A shift in EPA regulations could undermine climate policies in the US.

The proposed rule will go up for public comment, and the agency will then take that feedback and come up with a final version. It’ll almost certainly get hit with legal challenges and will likely wind up in front of the Supreme Court. One note here is that the argument the EPA makes in the proposed rule reversal is mostly a legal one, rather than focusing on attacking the science of climate change, says Madison Condon, an associate law professor at Boston University. That could make it easier for the Supreme Court to eventually uphold this, she says, though this whole process is going to take a while.

If the endangerment finding goes down, it would have wide-reaching ripple effects. “We could find ourselves in a couple of years with no legal tools to try and address climate change,” Sivas says.

To take a step back for a moment, it’s surprising that we’ve ended up in this position where a single rule is so central to regulating emissions. US climate policy is held together by tenuous measures. Congress could have, at some point, passed a law that more directly allows the EPA to regulate greenhouse-gas emissions (the last time we got close was a 2009 bill that passed the House but never made it to the Senate). But here we are.

This move isn’t a surprise, exactly. The current administration has made it very clear that it is pursuing climate policy changes in every way possible. But what’s most striking is that we’re not operating in a shared reality anymore when it comes to climate change.

While top officials tend to acknowledge that climate change is real, there’s often a “but” followed by talking points from the realm of climate denial. (One of the more absurd examples is people claiming that carbon dioxide is beneficial because it helps plants.)

Climate change is real, and it’s a threat. The US has emitted more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than any other country in the world. It shouldn’t be controversial to expect the government to take action on this issue.

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