Jody Freeman

For environmentalists and climate activists, the dangers of a Donald Trump presidency are myriad, particularly when his recent victory is combined with Republican Congress....“There’s no question there will be a regulatory rollback, the rhetoric will change dramatically, and climate change as an issue will not be as high on the agenda,” says Jody Freeman, director of the Environmental Law Program at Harvard University. “But we should be cautious and wait and see how dramatic the rollback will be… No administration can do everything at once. They’ll have to prioritize.”

Regulations to fight climate change likely will be casualties of the incoming Trump administration, but environmental experts taking stock of the changing American political landscape said that work in the field will continue elsewhere and that a broad-based rollback of U.S. environmental protection will prove easier said than done...“Trump could unilaterally withdraw from the Paris Agreement, renouncing U.S. leadership on international climate negotiations. And he could try to rescind or weaken some important regulations, like the Clean Power Plan,” said Jody Freeman, the Archibald Cox Professor of Law and director of Harvard Law School’s Environmental Law Program. “But any effort to fully unravel the substantial and meaningful regulatory initiatives of the last eight years will be long, complicated, and difficult, and in the end likely only partial because of the significant legal, political, and practical barriers to doing so.”

After President-elect Donald J. Trump promised to “drain the swamp” that he sees in the nation’s capital, his millions of supporters are expecting vast changes in the sprawling federal bureaucracy, and conservative activists are drooling at the chance to remake, resize or reduce the reach of government...“He doesn’t possess the executive power to reorganize the government at whim,” said Jody Freeman, a law professor at Harvard University who served in the first Obama administration. “There are some minor things presidents can do, in terms of creating new offices in cabinet agencies. But the notion that he can single-handedly abolish agencies is fanciful.”

President-elect Donald Trump's vows to single-handedly gut Obama administration environmental regulations will be more difficult than he has portrayed, legal experts say. And any effort by Trump's U.S. EPA to rescind or revoke major scientifically based rules — like the air standard for ozone pollution — would be met with a barrage of lawsuits. "Lots of threats of this kind have come in the past," said Jody Freeman, a Harvard Law School professor and former climate adviser to President Obama. "Virtually every Republican administration comes in and says they want to deregulate. But when the rubber hits the road, there is little of it."

A hearing was held on the EPA's Clean Power Plan last month at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. Mike Edgerly spoke with the director of Harvard Law School's Environmental Law Program, Jody Freeman, about what happened at the hearing, and what that means for the plan and future climate regulation.

Following years of debate over U.S. EPA's Clean Power Plan, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit heard arguments yesterday in the lawsuit challenging the rule. During today's OnPoint, Richard Lazarus and Jody Freeman, professors at Harvard Law School, discuss the reactions coming from the 10-judge panel on the key issues and arguments in the case. They also explain why they believe the court's final ruling will more than likely favor EPA.

A case against President Obama's Clean Power Plan will be heard today in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. circuit — 28 mostly Republican states, along with over 100 companies and labor and industry groups, will be fighting to overturn the plan, which was stayed by the Supreme Court back in February. Jody Freeman joins The Takeaway to explain what's next for this case. She's a professor at Harvard Law School and director of the Harvard Law School environmental law program. She also served as the White House counselor for energy and climate change from 2009 to 2010.

This September is a big month for the coal industry. Early in the month, the US Environmental Protection Agency released its final version of a modified Cross-State Air Pollution Rule that seeks to cut emissions from power plants tied to smog. And, at the end of the month, a federal circuit court will begin hearing arguments over the Clean Power Plan that aims to cut carbon emissions...Harvard Law Professors Jody Freeman and Richard Lazarus explain that EPA’s rule gives states several alternative options to comply, such as replacing their coal-fired generation with plants that run on cleaner natural gas, or with green energies. States with a lot of coal, for instance, have less stringent requirements. With that, Freeman and Lazarus point out that coal plants in this country are on average 42-years-old and pollute a lot more than newer plants. Still, coal is expected to supply 30 percent of the nation’s energy mix by 2030, which negates the argument that the plan is nothing more than a “power grab.”

President Obama’s signature climate change initiative is about to face its biggest challenge yet. Time is running out on Obama’s second term in the White House, and the president could leave office next January with his Clean Power Plan stuck in legal limbo. The rule, which would require power plants to cut their carbon dioxide output, is the centerpiece of Obama’s efforts to use executive power to slow U.S. contributions to global warming...“I think that people shouldn’t be too pessimistic or optimistic either way,” said Jody Freeman, director of Harvard Law School’s environmental law program and a former counselor to Obama. She filed a legal brief backing the plan on behalf of two former Republican EPA chiefs.

Nearly 200 Democrats in Congress – including most from New England – are supporting the Environmental Protection Administration as it faces a legal challenge to its effort to regulate carbon emissions from coal-burning power plants. “The law is clear: The Clean Air Act gives EPA the authority to regulate air pollution and that is what the agency is doing with the Clean Power Plan rule,” Sen. Edward Markey, D-Mass., said during a conference call Friday with reporters to announce the filing of an “amicus brief” in support of the rule...A similar brief was filed Thursday by Harvard Law Professors Jody Freeman and Richard Lazarus on behalf of two former EPA administrators who had been appointed by Republican presidents Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. Former EPA Administrators William D. Ruckelshaus and William K. Reilly are supporting the Clean Power Plan as a “pragmatic, flexible, and cost-effective pollution control program” that respects the authority of states. They argue that the rule “falls well within the bounds” of the agency’s authority to reasonably interpret broadly worded statutory language to address unforeseen problems without the need for congressional amendment of current law.

An article by Jody Freeman (registration required): In February 2016, the U.S. Supreme Court made an extraordinary decision. It temporarily suspended the implementation of President Barack Obama’s signature climate change initiative—the Clean Power Plan—which requires coal- and gas-fired power plants, the largest source of U.S. carbon pollution, to cut their emissions for the first time. At the Paris climate talks just two months prior, nearly 200 nations pledged to mitigate their greenhouse gas emissions using a variety of domestic policies. Obama’s plan had become a crucial part of the United States’ strategy for meeting its own commitment in Paris: to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by up to 28 percent by 2025, compared to 2005 levels.

Be wary of any promises from Republican presidential candidates to abolish federal entities such as the Environmental Protection Agency and Energy Department, legal scholars told Bloomberg BNA, because they will not come true...“This is just red meat to their supporters, of course, and cannot be unilaterally accomplished,” Jody Freeman, a professor at Harvard Law School, told Bloomberg BNA. “Presidents can ask Congress for skeletal agency budgets, try to stymie or slow agency work or control them and weaken regulation through centralized White House review, but they cannot eliminate agencies or zero out budgets by fiat, which is what these candidates are promising.” ...Laurence Tribe, Harvard Law professor and legal scholar, told Bloomberg BNA in an e-mail that the agency's origins are “legally irrelevant” to whether it could now be abolished. “The fact that an executive order by President Nixon preceded the Acts of Congress constituting the current EPA, delegating regulatory powers to that agency, authorizing its expenditures and appropriating the funds in its budget doesn't make it vulnerable to unilateral presidential abolition,” Tribe said.

Ten research projects driven by faculty collaborators across six Harvard Schools will share over $1 million in the second round of grants awarded by the Climate Change Solutions Fund, an initiative launched last year by President Drew Faust to encourage multidisciplinary research around climate change...This year’s winners are:...Wendy Jacobs and Alma Cohen, Harvard Law School. Jacobs and Cohen will work with existing community organizations to encourage behavior changes that meaningfully reduce greenhouse gas emissions and build social and political support for policies to mitigate climate change...Katherine Konschnik and Jody Freeman, Harvard Law School. Konschnik and Freeman’s project, called Power Shift, will help policymakers, regulators, and stakeholders design a modern legal infrastructure to support 21st-century electricity by creating and supporting a new network of expert communities.

Justice Antonin Scalia, who died unexpectedly Feb. 13 while on vacation at a West Texas resort, authored nearly two dozen majority opinions and a dozen dissents in environmental law cases during his 30 years on the U.S. Supreme Court. ... Richard J. Lazarus, a professor at Harvard Law School, told Bloomberg BNA that Scalia “was probably environmental law’s greatest skeptic,” but not “because he was against environmentalism.” ... Jody Freeman, a professor at Harvard Law School, told Bloomberg BNA that “you could largely predict where Scalia would come out on those cases. He was very consistent that the burden on the larger public to get standing was always going to be greater than for directly regulated entities.”

A few hours after nearly every country in the world adopted the Paris Agreement last December, John Kerry went into enemy territory. Backed by the blinking lights of the Champs-Élysées, the bleary-eyed secretary of state clipped on an earpiece and started fielding questions from Fox News Sunday’s Chris Wallace. One of the main objections American conservatives have to any global climate deal is the fear that other countries will renege, making money off dirty energy while Americans sacrifice to clean the atmosphere like a bunch of chumps...But this week, another branch of government emerged as a threat to the plan. Chief Justice John Roberts, backed by his four fellow Republican appointees on the Supreme Court, barred the Obama administration from taking any steps to implement its plan to reduce carbon pollution from existing power plants until the courts reach a final decision on the plan’s legality...Jody Freeman, a Harvard University law professor who served as White House counselor for energy and climate change under Obama, disagrees. "There’s no argument for irreparable harm," she says. "There is no obligation on the part of the federal government to preserve the market share of the coal industry."

OnPoint with Tom Ashbrook: The Supreme Court hits the brakes on the heart of President Obama’s push to fight global warming. We’ll dig in. Guests: Jody Freeman, founding director of the Harvard Law School Environmental Law and Policy program.