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In 2025, President Donald Trump rolled out new initiatives at a dizzying rate. That story, in one form or another, dominated the news. This year, much of the news will again be about Trump, but he will have less control of the narrative. Legal and political responses to Trump will play a greater role, as will economic developments. Trump’s anti-environmental crusade may run into strong headwinds.

A recent U.S. Office of Management and Budget (OMB) memo proclaimed the Trump administration’s commitment to “deregulating at an unprecedented scale.” To advance that agenda, the memo tells agencies to put a thumb on the scale in favor of rollbacks. In contrast, most lawyers and economists would say that regulation and deregulation are subject to the same rules. Sometimes, the conventional wisdom is right.

Although Congress vetoed California’s most recent vehicle regulations, the state can pass new regulations so long as there are significant differences from the ones Congress overturned. The Trump administration has been arguing all along that California lacks the power to regulate greenhouse gases from vehicles. Those regulations are a crucial part of the state’s climate policy. Sooner or later, courts will need to decide the extent of California’s legal authority over vehicle emissions. The issues are complex, involving an unusual statutory scheme. Here’s what you need to know, and why I think California should win this fight.

Not that long ago, conservatives demanded that the government balance costs and benefits. They still do, but with a twist: They demand special limits on consideration of environmental effects. But that makes no sense. Whatever rules we have about costs should apply to all types of costs, and the same with benefits. The result of skewing the analysis is, not surprisingly, that we get conservative results more often.

If a tree falls in the forest but no one hears it, does it still make a sound? If a law hasn’t been formally repealed but can be violated with complete impunity, is it still in effect? I’ll leave the first question to philosophers, but the second one could have major legal implications. Here’s why.

President Donald Trump is on a rampage. He has big plans for a mass repeal of existing regulations, he’s trying to use emergency declarations to short-circuit normal environmental protections, and he’s savaging environmental agencies. He’s also at war with the rule of law, dodging court orders, ignoring statutes, and punishing lawyers and law firms that have dared to challenge him. In area after area, Trump has tried to sweep aside legal constraints. Part of the point of Trump’s “shock and awe” campaign has been to overwhelm the ability of opponents and the courts to keep up with his legally questionable actions. Trump’s attack on the bureaucracy is also an attack on the rule of law because one of the key functions of bureaucrats is to ensure that the government follows the rules.

In one of President Donald Trump’s first executive orders, he eliminated a centralized system that Jimmy Carter initially set up to issue regulations governing environmental impact statements. Instead, he called on each agency to issue its own regulations, which seems to have caused the predictable amount of confusion. I’ve examined the new regulations from three agencies: the Department of Defense (DOD), the Department of Energy (DOE), and the Department of Transportation (DOT), which happened to be the first ones that I saw. There seems to be little rhyme or reason in the variations.

President Donald Trump has taken some dramatic steps in the name of improving use of NEPA, the statute governing environmental reviews of projects. The goal is to speed up the permitting process and make it more efficient. The reality is that his efforts will create chaos and uncertainty, with the likely effect of slowing things down.

It’s a tribute to the significance of state climate policies that President Donald Trump devoted an entire executive order to excoriating them as “fundamentally irreconcilable” with his own, fossil fuel-promoting energy policy. Yet, despite all the drama in DC, state governments have continued to make quiet progress in their efforts to expand clean energy and phase out fossil fuels. These states are focused on tangible steps forward, not on capturing online clicks, so their efforts may escape notice. But the cumulative effect of these month-by-month, smaller-scale initiatives is significant.