A climate alarmist group with ties to the Biden administration pledged to sue the Environmental Protection Agency under President Donald Trump, on the same day the EPA announced it was rescinding Biden-era rules regulating greenhouse gas emissions at power plants.
“The Trump EPA is tearing down our national limits on the extensive and dangerous pollution from power plant smokestacks—just as data centers and other drivers are increasing this harmful pollution,” Vickie Patton, general counsel for the Environmental Defense Fund, said in a statement Monday, shortly after the EPA announcement.
“Climate pollution is imposing urgent costs and serious health impacts on people’s lives, from the dangerous heat, fire, smoke, and drought we experienced this summer to steeper insurance and health care bills that go with those disasters,” Patton added. “EDF will oppose this harmful action in court.”
This pledge to sue is notable, not only because it comes so quickly after the Trump move, but also because EDF is directly tied to the man who led the EPA when it published the rules the Trump administration just announced it was rescinding.
The EPA Rule
Hours before the announcement, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin announced that his agency would rescind an April 2024 regulation that likely spelled doom for many coal and natural gas power plants.
The Biden EPA rules required certain coal plants to reduce their emissions by 90% by 2032 and forced new natural gas plants to offset most of their emissions.
“The years the Obama and Biden administrations worked to destroy coal and natural gas are over,” Aaron Szabo, assistant administrator of the EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation, told reporters on a call Monday.
The EPA estimates that the rescission of the Biden greenhouse gas regulations will save consumers $310 billion, in addition to a $370 million savings in direct compliance costs.
The Legal Rationale
Yet the EPA’s argument doesn’t just boil down to what saves consumers money. Zeldin’s team has crafted the legal reasoning to make any EDF lawsuit an uphill legal battle.
The Clean Air Act of 1970 directed the EPA to regulate “any air pollutant” that could “endanger public health or welfare.” The Obama administration issued an Endangerment Finding in 2009, claiming that greenhouse gas emissions harm public health and welfare via climate change.
Yet EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin announced earlier this year that the EPA would rescind that finding, which would remove the legal scaffolding for many federal greenhouse gas regulations.
On Monday’s call, Szabo distinguished between the EPA’s authority to regulate “local and regional” impacts and the claimed authority to regulate global impacts, which he said lay outside Congress’ intent with the Clean Air Act.
Szabo argued that Congress intended the Clean Air Act to address pollutants with local and regional effects rather than an alleged global phenomenon like climate change, where the link between pollutants and effects is harder to demonstrate concretely.
Szabo also faulted the Biden EPA for ignoring the Supreme Court’s decision in West Virginia v. EPA (2022), in which the court ruled 6-3 that the EPA does not have the authority to broadly restructure America’s energy sector by forcing power plants to shift from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources.
“Even if we eliminated all greenhouse gas emissions from power plants tomorrow, there would be no meaningful impact on global climate change,” he argued.
Importantly, the EPA clarified that the new rule will not affect “the regulation of any hazardous air pollutants,” or the regulation of greenhouse gases for other purposes—just the regulation of greenhouse gases for combating climate change.
EDF’s Biden Ties
Regardless of the legal merits of whatever case EDF ultimately files, the climate alarmist group’s lawsuit threat is notable due to its ties to the Biden EPA.
Those harsh power plant rules didn’t come out of nowhere. The man who led the EPA when it published those rules—Michael Regan—had worked for EDF from 2008 to 2016 before joining the administration of North Carolina’s Democrat governor, Roy Cooper, and then ultimately taking the reins at EPA.
After Trump retook the Oval Office last year, Regan returned to EDF, taking a seat on the board of its action arm in October 2025, according to his LinkedIn profile.
As I wrote in “The Woketopus,” EDF leaders had at least ten meetings at the Biden White House, including EDF President Fred Krupp’s meeting with climate funding czar John Podesta. Podesta, who served as chief of staff to President Bill Clinton, also founded the Center for American Progress, a hub of leftist activism that fed dozens of staff into the Biden administration.
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A Broader Coalition
This wouldn’t mark the first time EDF has sued the administration. In February, EDF joined a coalition of activist groups in suing to block the EPA’s Endangerment Finding rescission.
The coalition includes the American Public Health Association, which sued the administration and opposed its federal grantmaking rules. The coalition includes Earthjustice, a climate alarmist litigation outfit.
It includes two other notable groups I covered in “The Woketopus,” as well.
The Natural Resources Defense Council, another coalition member, hired Obama-era EPA head Gina McCarthy as president in 2020. McCarthy would move from NRDC into the Biden White House, becoming national climate advisor. NRDC’s executive director, Christy Goldfuss, attended at least 23 meetings at the Biden White House, including a one-on-one meeting with Gina McCarthy, and four with John Podesta. Kathleen Welch, chair of NRDC’s board of trustees, had at least 38 White House meetings.
The Sierra Club, another coalition member, bragged about collaborating with the Biden administration to shape climate policy. In July 2023, the Sierra Club, Earthjustice, and other groups petitioned the Interior Department under Biden to stop “fast-tracking approval for offshore oil and gas projects.” Two months later, Interior issued a press release bragging that it announced the “fewest offshore oil and gas lease sales in history” for the Gulf of Mexico.
When the department later announced three oil and gas lease sales but 12 offshore wind lease sales, the Sierra Club praised the move, and stated that the group remains “dedicated to collaborating with the Biden administration and all stakeholders to maximize the potential of offshore wind.”
Ben Jealous, the Sierra Club’s executive director, had at least seven White House meetings under Biden.
Conclusion
Courts may decide the ultimate success of Zeldin’s legal interpretation, but this budding round of lawfare illustrates the abiding influence of the Woketopus.
The battle over federal climate policy does not end when administrations change. The same network of environmental activist groups that enjoyed influence under Biden appears prepared to defend its preferred regulatory framework in court, regardless of the intervening presidential election.
This article is a commentary on news initially published on The Daily Signal.
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