Hello, I'm Amy Westredelt and this is a special crossover episode of Drilled and Damages.

Today I am joined by Sam Sinkar, Senior Vice President of Earth Justice and Kirti Dottla,

Director of Strategic Legal Advocacy for Earth Justice, to talk a little bit more about

what exactly the West Virgin Universe's EPA decision meant, and to look ahead at some of the big

pieces for climate folks to be watching in the next Supreme Court session coming up this fall.

There's a lot to get into here from the continued attempt to dismantle the quote-unquote

administrative state to the way that the Clean Water Act is being targeted in a case coming up next

session to how litigation remains a very important tool even with the Supreme Court on fire.

We're going to get into all of that and more coming up after this quick break.

My name is Sam Sankar. I'm the Senior Vice President of Programs at Earth Justice,

which means I lead our lobbying and litigation efforts.

I'm Kirti Dottla and I'm the Director of Strategic Legal Advocacy at Earth Justice,

which in a nutshell means I keep track of the goings on in the federal courts,

especially the Supreme Court on issues that crop up across all of our cases.

I know that it's been a while since the West Virgin Universe's EPA decision came down.

A couple months past it, what do you think the implications of that decision are or will be?

Yeah, totally. I think your listeners are already pretty well versed in this case,

but just as a reminder, the case is ostensibly about this Obama era regulation called the Clean

Power Plan that addressed emissions from fossil fuel-fired power plants, but that regulation

is a sort of a zombie regulation that had because of the Supreme Court issuing a stay,

never got into effect, and it was sort of practically dead for all purposes.

And the Supreme Court took a case that was about whether or not that that zombie regulation

...