How the Courts Have Cleared the Path for a Second Trump Administration to Gut Environmental Protections and Put Lives at Risk.

Carl Pope
3 min readAug 25, 2024

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“This article earlier published in Sheekeydaily

When Donald Trump was president, his attempts to roll back federal climate regulations were often stopped by the Courts. But if he wins a new term in November, there’s a new landscape where the Courts will be an easier place to gut environmental protections in favor of the fossil fuel industry.

Donald Trump’s true environmental legacy is not his squandering 4 critical years to get on top of the climate crisis, nor even his weakening of the institutional capabilities of Department of Energy and the Environmental Protection Agency, damaging as they were. Trump’s environmental legacy is the Roberts-Alito Court.

Already this Supreme Court has dramatically and permanently gutted consistent EPA regulatory enforcement by allowing any federal judge to overrule EPA’s regulations, including ones adopted years ago. They have limited EPA’s ability even to issue regulations on really big problems, saying that only Congress should deal with “major issues.” In other words, House Speaker Mike Johnson from Louisiana should set the limits on really dangerous gases.

And the Justices are toying with the idea of saying that Congress cannot delegate even minor regulatory responsibility to the EPA (nor to the Food and Drug Administration, the Federal Highway Safety Administration, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the Alcohol, Firearms and Tobacco Age and the Federal Aviation Administration) by reviving a dubious Supreme Court Precedent from the 1930’s called “the Non-Delegation Doctrine.”

Congress, if 5 Justices take this road, would have to directly set public health standards for clean air, vote on which drugs to allow and which to restrict, and directly manage investigations into why Boeing’s new lines of aircraft have crashed.

And the biggest danger if Trump were to be elected for a second term would not be the damage he does working with Congress, but the wholesale destruction of our environmental safety net which the Roberts-Alito Court would collaborate on.

The logical conclusion of such a partnership is that Trump simply determines that the entire environmental safety net is improperly delegated, revokes it all, and the Supreme Court validates the decision, saying, “Congress actually can’t delegate the implementation of public rights to agencies, Congress must write every regulation itself.”

This approach makes knowledge-based regulation of dangerous technologies and business practices impossible:

If every drug must be tested by Congress, rather than delegated to FDA scientists, our life spans will shrink dramatically.

If only Congress can set limits on the mercury in the air, and clinical data doesn’t matter, then we will face of wave of mercury pollution neuro-poisoning.

These roll-backs could go much further than the infamous Project 2025 hit list. The 900-page Heritage Foundation document proposes that Congress should strip Clean Air Act protection away from carbon dioxide — but didn’t attack sulfur dioxide, particulates, nitrogen oxides and carbon monoxide. But under the “No Delegation” doctrine the Court is considering, all of the existing public health standards would be revoked because Congress delegated them to EPA. All federal limits on dumping sewage in lakes, rivers and beaches could be cancelled as well.

The Court is considering crippling Congress, not just the agencies — because it wants to make sure Congress can’t actually guarantee the American people air that is fit to breathe, safe water in your tap or medicines that are safe to take.

This is one of the biggest threats if Trump wins a second term.

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Carl Pope
Carl Pope

Written by Carl Pope

A veteran leader in the environmental movement, former executive director & chairman Sierra Club and Senior Climate Advisor to Michael Bloomberg

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