think, most significant, perhaps it's just a sign of the sort of self-confidence and and and willingness to be bold that this new supermajority on the court has as a 40 year old precedent, the six zero decision been cited as much as almost any Supreme Court decision ever.
And the court has little difficulty overturning it. So so that the court's that the sort of coming into view of what it means to have a very conservative, very environmental regulation-skeptical court there for the foreseeable future. That picture which everybody understood to be really challenging for federal environmental policy, becomes clearer and perhaps more daunting. So partly as a result of that understanding, the Biden administration puts a big focus on trying to do big things on climate outside of regulation.
And that is the use of the reconciliation process to enact sort of spending and fiscal side measures to speed up the growth of clean energy and all the associated technological and economic changes that are needed to make that happen. That's the inflation Reduction Act passed in August of 22 that dedicates $370 billion in tax incentives and grants to various clean energy incentives and projects and provides other support for for those kinds of changes.
As I noted, that's obviously in part because of the realities of Congress. You did not have a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate to get this kind of thing done. So using reconciliation, which could bypass the filibuster requirement, was a tool that that could work borne of necessity, and that there's a sense that if we're going to do big things on climate, we should do as much as we can legislatively because of some of these interpretive doctrines.
And and the Supreme Court's willingness to strike down efforts to deal with climate under the Clean Air Act. And and then there are some other important strands behind that IRA effort. One is we'll invest big in areas that are perhaps supportive of Republicans and voted for President Trump. That wind energy in Iowa and Texas and and EVs in lots of places, EV plants and manufacturing in red states.
So that's sort of part of the theory is that maybe we can change this terribly divided politics of climate in part by spurring economic growth and jobs in red areas. And then also the IRA seeks to sort of explicitly bolster EPA's authority to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act through a variety of provisions that sort of rely on EPA's existing definition of greenhouse gases and other it's it's clearly intended to be a supplement, not a substitute for regulation.
So by the end of the Biden years, I think the IRA is regarded as the most important climate legislation that the United States has passed is a huge achievement that is having big effects on the ground by the end of 2024, by the by the election. The big regulatory actions have not been adjudicated in courts yet. They're sort of still in the pipeline.
There was a big D.C. Circuit argument where challengers like red states and oil and gas industry argue that the Biden administration's reliance on vehicle electrification as the basis for standards was a major question. So they're trying to sort of use this new sort of Supreme Court sort of presumption against big, big climate things, at least on the Clean Air Act, to to go after what had been the biggest success in terms of reducing emissions.
And you had a lot of auto industry support for at least the basic idea of of pushing forward on emissions by leveraging electrification which is happening and which the companies believe is sort of the global trend anyway. That case that never gets decided, arguments are sort of still pending in the courts when and this is the big surprise of my talk, Trump gets elected again in 2024, and what happens is another sort of 180-degree flip in policy, another set of day-one executive orders that instruct the administration to reconsider all these climate policies.
We immediately drop out of the Paris Agreement again. This time there's no hemming and hawing about it. And but this time and this is one of my my pieces, and I think pretty much anyone who reads the news would be constrained to agree. Trump two is very, very different across the board from Trump. One, certainly in environment and climate policy, vastly more ambitious, more radical.
One important example of of scores that could be offered is that this time we didn't just drop out of the Paris Agreement, which was an executive undertaking. I didn't get Senate ratification, but this time we purported to have dropped out of the UN framework Convention on Climate Change from the George H.W. Bush administration. That sets up the entire international conversation and it's just sort of a breathtaking move, repudiation not just of climate mitigation, but of of conversation about it.
And that's just something that I think and Trump won. I never saw that even suggested. Obviously, we pulled out of a whole bunch of other international undertakings. And but but just there's there's a radicalism there's a radicalism in the rhetoric that's used an out of sight a phrase from EPA Administrator Zeldin when he announced a whole bunch of undertakings to roll back regulations, particularly in climate, he used the phrase. He said, we're driving a stake through the heart of the climate change religion. This is the EPA administrator. You might expect to hear language like that at a speech at the Heartland Institute, or I focus on people who don't believe climate change is real or they believe it's good for people and in fact, Lee Zeldin did speak to that to the Heartland Institute during the second Trump term.
So there's just a sense of of complete repudiation of what might have been seen as the middle or the left side of the political spectrum and and governing very much with extreme prejudice, extreme hostility to two sort of progressive ideas, obviously, across the board. But but really, really extreme anti-climate mitigation efforts that extends from not only repealing lots of regulations, defunding lots of things, having a I go through and look for federal grants that use the word climate in them, whether they're about climate change or something else.
And and defunding them without a lot of inquiry. So there's a bunch of really big policy changes and then a bunch of sort of abusing the other side for the fun of it or perhaps to sort of fire up the base. A small but to my mind, pretty annoying example of that is that just the other day as a as an act of grace for the 4th of July that the president pardoned a number of people who had been convicted of altering their motor vehicles to evade Clean Air Act emission limitations.
They said these are people who are fixing their cars. So there's a sense and we've all seen the reports of his views, Trump's views on like wind power, that that is he wants not just to have the federal government not be in the business of promoting it, but he wants to stop it where he can defund it, persuade other countries to get rid of it.
So there's this kind of feral, over-the-top quality to to the second administration that's remarkable and noteworthy. And a bunch of other really salient differences. I mentioned that one thing that you saw a lot in Trump, one was industry saying not so fast, or maybe we're not on board with this or heaven's sake, we are. We believe in climate change.
We're not completely non-serious. But this time you have, you know, the heads of Amazon and Google and and other big companies going to the inauguration and Trump governing in a way that operates to intimidate leaders, particularly in industry, from speaking up about things like that, lest they be punished or lose opportunity sort of government by deal. And that's a huge, huge thing because a big part of the success that had been made under Obama and Biden involved, for example, in the auto industry doing things that the industry supported or at least didn't oppose and and having industry come out and say, no, clean cars are where we're going.
And we we're worried about climate change, too. And this time, industry has been pretty effectively cowed and they've obviously gotten, you know, in various areas, a lot of the tech area that have been a source of funding and interest and public statements and industry support. Amicus briefs in Trump Won for advocates for climate action. They're pretty quiet. That's made it much more difficult, I think, for for advocates in litigation and a lot of other areas.
Another thing that that sort of continues from Trump, that accelerates is the administration attempting to marshal the Supreme Court's moves on legal interpretation and major questions into a basis for achieving massive rollback. So a lot of Trump's executive orders point to things like the major questions doctrine and say this is prior policy presents a major question. It's not specifically authorized by statute, so we can repeal it or we have identified the best reading of the statute under Lopez Bright, and we can get rid of that statute and get rid of a regulation.
You know, without further ado, it's not totally clear that this has been that successful. And one one thing that they have struggled with is it actually takes a ton of work to rescind regulations. You have to have a record. You have to have reasons. You have to sort of deal with contrary empirical showings and legal arguments. That takes a lot of person-power and a lot of consideration.
And they didn't do so well in court the first time. And they've also had massive losses in personnel from EPA, no interior legal offices, etc., the people who would do a lot of the work. So that's something I think they've been aware of that sort of rulemaking EPA notice and comment repeals are not a very favorable battleground for them.
So they've done a lot of things outside that tried to find other ways of changing policy. I would say an exception, a partial exception to that is they have gone after the endangerment finding that is the basis for regulating greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act. And they devoted a lot of effort to that, I would say not with mixed results in terms of dealing with the facts, I'd say pretty poor results, but but at least it was a high priority.
This is something that couldn't get through. And Trump won. It was thought to be too out there, too, contrary to overwhelming science, to contrary to what the rest of the world understands, sort of embarrassing thing to do. But this time it's done. The president wants it done, and EPA has purported to do it. It is being challenged. It is very much in the face of Massachusetts versus the EPA.
The Supreme Court decision that affirmed that greenhouse gases are pollutants under the Clean Air Act and rejected a lot of the arguments that EPA now trots out as a basis for repeal, as well as a D.C. Circuit decision upholding the first round of of Obama regulations for for vehicles. But I think there's a sense that the Supreme Court is different.
Just maybe the court will come out differently down and overturn Massachusetts. I think they're maybe overoptimistic about that, but we'll see. But that's sort of the really big regulatory effort there. They do plan as well to do something on powerplants. There are sort of two visions. One is to overturn the Biden administration's replacement for the Clean Power Plan, which was based on a sort of more conventional regulatory structure that involves reliance on carbon capture and sequestration. That would be based on just sort of a record. So this is this is too ambitious, it's not feasible. And they're also considering one that is more linked to their sort of climate change. Greenhouse gases shouldn't be regulated at all. One of the ideas that has emerged in the endangerment repeal is the idea that it's it's futile to regulate greenhouse gases because they're emitted all over the world.
We're talking about a small fraction. We're talking about emissions. There's already a giant stock of emissions over decades. And so it's just not not worth it. That was something that they sort of threw in to a large extent and into the final rule. Contrary to the views of pretty much everybody who looks at climate policy and and seriously all over the world.
As noted, I'd say rulemaking hasn't been the sort of major focus. There've been lots of other efforts, including use of emergency powers. We have an energy emergency. We have the recent remarkable effort to kill a citizen sued by the NAACP against Elon Musk's use of natural gas. Temporary mobile turbines to power data centers on the basis that this is allegedly a national security problem because the Pentagon needs grants, resources.
So all kinds of sort of fairly aggressive uses of executive proclamations, declarations, emergencies, those tend to be difficult to challenge in court. There's a lot of doctrine that courts should be very deferential. A lot of times, the judicial review framework is not clearly established as it is for rulemaking with sort of APA style review. There's been a lot of that, a lot of it is still in court.
And often I would say the administration has some of the same problems that had the first time. But but I think they've gotten better. If your goal is to completely dismantle, you know, restraints on on pollution, they've found ways to do it outside of rulemaking that they didn't use the first time. Okay. I'll just briefly mentioned a couple of other key aspects of of the last couple of years.
As as everybody knows, the one big beautiful bill acts, the massive record reconciliation package that the Republicans got through as a signature legislative accomplishment. Among other things, it repealed much of the Inflation Reduction Act, clean energy incentives. A fair amount of the money had already been dispersed and was out there that much of it hadn't. And then there is a sort of middle ground of money that had been sort of obligated was well along the pipeline that the administration tried to claw back.
And some of that is still in litigation. The one big, beautiful bill that does leave some parts of the IRA in place, incentives for things that are more or less sort of progressive-coded, maybe areas of of of policy like geothermal energy storage, carbon capture, sequestration. So there are some significant parts that weren't repealed, but but definitely a huge body blow to the the effort to use the IRA as a really significant sort of bridge to a clean energy future. Okay. I will jump to another big feature of this administration that's I think, quite different from the first. And that is a deliberate effort to do deep structural damage to the federal administrative agencies that administer environmental law and related areas. I'll quote Russell Vought, the OMB director who's enormously influential in this administration. We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected.
We want them to not want to go to work because they're increasingly viewed as the villains. So you have that. It's not just about sort of taking steps, using legislation or regulations to downsize agencies or remove offices from the organizational chart. Although that is happening, it's also a deliberate effort to make it miserable to work for those agencies.
And as I mentioned, there was a sense after Trump won that a lot of people within EPA, for example, were able to sort of hold on. It was really tough. It was unpleasant. They were made to feel deeply sort of undervalued and asked to do things they didn't think were so good. But then a lot of people made it through and the amount of attrition was not massive this time.
It is massive. It's already massive. EPA lost about 4000 employees over the first year, 24% of the workplace, Fish and Wildlife, 25%. NOAA, 19%. The of Justice's Environment and Natural Resources Division, which, as Christof mentioned, has just, I think, last week been announced. I don't know if this is legal particularly, but they're renaming at the Energy and Natural Resources Division as of the start of 2025, when Trump came back, they had about 400 lawyers over 12 months, over 140 had departed.
That's a massive and that's obviously a lot of that is in enforcement. That is enough that it's going to materially affect their ability to do their job, at least as Congress, and see that there are also, as you've seen, efforts to reform civil service rules so that a much greater share of the federal workforce is subject to sort of at will removal by the president and not protected by civil service laws that were intended to protect sort of independent judgment, expertise, prevent sort of nepotism and patronage.
That has to be encouraging for an administration that views an independent civil service as a source of threat and and frustration of of the president's ability to control things the way he wants. And that's my final trend. Efforts to dismantle our ability to collect information about the world, about climate. This would be repealing the Greenhouse gas reporting program, for example, efforts to frustrate the preparation of the next national climate assessment, firing people and defunding it, even though it's required by statute discontinuing NOAA's climate and weather database and again through downsizing, but also by creating an environment of profound hostility.
We're losing scientists out of the federal government at a very alarming rate. The journal Science found that over the first year of Trump to departures from of scientists from federal scientific agencies outnumber hirings 11 fold. That's a net loss of 4200 STEM PhDs. There's an effort to dismantle NPR, the National Center on Atmospheric Research, which is sort of a really globally significant hub of research on climate and weather.
And finally, I will mention OMB is proposed rule to change longstanding policies over federal grant making to make it much less politically insulated and make it sort of something that political appointees entirely control and peer review as will play a much smaller role. That's a very, very troubling development. That's a proposed rule. There will be an opportunity to fight that, and I'm sure it will be okay.
I will. Now, just very quickly summarize by sort of takeaways from all of this. It will not be possible to sort of easily tell ourselves that we can get back on some prior course that was more or less the right course. We are facing a charred, smoldering Cormac McCarthy esque landscape of ruin and environmental law and policy and climate, massive damage, a lot of human costs to that, a lot of cost to public health.
I will mention a massive cost to the US's reputation in the world that's not just limited to climate and science, but but but dropping out, for example, of of international conversations about climate policy is enormously harmful, will take a long time to fix that. And now I want to talk about all the reasons to be hopeful. I am reminded of the part of the Princess Bride when they need to storm the castle and there's like 60 guards and one of the three members can't move. They take stock of their assets. And that's what we need to do if we're concerned about making progress on some of these areas, including dealing with climate change. I think we we have some real assets, just like the crew and Princess Bride, starting with an obvious one. But the fact that we have a federal system is very helpful.
The states have been the leaders in pushing back on some of these really harmful actions, whether it's randomly cutting wind power or some of the big rulemaking changes that various efforts to restart an economic coal plants, just because that's the president's policy preference and across the board and and making and retaining state policies, that's federalism is a kind of hedge a brake on a runaway executive doing bad things.
And it is working it's important. A second good thing, I would say I think the reconciliation model, the IRA obviously got undone, but I think it was proof of concept. It did a lot of good and it could be done again. And and I think it proves that the politics of that kind of thing are much more tractable than the politics of some other areas, including sort of new regulatory statutes. I will also say I think that we shouldn't forget that we still have these big environmental statutes, like the clean Air Act that have not been repealed, have now been working for decades, generations even, and themselves can be pretty resilient and achieve important results. There was just about two weeks ago a decision on the D.C. Circuit, a case called Kentucky versus EPA, where the D.C. Circuit, in the opinion by Judge D.H. Ginsburg, upheld basically a Biden decision, tightening the national ambient air quality standards for particulate matter against an effort by a lot of challengers and the current administration to to sort of undo the rule.
And I took that as kind of an important reminder that the Clean Air Act and a strong factual record are still probably pretty potent things. And then finally, the economics of clean energy remain just really, really helpful. We are continuing, even under Trump, to see massive growth in solar and wind power across the board. Renewables are beating coal globally now in terms of overall source of power.
And and obviously China and some other countries are making massive progress, even where we are perhaps backsliding a little bit. So there are plenty of reasons to not despair. The fact that we have such a need to address these problems and the very fact that we're looking at a sort of Cormac McCarthy-charged landscape means that there will be room for new concepts.
We're not defending old things and trying to restore things. We will, of necessity, be looking for new ideas and we have brilliant young people to do that who are who are very concerned about these problems and are going to come up with with new and better answers.
Christophe Courchesne
And thank you listeners. Please tune in again for the next edition of Hothouse Earth. To watch the full lecture. With the Q&A afterward, please visit our Hot Topics playlist on Vermont Law and Graduate School’s YouTube channel.
Narrator
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