As part of the 2025 Hot Topics in Environmental Law Summer Lecture Series, Sean Donahue, partner at Donahue, Goldberg & Herzog, and Bob Percival, director of the Environmental Law Program and the Robert F. Stanton Professor of Law at the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law, discuss recent Supreme Court decisions and the state of environmental law during the second Trump administration.
Narrator
This podcast is a production of the Maverick White School for the Environment and Vermont Law and Graduate School.
Christophe Courchesne
Hello and welcome to the Hothouse Earth Podcast. I'm Christoph Courchesne, faculty director of the Environmental Law Center, associate dean for Environmental and Experiential programs here at Vermont Law and Graduate School. For today's episode, welcome to the 2025 Hot Topics in Environmental Law Summer Lecture Series. Today, we're honored and pleased to welcome our two joint presenters, Sean Donahue and Robert Percival.
So Sean is a partner at Donahue, Goldberg and Herzog, where his practice is focused on appellate litigation with a focus on complex environmental and administrative law cases in federal and state appellate courts. Graduate of the University of Chicago Law School, Sean served as law clerk to then D.C. Circuit Judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg and to Justice John Paul Stevens, the Supreme Court.
After entering practice at General Black, he spent four years at the appellate section of the Department of Justice's Environmental and Natural Resources Division. Since establishing his own practice in 2002, Sean has represented environmental and public health organization parties in numerous major environmental and clean energy cases in the Supreme Court and the Courts of Appeals. He has taught courses in environmental law, climate change law, civil procedure, constitutional law, and other subjects.
The Iowa College of Law at Washington and Lee University School of Law, Georgetown University Law Center and Stanford Law School. And of course, Vermont Line Graduate School, where he is joining us this summer to teach his course. Federal environmental policy under Trump, too. Also joining us today is Professor Bob Percival. Bob is the director of the Environmental Law Program and Robert F Stanton, professor of law at the University of Maryland, Francis King Carey School of Law.
He served as the law clerk for Judge Shirley M Hofstadter of the Ninth Circuit and for Supreme Court Justice Byron R White, and spent six years as an attorney for the Environmental Defense Fund. He served as a visiting professor at Harvard Law School and Georgetown University Law Center. He is the principal author of the most widely used environmental law.
Casebook is a J. J. William Fulbright scholar. He was at the University of Political Science and Law in Beijing in 2008 and has worked with China's Supreme People's Court, the National People's Congress, the Chinese Ministry of Environmental Protection in the China Council on International Cooperation for Environment and Development, both from Percival earned his B.A. degree from McAllister College and his M.A. and JD degrees JD degrees from Stanford University.
Today, Sean and Bob will present Federal Environmental Law After Trump to about as hot a topic as it comes. So please join me in welcoming Sean Donahue and Bob Percival.
Robert Percival
All right, I'll start off. We're going to do this as kind of a dialog between Sean and I, which I think will be a lot of fun. I wanted to start off by comparing how the second Trump term has compared with Trump. One, Trump is as anti-environmental as ever. But in Trump, one, he hadn't done as much preparation to hit the ground running in what has become now a slash and burn expedition through federal environmental law.
He was often stymied during his first term by losing the large majority of cases in the court when he tried to roll back environmental regulations. He didn't, in the first term, seem to know much about this thing called the Administrative Procedure Act, which meant you couldn't just repeal a regulation on the whim of the president. But that's changed quite a bit in the second Trump term.
There were was a careful blueprint laid down by the Heritage Foundation, the the Project 2025, which he claimed to know nothing about, disavowed on the campaign trail, but which is coming to resemble very closely what he's done since taking office. He hit the ground running on day one by issuing a flurry of executive orders, and he's not stopped.
He's now, as of Sunday, issued 168 executive orders, which is more than the entire number of executive orders issued during the four years of the Biden administration. Now, only 17 of these have dealt with energy and the environment and preparing for this. John and I talked about, you know, as bad as these environmental policies have been, his policies on having people seized off the streets and flown to whatever country seem far more radical even than what he's done to the environment.
But he certainly has been doing radical things to the environment. He pulled this out of the Paris Agreement once again, which he had only succeeded in doing for a couple of months the first time around. He has taken an expansive view of presidential powers that goes even way beyond what he did in the first term. This is all based on this unitary executive theory that basically says because the framers of the Constitution considered sharing power among multiple presidents, but decided on just having one president, because the Constitution says the executive power will be vested in the president, that means he has virtually unlimited power to control whatever the executive branch does.
Now, that unitary executive theory was rejected by an 8 to 1 vote of the Supreme Court in the Morrison versus Olson case, where the court upheld the Independent Counsel Act over the dissent of only Justice Scalia. And it's completely inconsistent with originalism because the framers of the Constitution were highly represented in the first US Congress that in fact, when it created the Treasury Department and the federal bureaucracy, explicitly made provisions to make sure that they could require that the Treasury Department report honestly to them, rather than filtering everything through the president.
And while the framers said you don't need congressional approval to fire someone, they contemplated having four cause restrictions on such firings. And the what the Trump administration has done has claimed that they could fire anyone, even heads of independent agencies, even the head of the NLRB, where there's a for cause removal provision and the merit systems protection board.
And one thing that's very different in the second Trump administration is that they have a Supreme Court that I think is really willing to bend and rewrite the law in order to facilitate the Trump administration's control over the executive branch. What they have done is they have greatly expanded use of the emergency or shadow docket of the during the administrations, President Biden and Obama and Bush.
There were only eight emergency applications to the Supreme Court. And now we see that the Trump administration already has made more than twice as many of those to the Supreme Court, and they usually win these with some very questionable decisions. When Trump fired the head of the National Labor Relations Board, even though there was a clear for cause removal provision in the statute, the Supreme Court refused to block it.
And one of the things the court has done is it has sort of presumed that anything the Trump administration wants to do, if it's not immediately put into effect, creates irreparable harm. So even though these cases haven't been decided on the merits, they've required that the agencies essentially be restructured pending a long legal process to find out if this is legal and constitutional.
Of course, the long time precedent that has upheld for courts removal is the Humphreys executor case from 1935, and it's been criticized by the members of the current conservative court, and they've limited its application, but they've never overruled it. And one of the reasons they haven't is because the agency no one wants the president directly monkeying with this, the Federal Reserve Board.
And yet in the Wilcox decision that the court issued on May 22nd, the court indicated that it's probably likely to jettison Humphrey's Executor. And in a per curiam decision, they try to distinguish the federal Reserve Board because they didn't want the economy freaking out if Trump was able to immediately replaced Jerome Powell. So they they said, well, this doesn't apply to the Federal Reserve Board because it's, quote, uniquely structured, quasi-private entity that follows in the distinct historical tradition of the first and second banks of the United States.
The three dissenters in the case said that was kind of an absurd distinction, but it shows what's likely to follow as this court is hell bent on upholding Trump's power to fundamentally restructure the executive branch, not only by bringing in agents heads who are hostile to the missions of the environmental agencies, gutting their budget substantially and basically suspending enforcement of existing regulations.
A lot of these executive orders refer to radical environmentalism that they're ordering be replaced. And in situations where it's going to take them a while to repeal regulations, they just say, well, we're going to suspend all enforcement of it. In the meantime. Now, Sean will give you more details about some of the outrageous things that they've done. So I'll turn it over to Sean now.
Sean Donahue
Thank you, Bob. Thanks, Christopher, for having us. So, yeah, I mean, I think it is right that this this administration, this version of the Trump administration is more aggressive. The likelihood of sort of enduring harm to our system of environmental protection and natural resource conservation is great. I think we are we are going to suffer very significant harm that will require and I think we're going to get out of this toward the end, a period of of rethinking and rebuilding, which, you know, some will have some merit independent of just just remedying things that have been lost.
But it's hard to overstate how urgent the situation is for environmental law and policy right now. It's but it's quite understandable to do so, because, as Bob mentioned, there's all this other stuff that seems, you know, more immediate and more extreme, including people being seized up the street after military being sent to American cities and the like.
So I guess I think one point I would make is that for all the extraordinarily aggressive things that the Trump administration is doing on energy and environment, one thing it's not done is sort of sink or still less obtained substantive changes to any of our great environmental statutes. And that's because the votes aren't there, particularly in the Senate.
And so you see, again, and this is not unique to Republican administrations, but an effort to kind of maximize what can be done with executive action or with the kinds of legislative actually that don't have to survive the filibuster. One of those is the Congressional Review Act, which authorizes Congress to review and overturn specific agency rules that has been used at a record pace and Trump to including in some circumstances that are really remarkable and deserve some attention because of their egregious that in which EPA sought to recharacterize some grants of preemption waivers that had it granted to California, the Biden administration, to allow California to enforce emission standards that are more rigorous than federal
standards under very long standing Clean Air Act authority recognizing California as sort of historic role in emissions control. And EPA recharacterized these accidents which it had always regarded under Democratic and Republican administrations as adjudications that weren't subject to the C.R.A., had the government Accountability Office taking that same view, as had Republican members of Congress. They recharacterize those actions as rules and sent them to Congress to overturn in these important California programs encouraging clean car deployment.
And I think that, you know, was particularly egregious. California has sued a sort of total miscarriage of the CIA process and of principles of sort of respect for states under the 10th Amendment. So we'll see whether there's a remedy there. But the use of these sort of alternative methods has been very, very aggressive. Obviously, we just saw a reconciliation with a very comprehensive effort to undo much of the federal investment in clean energy that cut back paid to the Biden administration.
And that's a tragic loss for the country. That will will definitely set us back. It remains to be seen whether it will set us back. You know, a modest amount or a tremendous amount. And obviously, the economics of clean energy continue to be very favorable. And that is one challenge for those of us who are worried about climate that interested in clean energy, sort of what are the workarounds there, whether through state law or private remedies?
Because it's the environment has gotten a lot tougher and even though there has been this focus on non-EPA sort of non regulatory aims of attacking environmental protection and clean energy, there will be a whole bunch of conventional rollback rulemaking as administrator. ZELDIN You know, sort of trumpeted a whole bunch of really important rules and in the crosshairs.
And we're starting to see that those have been in a proposal to completely eliminate carbon standards for power plants. We expect to see them kind of shockingly attempt to rescind said the endangerment finding for greenhouse gases. That's something that was considered in Trump's want and rejected, in part because there was basically a chorus, including from industry and some conservative voices, that this was a crazy thing to do because the science is overwhelming and it sort of makes you look not serious.
And it's very unlikely to survive this review. There will be efforts to to overturn federal vehicle emission standards, air toxic standards and and much more of it. So there will be a lot of work to do just sort of in the trenches of trying to push back and get at least some of those overturned. But it's certainly going to be a challenge for the for the states that environmental advocates who are will be challenging all those.
And then I'll just say the thing that concerns me the most that I think has the most potential for sort of really insidious long term damage is the sort of effort to weaken the sort of infrastructure of government itself through massive reductions in force, through disbanding key components of EPA and other agencies, massive, massive, massive cuts in personnel and just sort of creating an atmosphere where expertise and neutral, dedicated civil service are not valued so that people it just becomes hellish to work in these environments.
And that's obviously something that can't be just fixed with with a pen and rescinding executive orders. I would urge people to sort of be aware that speak out against that. It's really, really damaging. And that's something that, you know, we'll want to continue to watch for. Some of it's in litigation now and we'll be at maybe babble. I'll turn it back to you since I've been unable to create a lighter tone. So Pat, I'll give you a chance.
Robert Percival
Yeah, well, you know, I just want to mention know when you mentioned the Congressional Review Act, one of the things about that act is that it provides that no similar regulations can ever be adopted unless there's a specific act of Congress enabling that. So they'll be making the argument that by supposedly vetoing the California waiver, even though the Senate parliamentarian said, you can't do that, it's not a rule that that means California can't ever have more stringent standards, even though from the very founding of the Clean Air Act in 1970, they already had their own vehicle standards and that's why they were grandfathered in for those some of these other initiatives.
I mean, if you go back and look at the Reagan administration, it was kind of similar in that there was no way Reagan had the votes in Congress to roll back the environmental laws. So what did he do? He decided to create Executive Order 12 to 91 that said, you can't promulgate any regulations unless they're first approved by my new Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in the Office of Management and Budget.
And I actually as a young lawyer for EDF brought the first lawsuit against OMB challenging them for blocking the EPA regulation that was subject to a statutory deadline, And I ultimately succeeded in winning the judgment that OMB had acted illegally in doing so without query whether the current courts would rule in the same way. But a lot of the story of the Reagan administration was how they went overboard and overreached for example, the classic story about the regulations on letting gasoline.
They proposed that these regulations that have been the subject of hard fought litigation, a one vote margin on Bork in the D.C. Circuit in the corporation case, where the Clean Air Act provision saying they could regulate fuel additives that will endanger public health or safety, was found to give them good reason to set an overall limit on the amount of lead in gasoline.
And the reaction to that proposal to get rid of them was so vociferous that ultimately, later in the Reagan and Bush administrations, they banned all letting gasoline a regulation. Now that's been uniformly adopted throughout the world and that most people agree, is by far the most cost-beneficial regulation that's ever been adopted by EPA. Now, what they're doing you mentioned the endangerment finding, which of course, the Supreme Court in Massachusetts versus EPA by a single vote, upheld EPA's ability to regulate greenhouse gases when they had rejected the notion that they would even start a rulemaking to do that.
Now, what they're want to do is say that even though power plants emit almost a quarter of the 6.5 billion tons of greenhouse gas emissions in the US every year that if we slice them all into tiny little pieces and none of them themselves is significant enough to meet the endangerment standard, that's something that will have to be litigated out in court.
And, you know, they're talking about other things like bringing making us America great enough again for asbestos, getting rid of the restrictions on asbestos use, which would be crazy when even the World Trade Organization has said you can ban asbestos because it's uniquely dangerous. But you also see this administration, I mean, they've they haven't gone full speed ahead on that yet now, because it would require a court to basically say climate change doesn't exist.
If you were going to say that greenhouse gas emissions don't qualify for regulation because they don't endanger public health or safety. And in a similar fashion, I think actually the birthright citizenship case says a lot because it was absolutely clear that the language of the 14th Amendment creates birthright citizenship. And you can't, with an executive order, amend the 14th Amendment, which was essentially what Trump was trying to do.
So when the Castle case challenging that came up to the Supreme Court, the administration had lost and several lower courts around the country, they didn't ask the court to review the merits of those decisions because they feared that they would lose on the merits, and hopefully they will eventually lose on the merits. President can't rewrite the Constitution by an executive order, and that's the reason the Supreme Court in the decision saying that universal injunctions exceed the authority of the district courts didn't rule on the merits.
It would have been so easy to just say, look, the lower courts are right on the merits. Let's save ourselves a lot of time. And instead, you now have a system where states all over the country that are hostile to birthright citizenship can say, well, children now born here are no longer going to be considered US citizens, and we'll have a patchwork of who's a citizen who's not.
It might depend on when you cross state lines, which was a prominent feature of the oral argument in the Supreme Court. But what this court is doing is it's saying we're going to turn a blind eye to clear violations of the Constitution by this administration like happened when prior to Roe v Wade being overturned, when they denied emergency relief for the Texas law that was authorizing citizens suits against anyone who aided in an abortion at a time when there was a federal constitutional right to abortion throughout the entire United States.
So we have a court that's kind of tolerating lawlessness around the country, and its difficult to get judicial relief from these policies. Also clear in the impoundment context, like the situation with birthright citizens, it's pretty clear what the law is regarding the president's authority on impoundments and conservative legal scholars like they did in rejecting the notion that birthright citizenship could be altered by the president, also said the president didn't have the right to unilaterally impound funds, but they've tried by bringing cases up on other grounds and challenging the authority of lower courts to intervene, to stop lawlessness by the Trump administration, to be able to say that while we've won in court on these emergency motions about whether or not a stay is warranted without getting to the underlying merits of the legal controversy, where they knew that they would, in fact, lose. Your thoughts on.
Sean Donahue
Yeah, no, I think, yes, some of these kind of actions, like the funding that the defunding sort of peremptory pauses on funding that, you know, is already in the pipeline and some of the personnel actions really create very favorable conditions for some of the tactics that this administration appears to be, you know, kind of quite good at and has been kind of rewarded, at least by the Supreme Court, much less by lower courts, kind of carrying on review ability, scope of relief, that sort of thing.
You know, the arguments that this massive, broad scale, you know, cutting huge fractions of the entire workforce of major agencies is, you know, something that should go to the Merit System Protection Board as a personnel employment matter. These are arguments that I think in a way it's easier to win on these kinds of things than some of the sort of EPA fight, you know, rulemaking rollbacks, where the sort of record and legal interpretations on the merits are easier to get to.
I'm not heartened so far by especially the higher courts willingness to tolerate peremptory executive sort of disbanding or certainly incapacitating agencies that have been created by Congress, funded by Congress. I would have hoped, and I continue to hope that the court will apply the same sort of concern or legislative supremacy. But Congress's power to make and unmake agencies, fund them or not fund them, retain or change substantive standards under Trump that they expressed in decisions like West Virginia and lower right that sort of say, you know, we're guided by the statute, the executive branch shouldn't go too far away from the statute.
And it is, after all, Congress that makes the laws. And that's that's a principle, you know, kind of that the environmental side is going to be reminding the courts of over and over, because we still have the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, and many others. They are framed in broad and demanding terms in many respects And the kinds of things that the administration is trying to do are not consistent with those.
And it should be the judge's responsibility to make sure that the law is faithfully executed. You know, even when a surveillance of that is to preserve regulation or even require regulation where it doesn't exist. And I think that's we have the right to insist on that in a tone of some of this litigation to Congress is going to focus on.
Let's go to I was going to say at some point, I mean, from my perspective as someone who still is representing environmental groups and talking with with others who are or contemplating lawsuits are involved in I mean, just like in the first Trump administration, it's unlikely that we're going to see helpful new environmental standards in the next few years for an op ed, just getting existing ones enforced will be a struggle.
But one thing we really tried to focus on last time was preserving the authority so that when the guard changes again, there will be a basis to to move quickly and right the ship. And I think that'll be a key part of the effort. This time, trying to adapt to the the Court's sort of evolving doctrinal framework, I think appropriate is is a decision, even though I did not agree with a lot of the line that the sort of movement to overturn Chevron I thought was completely rigorously thought through.
It's a little overwrought. But I think what Loper leaves is something that we can work with because the text of statutes is in many, many cases really quite favorable to the environmentalist side, will be kind of assisting on that. And I guess I, I don't know. But one thing I would like to talk about is I know you teach at graduate school and at other places and talk to a lot of brilliant young people who are, you know, going into this field and well aware of what's happening with our climate and other pressing problems.
And they see what sounds like they just complete free fall and disintegration of even the sort of inadequate laws and programs that we have in place. And how do we maintain not just hope but, you know, motivation to to fight and to be ready to make progress when progress is again possible? I mean, you have you have more perspective than I do on that.
I'd love to hear, Pat, what you would say.
Robert Percival
Well, it's you know, it's always it's our students that inspire us because they're going to be the ones carrying these fights on in the future. So I think what I should do now is touch on some I wouldn't call them bright spots, but maybe less dim spots in the current environment. I mean, we know that environmental law has been on a huge losing streak in the US Supreme Court with West Virginia versus EPA, the court reaching out and voiding the Clean Power Plan that the Biden administration was not using and had no intent to use the Sackett case completely rewriting Section 404 of the Clean Water Act to greatly restrict federal ability to protect wetlands.
Loper Bright, as you discussed, reversing the Chevron Doctrine at the behest of industrial interests that thought that we had to protect ourselves from overly aggressive agencies, which is, of course, no longer the case now and then just this term, the Supreme Court in San Francisco versus the EPA saying that municipalities can't be sued for their discharges interfering with water quality standards because that would be an end result of regulation.
If you looked at the well, you mentioned the Congressional Review Act. One good news is that that pretty much only works when there's a change of administration because there's a time limit on what regulations Congress can review. Now, given the way in which the Republicans sort of changed the rules with respect to the California waiver, one could argue that they could gin up all sorts of things to try to get Congress to veto.
One piece of good news, of course, is there's a midterm election coming up next year and the House majority is so thin that they're no longer going to be able to get everything that they want vetoed through the Congressional Review Act to be vetoed when the big, ugly bill was being debated in Congress, Senator Mike Lee of Utah included a provision in it that would have forced the federal government to sell off millions of acres of public lands to private parties.
And one of the good things that happened is that there was very little support of it, even among people out West. It wasn't anything like the old Sagebrush Rebellion. Utah's for litigating, trying to get the Supreme Court to turn over all public lands that the federal government owns in the state. But they haven't been getting much support from other Western states for that.
So this provision actually dropped from the bill. And it's good to know that there are some issues where conservative Republicans want to protect public lands as well. Another piece of good news in the Supreme Court is there are a couple of lines that the court has not been willing to cross, although they may do so in the future.
One is the non-delegation doctrine. You may recall in the American trucking case, there was an effort to get the Supreme Court to strike down the Clean Air Act's National Ambient Air Quality Standards on non-delegation grounds that the Act wasn't specific enough. And when the ACT in fact sets up a very detailed process for how you go about establishing them, and you can imagine regulations that have economic or political significance because they apply to the entire country.
So from the standpoint of major questions, it might apply to it, but I don't think it's under threat from that. This year there was an effort there's there have been at times the six conservative members of this court have said that they don't like the non-delegation doctrine. And there was a huge push this year in the FCC case that was before it, FCC versus consumer research to say that you can't let a private entity set tax rates that go to funding federal support for rural wi fi programs and the Supreme Court by a 6 to 3 margin rejected this using the old intelligible principle, which had been the grounds for upholding the Clean Air
Act against non-delegation challenges. So the non-delegation doctrine, while it's still probably under threat in certain circumstances and would essentially require that Congress has to write an approval. Environmental regulation specifically itself no longer seems to be under direct threat from the court. Now there also is another line the court has been assiduous about avoiding, and that is it has not embraced industry pleas to venture into state tort law and start dictating what states should do with respect to who they hold liable.
So, so far, it has stayed out of the state consumer protection, climate litigation, even though it did have the case involving Baltimore on the standards for a reviewing court in deciding whether or not state cases could be removed to the federal court, the fossil fuel industry would like nothing better than to get the Supreme to just say, well, climate is a global problem.
It's governed by federal common law. And given the American Electric Power decision, it's now all displaced by the Clean Air Act. At the very time that this administration wants to gut the ability of the Clean Air Act to be used to deal with climate change, so far, they've stayed out of those, even though there's been attempt after attempt by the fossil fuel industry to get them to venture forward on them.
There's another effort by Bayer to get the court to intervene and reverse judgments against it for people exposed to the pesticide roundup. But the courts already denied several of those. So we'll see if they ultimately get worn down enough to go there. Other bright spots, I think, just like with the Clean Power Plan, where market forces, even though it never went into effect, had already accomplished the shift away from coal that the administration had and the Obama administration had envisioned at the time the original plan was promulgated, The market transition to a green economy seems pretty inexorable now.
Certainly a number of big projects are going to face obstacles as President Trump shows his antipathy towards wind energy, particularly offshore wind energy, and as the big, ugly bill pulls federal tax incentives for green energy, which is clearly going to slow the transition. I do a lot of work in China. China's just remarkable. And the way in which it's installed solar and wind and is now starting to benefit mightily from their investments in renewable energy.
Whereas Trump wants to take us back to drill, baby, drill scenario where we're more dependent on fossil fuels and he talks about big, beautiful, clean coal. No matter what he says, no electric utility in the US is going to be crazy enough to propose building a new coal fired power plant. I think that try as he might, he's not going to be able to defeat the transition to green energy.
It's just simple economics at this point. Of course, there's going to be a dramatic shift towards non-enforcement of the federal environmental laws. But the good news is that most of those laws have citizenship provisions. The danger is that the court could cut back on standing in citizens suits and the Texas citizens and cases from percolating in the Fifth Circuit might be a vehicle for doing that.
But I think it would kind of be ironic that this court, just this term in the Dimond alternative energy case, actually expanded standing for fossil fuel producers to challenge California automobile standards on the grounds that it's going to reduce consumption of their product, even though they're not directly regulated by it. If they're expanding standing for industry, be kind of hard for them to cut back on standing for citizens suits in cases to try to enforce the environmental laws.
Now, the fact that the public seems to be very supportive of our basic environmental law infrastructure, which is why Reagan couldn't repeal the laws, Bush couldn't repeal the laws, and now Trump hopefully can't repeal the law. So he's trying to do everything by subterfuge that I think will ultimately be a source of public support. And the final piece of good news that I would mention, I spent all last week in Lima, Peru, at the IUCN Academy of Environmental Law Annual Colloquium, where we heard over 100 presentations from top environmental lawyers all over the world.
We have a really bad administration on the environment like we have now. It gives me some solace that going outside the United States, you see one outlier that is compared to what other countries are doing. The host of that conference, the Universidad Cientifica del Sur, actually requires that all law students take the environmental clinic because the environment is considered so critical to the future of Peru.
So great things are happening outside of the United States. We just have to keep the fires burning for now in doing our best to limit the damage that this administration can do.
Sean Donahue
That was that was persuasive. And I feel like feeling better. Yeah, I mean, I, I agree. I think the sort of fundamental economics of clean energy are going to be very hard to reverse. It's kind of entertaining that we have a, you know, conservative, ostensibly conservative administration that is attempting to sort of by light of policy intervention, reverse the course of economics that's seen not only here, but in the rest of the world.
I don't think that will succeed. And that's a reason for optimism. I think the sort of absence of any kind of credible reason behind the undoing of the entirety of federal climate policy is a weakness. I mean, I think like it early on, like in the WB administration, the arguments were we know climate change is a is a thing and as a concern that we want to handle it through some combination of volunteer measures and negotiating with other countries before we impose standards on ourselves.
And there was some kind of argument about procedure and sequencing. This administration does not appear to have any serious refutation of the science, and that sort of observed impacts what's happening with the insurance industry, what's happening every day when we read the papers about terrible and unprecedented natural disasters that have heat and all that and I think I do think that will cause a pushback.
I think a lot of Americans are well aware of how bad this is, and I think they skew younger. I think that'll be a real weakness that I'm I'm optimistic that the very recklessness of the Trump climate policy will produce a pretty sustained and serious backlash. That's not just about restoring the policies that Trump is are doing, but it's about thinking about how can we how can we do better than we did, but where do we need to be and where do we need to be to have a policy that is that is storable because we can't I mean, this is crazy to be pulling these incentives that and, you know, upsetting business plans and state planning process and resource adequacy plans and all that, That's extraordinary. I also think that while there are some political momentum behind it, the attack on sort of expertise, scientific expertise, and relatedly, the attack on research universities is something that will be hard to sustain. I think that that if we do not get frozen in with some combination of shock and disgust and fear at this sort of onslaught, I think there is a lot of reasons for hope.
At first sort of using this terrible experience of the last six months as motivation to do better as a country.
Christophe Courchesne
Thanks again, John and Bob, for sharing your views, sharing your thoughts on this extremely hot topic. And thanks to everyone who's joining us for tuning into Hothouse Earth today to view the full lecture with the Q&A afterward, please visit the Vermont Line Graduate School YouTube channel.
Narrator
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