Readers of my previous (August 13) post on the Endangerment Finding (EF) litigation pending in the D.C. Circuit may have come away wondering about this issue: What is the basis on which this coalition of most blue states plus many major municipalities and big-time environmental NGOs seeks to put an indefinite stall on resolution of the litigation?

As reported in that post, after the Trump EPA had finalized its rescission of the EF in February 2026, a large number of blue states, municipalities and environmental NGOs promptly filed Petitions in the D.C. Circuit seeking to have the court block that action. But, once having commenced the case, the same group of major actors immediately started engaging in tactics to slow the litigation down and postpone the beginning of briefing on the merits. Most recently on July 29, a large group of most of the Petitioners in the litigation — including some 20 blue states (California, New York, Illinois, Massachusetts, etc., etc.), large municipalities (New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles, etc., etc.), and NGOs (Environmental Defense Fund, Sierra Club, etc., etc.) — filed a motion to put the case into “abeyance” for 30 days to force EPA to re-do some of the analysis that supports the rescission. While the “abeyance” request itself is only for 30 days, a re-do of EPA’s analysis could re-start the running of multiple clocks, and thereby delay the litigation for months, if not a year or more.

Now, this litigation potentially affects some trillions of dollars of economic activity. Surely, if there is to be a significant delay, there must be some very important reason. But in fact the stated basis for the motion, backed by all these big-time entities, is beyond trivial.

The Endangerment Finding (EF) is the completely absurd piece of regulatory overreach by which the Obama EPA in December 2009 purported to determine that the trace atmospheric gas carbon dioxide was a “danger to human health and welfare.” That action may have been absurd, but it was by no means benign. CO2 is a principal product of all combustion of fossil fuels. Following on the EF, EPA and other government agencies in the Obama and then Biden Administrations set out to use the EF as the basis to transform our entire energy economy — suppressing drilling, blocking pipelines, forcing closure of power plants, outlawing combustion cars and gas heat and stoves, and much, much more.

In Trump’s first term, EPA never chose to take on the EF; but in Trump’s second term the agency got right to work on the job of rescission, and issued the final rule rescinding the first part of the EF (as to motor vehicle emissions) on February 13, 2026. By February 18, progressive NGOs were already in court (D.C. Circuit) seeking to block the rescission. I covered the rescission of the EF in this post on February 15, and then the status of the litigation in this further post on July 21.

If you are interested in this subject, here is the key issue to watch: Do the progressive NGOs and their blue state co-petitioners, and for that matter the D.C. Circuit itself, want this case to proceed to a quick resolution? Or do they want to stall?