Per the New York Times:

The Trump administration has drafted a plan to repeal a fundamental scientific finding that gives the United States government its authority to regulate greenhouse-gas emissions and fight climate change, according to two people familiar with the plan.

The proposed Environmental Protection Agency rule rescinds a 2009 declaration known as the “endangerment finding,” which scientifically established that greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane endanger human lives.

That finding is the foundation of the federal government’s only tool to limit the climate pollution from vehicles, power plants and other industries that is dangerously heating the planet.

You will note that there is a word missing from this summary. Indeed, it is a word that is nowhere to be found within the entire 658 word piece. That word is “Congress.” Other words are used: We get “finding,” “government,” “rule,” “declaration,” and “tool.” But we do not get “Congress.”

This matters. Keen-eyed readers might well have asked themself why, exactly, the EPA’s “finding is the foundation of the federal government’s only tool to limit the climate pollution from vehicles, power plants and other industries.” As ever, the answer to this is simple: Because there exists no clear piece of federal legislation that mandates the executive branch to do any such thing. The EPA’s authority in this realm comes from a Supreme Court decision from 2007 (Massachusetts v. EPA) that held that the EPA is obliged to regulate “any air pollutant” that, in its judgment, could “endanger public health or welfare,” and from a section in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act that determined that the EPA is permitted to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act. The 2007 case — which is horribly reasoned, but has not been explicitly overturned — ruled that, absent a case for abdication that was unequivocally grounded in the statute, the EPA was mandated to decide either way whether such gases were dangerous. The Inflation Reduction Act made clear that the Clear Air Act can cover carbon dioxide (and more). Neither, however, removed the EPA’s capacity to make its own determination of dangerousness, and neither told it what to find.

In 2009, the Obama administration issued a “finding of endangerment” that unlocked the powers that the Court had granted it in Massachusetts v. EPA. If the Times is correct, the Trump administration is about to rescind that finding — perhaps on the merits, perhaps by taking on the arbitrary parameters that were set by the Supreme Court in Massachusetts v. EPA in the hope that the current Court will ground them more properly in the statute. As a political matter, one may approve of, disapprove of, or remain entirely neutral toward that decision, but one must not forget that, by Congress’s plain design, it is a political question, and its contours are delegated to the president. Should Congress wish to, it could pass a law that mandated the federal regulation of greenhouse gases in excruciating detail, and left nothing but blunt acquiescence to the discretion of the president. As of yet, it has not done any such thing, and, as a famous man once said, “elections have consequences.”