We're talking about the biggest legal developments of One of Justice Scalia's final official acts before he died was to cast what would prove to be an important environmental law vote. He joined a five justice majority to put on hold President Obama's Clean Power Plan, which would curb emissions from power plants. That order, it turns out, may have marked the plans final day. The Clean Power Plan is just one of the many Obama environmental initiatives now in jeopardy
with the election of Donald Trump. With me to talk about the year in environmental law is Charles Warren, who chairs the environmental practice at Cramer Levin in New York. Chuck, thanks for joining us. Is the Clean Power Plan now
dead with Donald Trump's election? Not necessarily, because you know, it's before the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit and if they upholded, which they could do, you know, before the inauguration, Uh, then it would be up to the new administration to try and change it. And to change they have to go through a whole regulation process. And it's not that easy to change regulations because they have to come up with a basis for
making a change. And if they and go through the whole process, get comments, and then they're subject to the lawsuits. And it showed during the Bush years when they tried to make some changes, they were often styme eaten by the courts. In the end, whether or not it it is uh still alive. Um has it accomplished some of its goals just by by the specter of it being out there and and you have power company has gone ahead and made the sorts of changes that the president
was hoping for. Yes, I think that's a good point. I think it has accomplished a lot of what it was trying to do because power companies are now starting to make those kinds of changes or have put them initiated them. Um, these things take a while, but a lot of the companies saw the handwriting on the wall, and they even started before the Clean Power Plan was put into effect to try to move away from coal
and go to natural gas. I think when you see utilities like a E P, which is the biggest user of coal how or was the biggest user of coal of all utilities, start to convert plants to natural gas, you know that there's a wholesale movement away from coal. Regardless of what happens to this regulation. In the end, there are a lot of other Obama environmental initiatives out there, some of them in the courts. Which of those d
c as being in the greatest danger at this point? Well, besides the Clean Power Plan, I mean, I think there are other there. There are some things like even though it's our Kane, what the Obama administration has been trying to do about under the Clean Water Act defining waters in the United States, which is something that's been a very controversial thing, and it's how broad the reach of
the government is in terms of regulating wet lands. And I think that that's something that could change under the Trump administration. It's has been a very controversial regulation. I think that's something could change. There's some other regulations, air regulations that are out there also. I mean, you have you have the mercury rule. Is that is that the mercury rule, And I mean that's already you know, that's
one thing that's UH. I think also going a long way to having utilities change their UH practices already, but that's something that they could try to change. Also. I see that I see that as another thing that might be UH there And and then, you know, I think just in general, I think there'll be a lot of reduction of the funding for the Environmental Protection Agency e p A and to try and sort of stop them from doing enforcement and writing new regulations and those kinds
of things. So I think that's where you'll see a lot of effort devoted by the new administration and the new administrator, Scott Pruitt, who was pretty hostile to e p A. Chuck, we only have about thirty seconds left, but I did want to ask you about the Paris Climate Accord. Where do things stand on that, what's happened over the past twelve months. Yeah, I think the Paris
Climate Agreement is, you know, really a landmark agreement. They had a d signatories around the world and so far it's been ratified by a hundred and twenty parties, and I think it's a signature accomplishment. Uh. And while while they are still goals in essence and countries have to follow through on them, and I think again that's something that you may see a slackening in this administration in
following through on the US commitments. But I think the fact that you have so many countries around the world that are committed to do it and major players around the world. I think it's going to still have momentum. Chuck, We're gonna have to leave it there. Thank you so much, Chuck Warmer Warren of of Cramer Levin. Coming up, we talk election law. This is Bloomberg