An NBC News story quotes Steyer-Taylor Center Faculty Fellow and Stanford Law Associate Professor Michael Wara on climate policies and references a paper he published in Science.

It doesn’t sound like much, but the “Clean Power Plan Proposed Rule” is a linchpin of the ambitious U.S.-China climate goals announced this week. It’s also a lightning rod for critics and supporters of President Barack Obama’s climate policies. So far 1.5 million comments about it have been filed — and it’s still more than two weeks before the Dec. 1 deadline for feedback.

Rising above the din are 13 economists and legal experts from top universities — Berkeley, University of Chicago, U.C. Davis, Harvard, MIT, Stanford and Yale — who published their take in this week’s issue of the journal Science.

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Stanford energy law professor Michael Wara, another author of the analysis out Thursday, says the estimates “all have issues” because the timeframe is still a decade out. Still, he adds, the EPA seems closer to reality, in part because it has to think about surviving future legal challenges. The Chamber-sponsored study, he says, seems “quite speculative” with some assumptions that drive the costs up.

Those divergent viewpoints are what the EPA is weighing, but in the long run the rise or fall of the “Clean Power Plan Proposed Rule” could depend on other factors.

“If I had to guess I’d say this is going to come down to politics,” says Wara, “to the willingness of Obama to veto” Republican attempts to defund the EPA effort. That, he adds, “and the legal battles.”

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Wara is among those who see that possibility as well, especially since the earlier Supreme Court ruling included comments by conservative justices warning the EPA not to “overreach.”

“Many smart D.C. lawyers are going to try to show that EPA is stretching beyond the confines of the law,” he says, “and they could win.”