Trump plan to gut science behind EPA climate rules faces long odds, experts say

• It held that six greenhouse gases endanger "both the public health and the public welfare of current and future generations."
• Any attempt to overturn it would ignite instant court challenges.

Zoom in: Since the finding was issued in the wake of a 2007 Supreme Court decision, scientific and legal justifications to limit greenhouse gas emissions have only grown stronger, said Michael Greenstone, founding director of the University of Chicago's Institute for Climate and Sustainable Growth.

• Greenstone referred to it as "the Jenga piece of climate policy," because removing it could topple a slew of laws and regulations.
• "It would pull out the underpinnings of a whole series of rules that aim to balance economic costs with reductions in emissions," he said. "It would be enormously consequential."

Yes, but: Greenstone said an effort to overturn the finding would have to ignore the mounting signs that climate change is already harming current generations.

• "It seems a bizarre position, given the record global temperatures, the fires in California, the unheard of hurricane storm in North Carolina," he said. "It seems a strange moment in time to be arguing that greenhouse gases don't endanger the public health and welfare."

The intrigue: Phil Duffy, chief scientist at Spark Climate Solutions who served in the Biden administration's Office of Science and Technology Policy, said overturning the finding requires doing two things.

• First,"you have to somehow prove that all of the effects that we're seeing of climate change are not caused by greenhouse gases," Duffy told Axios in an interview.
• "And then you also have to provide some other alternative explanation for all the changes in climate and all the societal impacts," he said. "It seems like an incredibly high bar."
• Duffy was also the lead author of a 2019 study in the journal Science updating the scientific evidence for the finding.

Friction point: During the first Trump administration, the EPA rebuffed advisers who favored overturning the finding.

• However, starting a process early in President Trump's second term could prove helpful given the resulting legal morass, depending on the mechanism that the EPA employs to repeal it.
• Michael Gerrard, a climate law expert at Columbia Law School, told Axios the EPA could revoke the endangerment finding as a way to avoid taking further action on climate change during Trump's term.

• But legal challenges would arise, Gerrard said: "I don't know how they avoid judicial review."

Between the lines: It isn't yet clear what the administration is going to do, with options short of a full rescinding of the endangerment finding, including a potentially lengthy reexamination.

• Jeffrey Holmstead of Bracewell LLP, a former EPA official during the George W. Bush administration, said some industry groups have been urging the EPA not to overturn the endangerment finding.
• "There is great concern that reversing the finding would open the door to a lot more nuisance lawsuits against all kinds of industrial companies — and it would eliminate one of the best arguments that oil companies have used to get lawsuits against them dismissed," he told Axios via email.
• "There is also concern that an effort to overturn the endangerment finding will not hold up in court," he said.

The other side: The EPA on Wednesday would only reiterate its earlier statement that it had complied with Trump's executive order to examine the finding.

What we're watching: How the EPA goes about reexamining or reversing such a key finding, and whether and how quickly the Jenga pieces, in the form of emissions regulations, tumble as a result.