Professor Michael Wara provides comment in this piece envisioning potential outcomes of climate and energy policies recently enacted by President Obama.

In August, President Obama ensured that climate change will be one of the major issues at stake in the 2016 election. Whether candidates choose to talk about it or not, whoever gets elected president next year will have enormous influence over US climate and energy policy.

The reason is simple. Back in 2007, the Supreme Court gave the Environmental Protection Agency unprecedented authority to regulate US greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Air Act. In the years since, Obama has used that power to enact sweeping new climate rules. That includes stricter fuel efficiency standards for cars and trucks. It also includes the Clean Power Plan, an ambitious EPA rule to cut CO2 emissions from the nation’s power plants, which was finalized in August.

These regulations were all enacted without Congress. And their ultimate fate rests with the next president. If a Republican gets elected in 2016 and wants to weaken the Clean Power Plan or relax those fuel economy rules, he’ll have a lot of leeway to do so (though total repeal could prove difficult, as we’ll see). By contrast, if Hillary Clinton or someone else wants to come in and massively expand what the EPA’s done, she’ll have plenty of options — such as extending carbon regulations to refineries, chemical plants, or aircraft.

…

“Any future administration will have a lot of room to be either more ambitious or less ambitious,” explains Michael Wara, an expert on energy and environmental law at Stanford. And unlike with tweaks to Obamacare or federal tax policy or a host of other issues, this won’t require Congress’s approval.

…

“There’s a lot of latitude in the review process,” says Stanford’s Michael Wara. “The history of the Clean Air Act shows this. If you have a president who doesn’t like climate policy, they could basically signal to the states that they’re going to give a lot of compliance flexibility and allow states to make assumptions in their plan that reduce their costs.” This would likely involve seemingly arcane tweaks to models and baselines that would be harder for green groups to challenge in court.