Meet the Lawyers Beating Back Trump's Reckless Environmental Policies -- and Winning

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This story is part of Covering Climate Now, a global collaboration of more than 250 news outlets to strengthen coverage of the climate story.

WASHINGTON — Drew Caputo was sitting on the couch at his home in the Bay Area watching the election returns on November 8th, 2016. As soon as it became apparent Trump was going to win, Caputo, a senior lawyer with the group Earthjustice, had two immediate thoughts: The first was that a Trump administration would be nothing short of a disaster for the environment, climate, and public health.

The second thought, he says, was: “Time to go to work. Time to go to the mattresses.”

Caputo and his colleagues quickly identified several critical issues that Trump might go after and formed internal teams to prepare for the worst. One potential disaster, he and his colleagues envisioned, was the undoing of the Obama administration’s efforts to protect parts of the Arctic, Atlantic, and Pacific oceans from oil and gas exploration. Even before Trump was sworn in, lawyers at Earthjustice had started lining up potential plaintiffs and honing their arguments to block a fossil-fuel free-for-all in the fragile ocean waters. “We knew the Trump guys would be an environmental wrecking crew and we wanted to be in a position to respond immediately,” Caputo says.

Sure enough, in April 2017, Trump signed an executive order to throw open the Arctic and parts of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans for oil exploration. Within a week, Earthjustice and a coalition of groups including the League of Conservation Voters, Sierra Club, and Natural Resources Defense Council sued Trump to block the order.

Almost two years later, a federal judge struck down a key section of Trump’s executive order, calling it “unlawful and invalid.” The Obama-era protections would “remain in full force and effect unless and until revoked by Congress.”

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/meet-the-lawyers-beating-back-trumps-reckless-environmental-policies-and-winning-887321/