I just had a truly helpful - and dare I say hopeful - pop-up conversation with Columbia University’s Gernot Wagner - a top-notch climate policy and economics analyst - on what to think and work on as the Trump Administration carries out its long-pledged plan to repeal the 2009 “Endangerment Finding” by the Environmental Protection Agency under President Obama.

Quick points:

* The litigation over this Trump move (details are still to come later this week) will play out for many years.

* There’ll be lots of CO2 released inside the Beltway as anti-regulation zealots pop Champagne corks, but decarbonization trends will be sustained globally.

* In the meantime, Wagner points to substantial areas of Trump policy that align completely with past Democratic policies - on geothermal, nuclear energy, energy storage (and, yes, carbon capture). Read this post by Wagner and colleagues.

* We discussed how the huge surge in AI infrastructure investment is coming with a surge in solar/battery systems (yes and gas). Read his recent post with colleagues: “The Race to Power Data Centers.”

Endangering “Endangerment”

As the EPA website explains, the Endangerment Finding is the formal scientific determination that greenhouse gases—specifically carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, hydrofluorocarbons, perfluorocarbons, and sulfur hexafluoride—threaten public health and welfare. The finding established the legal basis for regulating greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act.

The Wall Street Journal was fed the exclusive by the administration in a story with on-record comments from the EPA admnistrator and Secretary of the Interior.

The New York Times published a revealing deep dive focused on four key figures who’ve been working for 15 years or more to get to this moment. One is the lawyer Mandy Gunasekara, who helped Senator James Inhofe toss his snowball in the Senate in 2015 (seated behind him).

One reality of course, as Cardiff University’s Aaron Thierry quipped on Bluesky, is that “You can repeal an endangerment finding. You can’t repeal the endangerment.”

To me, it’s vital to keep a focus - amid all the destruction and backsliding - on what can be sustained or even advanced around clean energy choices even as the fight over regulation rolls on, enriching new generations of environmental lawyers.

Wagner’s Columbia-based Climate Knowledge Initiative is one place to look for insights. Here’s that post I mentioned above: America’s Clean Energy Transition Will Continue Despite the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Listen to Wagner here if you can’t watch the whole show right now:

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