> I hate that the executive and judicial branches have to do so much work that should be done by Congress.

In recent years the Supreme Court has turned against the use of regulatory agency rule making authority to stretch the meaning of older statutes and accomplish what Congress is too gridlocked to do. Most notably was the 2022 decision striking down Obama-era EPA power plant carbon emission limits (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Virginia_v._EPA), but there are many other decisions in a similar vein (e.g. overturning Chevron), and more coming down the pipe (see https://www.scotusblog.com/2024/10/supreme-court-allows-epa-...).

Between SCOTUS decisions limiting how older statutes can be reinterpreted to encompass global warming on the one hand, and fundamental economic incentives on the other (the West Virginia decision didn't result in a rush back to coal), this move by the Trump administration is unlikely to change the course of things, except to perhaps spur Congress to involve itself more heavily one way or the other.

Rather than handwringing, the left needs to finally accept that relying on lawsuits and aggressive Federal regulatory agencies, rather than the ballot boxes (plural--not just the presidential election), to enact their social and environmental policies is no longer viable. But it's going to be a difficult change because the Democrats sacrificed a ton of grass roots support (real, substantive support, as opposed to professional class and social media popularity contests) as they came to rely almost exclusively on imaginative legalistic and technocratic solutions, an evolution that started decades before the courts took their sharp conservative turn.

I, for one, invite diminished environmental regulatory agencies. In so far as it concerns global warming, renewable energy, and land use (e.g. mass transit, housing, etc), they've become impediments much more than enablers of (net) environmentally friendly change. What does it matter if an agency favors one set of policies over another when it takes years if not decades for projects to make it through the thicket of red tape? For energy policy specifically, the economics favor renewables, so less regulation can only hasten the transition.