One of Big Oil’s Big Defenses Is Getting Blown Up: Mark Gongloff

For decades, fossil-fuel companies and their climate-change-denying allies obsessively tried to kill the federal government’s right to regulate greenhouse-gas emissions. Like Ahab, they may find that finally harpooning their white whale risks taking them down with it.

Last week, President Donald Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency retracted its 2009 finding that greenhouse gases are dangerous to human health. In the byzantine scaffolding of US regulatory law, this “endangerment finding” means the EPA must regulate those planet-heating gases under the 1963 Clean Air Act. By inviting EPA restrictions, the finding has been anathema to fossil-fuel companies and the handful of ideologues in the White ...