Paramount Settles Suit & EPA Repeals Climate Controls

0:00Some people treat Chachi-PT like some kind of smart search engine, and some use it to get work done. Chachi-PT work is a new way of working in Chachi-PT that can take action across your apps and files, stay with a project for hours if needed, and turn a goal into finished work. It's designed to help you move from a chaotic starting point to a reviewable first version. So all the source materials, briefs, and scattered information that you have to grind through to turn into something useful can just become something useful. Put Chachi-PT to work on your most ambitious ideas and projects. Get started at chachi-PT.com by selecting Work Mode, available on plus and pro plans. This is Robert Smith from Business History. If you're listening to this, there's a good chance you're a small business owner. And like every small business owner, you started with a dream to do what you love and watch it grow. What you probably didn't dream about, keeping up with cyber threats. That's where MasterCard can help, with access to tools that help identify cyber threats to better protect your business.

1:02Building a dream business? Priceless. For cybersecurity in a changing world, there's MasterCard. Learn more at mastercard.com slash small business. If you listen to financial news, you know a lot of time to spend thinking about what's next. The next opportunity. The next investment. The next move. But sometimes what matters most is being ready for what you never saw coming. For more than 75 years, Cincinnati Insurance has worked with independent agents to help protect businesses, homes, valuables, and more. Because planning for the future isn't only about knowing what's next. It's about making sure you're ready for what you can't predict. Let Cincinnati Insurance make your bad day better. Find an independent agent at cianfian.com This is Bloomberg Law with June Grasso from Bloomberg Radio. The settlement is not a vote of support for this merger.

2:03It is not a blessing of the broader merger. Probably speaking, we believe, further consolidation in markets that are central to American economic life. Doesn't serve the American economy, consumers, or competition well. The settlement of the anti-trust lawsuit brought by 12 states may not be a vote of support for Paramount's historic $110 billion acquisition of Warner Brothers, but it was a vote to remove the final obstacle to the deal. Attorney's General from 12 states and the writers guild had sued to block the deal, arguing that it would give Paramount an undue share of the movie and cable TV industries. The settlement announced by California Attorney General Rob Bonta doesn't do anything to change that dominance. It just calls for some new commitments from the company without any divestitures. The block, the merger coalition, which represents more than 40 organizations that oppose the tie-up,

3:09slammed the settlement, calling it a sweetheart deal. Quote, we are disappointed and angry that the interests of average Americans have been trampled to benefit oligarch billionaires. The blockbuster deal will vastly reshape Hollywood with Paramount now controlling two of its biggest studios, two major subscription streaming services, and dozens of TV channels ranging from CBS to HBO. Joining me is Bloomberg Intelligence, Senior Litigation Analyst, Jennifer Rhee. Jen, what is Paramount giving up to get this settlement? Very little. Really, at the end of the day, I think this is a win for Paramount and a surprising settlement, because we all expected something structural, a structural aspect. And that's where I see it as a win for Paramount, because there's nothing structural in it. By that, I mean, June, that they have to sell something, rather than just making a bunch of promises about how they're going to behave once they're merged. Now, there are some divestiture commitments in here, but only if the merged company is in

4:12breach of certain terms of which I doubt they'd be in breach up, because it's actually pretty easy agreement with which they can abide. And I understand that a lot of these terms, Paramount had been offering for months, including releasing 30 films a year in theaters. Yes, you know, they had. And I think in some ways, I believe some of these commitments really aren't a big change from the way they've just always done business. You know, for instance, people are talking about this commitment to release 30 movies to theaters every year. Now, that's release, not make. So it doesn't necessarily have to be a movie that they produce, but they only have to either produce or co-produce 50%. So that's the first thing. And it's really not that different from what they're already each individually doing. So this isn't asking for much from Paramount. And it seemed like California and the states were holding all the cards. Paramount was set to face late fees of $7 million a day if it didn't close the deal by the end

5:14of the month and $7 billion if the deal fell apart. The state's beat Paramount in court, winning a court ordered pause on the merger, and the company agreed to pause the merger until as late as next June. It seemed like they had an edge in the negotiations at this point. Absolutely. It was a very odd situation because I think the states very much had leverage, not because their case against the merger was so strong because honestly it wasn't that strong, but because time, time and the financial aspects were on their side. And I really think that they could have waited this out. It would have put more pressure on Paramount. Maybe they might have gotten better terms, but then Paramount knowing I believe that it didn't have the leverage it needed for a settlement negotiation to come out favorably, threatened to leave California. And I think that's what did it because that would have been devastating on the state and had an impact on the state's economy as well as so many employees and people who live there. And I think it was that threat that the Attorney General

6:14of California called Blackmail. I think if it is just trying to do what they can to get leverage, that did give them the leverage to get to this settlement and to get to it when they did, which was mid-September. And I kind of thought late September would be more likely. Apparently pressure was on the Attorney General Bond from the governor, LA's mayor. I mean, would Paramount really have left California in the end? It really would have been a major disruption to their business and actually quite an endeavor and very expensive for them. And that was the big question. You know, it was funny. I had so many clients saying, you know, are they going to do this or not? Is this a real threat or not? And I'd say, look, I'm not in their head. I can't say what the company would or wouldn't do. But it was enough of a threat. There was enough of a concern that it did what they wanted it to do, which was to get a settlement out of the states and a settlement that's widely favorable in my view to Paramount. So California had its reasons for this. But the other states, and there were several states that were holding out, including New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Minnesota.

7:17According to Bloomberg sources, they decided that the expense of litigating without California would be too much. So litigation would be too much for those states. You know, I have to say that if you look at the cases where states have been the plaintiffs and alone without the federal government or without private parties, it tends to be pretty big groups of states. You have 12, you have 14. I think it was something like 14 when the state sued to block team mobile and sprint. You had a pretty big group of states going after next star and tag nut and also a big group of states going after live nation. They have very small group thing. You know, they one or two antitrust attorneys. They don't have the money. They don't have the physical resources. And then they're going up against major heavy hitter lawyers on the other side and unlimited resources. Essentially, they really do need and California was leading. So you have to remember that this litigation now has been going for quite some time. California's been in the lead. It is a little bit difficult for another state to take over that role and jump in. So I do think that once California and you know, other states aside from New York had decided

8:22that they were going to settle, the other states really had to as did the writer's guild of America, which was also a plaintiff. Yeah, the writer's guild apparently was blindsided. Right. I haven't seen as much news, but the settlement they reached is even weaker. And I think they must have been blindsided because they're concerned about harm or to writer's markets, writers of movies, writers of television shows, writers that are signed on contract with studios. And instead, what they agreed to was some guarantee of employment for CBS News Bureau, which is different from the areas which they said would be harmed. So now let's talk about that. You have now paramount is going to control both CBS news. And we've seen what's happened at CBS News. So they'll control CBS and CNN. Right. And apparently the Connecticut Attorney General was really pushing for a divestiture of those networks. But Ellison would not agree to that. So now there's going to be an independent editorial oversight board. What does that mean? Well, you know, let's just say that

9:23it's really something that's quite unenforceable. So it's a board made up of five people. They have to be journalists, retired or currently acting journalists. And there, you know, a bunch of qualifications written into the settlement as to what that means to be an experienced journalist. And no more than two can be from the same political party. But here's the kicker. They will be appointed by paramount. So paramount will be picking these five people, even though no more than two can be from one political party. So they're picking the editorial board that's supposed to oversee their own business, which that seems to me a little bit ridiculous if you really wanted this neutral editorial board. But the board is intended to establish guiding editorial principles. And those principles are supposed to be based on CBS news and CNN's standards and practices now before they close. So whatever their practicing policies are now, they're supposed to stick to those and this board is supposed to make sure that they stick to those. And then they're going to resolve disputes if they arise between CBS news or CNN and the management of the combined company.

10:27So I mean, under that could paramount put Barry Weiss in charge of CNN? Oh, I do think so. Yes. I don't see why not. There's nothing in this that would prevent that as far as I've seen. And so let's say you see that there's pressure on CNN to take a conservative turn to let's say have more stories and favor of the administration. What can be done anything? Well, the first thing that would happen is if there was a dispute, if the journalists object to this, then this dispute between those journalists and the paramount management would be resolved by this editorial independence board. Now, there's another layer that oversees this entire agreement. There's a monitor. There will be an internal monitor and then also an outside monitor chosen by the states and paramount together. And then that monitor could step in. But the thing is June, if there's some problem, if whatever's happening is considered a breach, really the only way to fix it, the only way to make the company act differently would be then to go back to court. You'd need the states, you'd need the attorney generals to agree that they'd have to bring this up back in court

11:32in front of the judge that was overseeing this litigation to start. And you know, that's a lot. And I'm not so sure I see something like that happening. You said before the state's case wasn't necessarily great. But yeah, this one company controlling two of Hollywood's biggest studios, two major subscriptions, streaming services, and dozens of TV channels, ranging from CBS to HBO. Right. Why isn't that a good case for antitrust? Because at the end of the day, antitrust cases in court, to have a strong case in court, it's going to come down to the way markets are defined and market shares. It's really mathematical at the end of the day. You look at the market, you look at the market shares in that market and there's a computation you can do to determine how concentrated that market is and the guidelines that are used by the Department of Justice, Federal Trade Commission, and generally used by the judges, even though they're not binding, give you a number. And they say, well, if it's over that number, you have a presumption of harm. If it's under that number, you really don't, you're probably not going to win. To get over that number, the states define the markets in a

12:33very specific way that could be rebutted. And they used market share numbers from a very specific time period. And if you change that time period, those market shares change quite a bit. And using what they used, which Paramount would call Jerry Manderd, I would call just good advocacy, by using those numbers, they actually barely hit those thresholds of harm. Right. So this was their problem. And if Paramount could have come into court and sort of poked holes in the way they defined the market or poked holes in that time period they used for shares, it would have been problematic. And one other really big thing is that in merger cases, where you have the threat of new entry, the threat of new entry can be a really good defense. Okay. These may be our shares today, but we have all these other new entrants nipping at our heels. And we can't really do anything to let them take our share. And you do have new studios. There's one, an independent called A24. You have Apple making movies. You have the combined Amazon MGM making some new movies. So they had a decent argument that we have some new entry. So court, you really shouldn't even pay

13:35much attention to these static market shares because they're not going to be the picture in a year from now or two years from now as these other studios continue to make movies. And so I think that what the states had was a good enough case for that complaint and a good enough case to get their temporary restraining order, but I view it as fragile. That's how I like to think about kind of easy to poke holes in once Paramount got into court. There was a lot of pressure to let this deal go through on the federal level. I mean, Ellison, father and son, very close to Trump. There was lobbying there. And we saw what happened with the live nation anti-trust case where it fell apart when trial had already started because of a deal made in DC. So in a different administration, do you think that the feds would have challenged this? Yes. Yes. I heard rumors. I don't know if they're true or not. Reports that there were DOJ staffers. And you know, the staffers tend to be there a long time. They're not necessarily politically, you know, they're neutral politically that the staffers were opposed to this. And it was the decision was made over their head to settle.

14:39I do think in a different and particularly if it had been the previous Biden administration that there probably would have been either, you know, a challenge that was settled with a stronger settlement than this. I think they would have demanded some divestiture, particularly of some cable channels, or they would have actually gone to court to try to block it. They're paying so much. There's investments from outside groups. Is this deal going to be profitable for them? Well, that's the big question now. And I think you left a talk to my colleague, the rank and Nathan about that, who's an expert in these companies and these industries. I will say this that those assets, the time Warner assets have a checkered history in terms of their acquisition and success. Those assets, the Warner brothers assets have been bought and sold numerous times and the buyers have not had success. And the craziest thing is that this is such a full circle case June because the last time those assets were sold was when AT&T acquired time Warner and the Department of Justice went to court to try to challenge that and the Assistant Attorney General in charge of anti-trust that

15:41challenged the deal was Macindale Raheem, who is now the General Counsel at Paramount that guided this through. And at the time he went to court against AT&T and time Warner because he insisted that they divest CNN and they said no, we won't do that. And AT&T won in court. Now, sadly for them, they did not make a success of it with these assets. As has been the history, I'll sort of think of them as cursed. But it's interesting to me that he's come back around to be involved again in the control of CNN. So tell me this, we've talked about this before, but how is the Trump administration in the anti-trust area? Are they being any more aggressive in the last time we, I doesn't seem like no. The answer would be no. And I can give you some data that backs that up so far in 2026 as we come into the fourth quarter. There has been not one single challenge without a simultaneous settlement to a deal by the Department of Justice. I don't even know if there's been one by the FTC. Trump's FTC has challenged a few small healthcare deals and one deal related to

16:43do-it-yourself adhesive for construction. Gorilla glue. Oh, really, right. Okay, now I get it. Yes, you haven't at home. Right. So there have been very few challenges across the board. Since the Trump administration enforcers took over by both the FTC and DOJ, but really what's glaring is this year nothing at all by the Department of Justice. So when you look at it that way, it's a very business-friendly enforcement era that we're in on the M&A side right now. And, you know, they're beginning also to settle some of the monopolization suits as well. That were existing that they inherited when they took over. And I think we'll probably see a settlement of a suit that's been running for a few years now against Apple. We may see a settlement of an FTC suit against Amazon. I'm just guessing. I'm not talking in the near term, but in the longer term, the ones that are left over that were started by the Biden administration. So the effort goes into settlements instead of bringing new cases. Thanks so much, Jen. It's great to have you on again. That's Bloomberg Intelligence Senior Litigation Analyst,

17:45Jennifer Rhee. Some people treat Chachy-P-T like some kind of smart search engine. And some use it to get work done. Chachy-P-T work is a new way of working in Chachy-P-T that can take action across your apps and files, stay with a project for hours if needed, and turn a goal into finished work. It's designed to help you move from a chaotic starting point to a reviewable first version. So all the source materials, briefs, and scattered information that you have to grind through to turn into something useful can just become something useful. Put Chachy-P-T to work on your most ambitious ideas and projects. Get started at chachy-P-T dot com by selecting Work Mode, available on plus and pro plans. You already know how AI is changing how everyday work gets done, how much ground you can cover, and how fast a team can scale. To stay ahead, you need the tools to give you a competitive advantage, built for this new era. Welcome to a GENTIG Revenue. Adio is the CRM for this world. It meets you where you work.

18:46Compounds every customer signal into context, then acts on it across your pipeline to let you move it on match speed and scale, with agents and animations for every job in revenue. Adio orchestrates your work around the clock, built to handle the scale of your workloads, extensible with API, and MCP, and with the infrastructure to keep up with your most ambitious agents. Loved by high growth startups like Granola, Modo, and Edget, Adio runs the work behind every win. That's Adio, the agent at CRM, the intelligent system that never sleeps. Fix up leads at 2am, catches renewals before they slip, hands you the answer before you ask. Try Adio free at adio.com slash ihardt. That's adio.com slash ihardt. Early morning on a Manhattan sidewalk, a shooting caught on surveillance video. It was an assassination style killing, and everybody saw it. Now, as Luigi Mangioñe prepares to stand trial for the murder of United Health Care CEO Brian Thompson,

19:48which he denies, a new podcast series from ABC Audio in 2020 goes inside this captivating case. I'm ABC News legal analyst Brian Buckmeyer. Listen to burden of proof Luigi Mangioñe, wherever you get your podcasts. Turning to environmental law news, the Trump administration has announced rule changes that will effectively erase efforts undertaken by President Barack Obama and Joe Biden to address climate change. EPA administrator Lee Zeldin announced the agency is repealing rules that limit planet warming greenhouse gas emissions from coal and gas fired power plants. One of its most aggressive moves so far to unwind US environmental regulations. It means providing companies that choose to invest in America with the certainty that their work will pay off and their money will get tied up in unnecessary burdens from regulatory battles.

20:49The EPA says removing the rule will save power plants more than $300 billion in costs. It also estimates it will result in an additional 533 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions by 2040. This follows the agency's axing in February similar EPA climate standards for cars and trucks. Another major source of emissions and the reversal of the legal underpinning for those rules known as the endangerment finding. Joining me is environmental law expert Pat Peranto, a professor at the Vermont Law and Graduate School. Pat, where do we stand with the EPA repealing these rules? So this is the second shoot a drop following EPA's repeal of the endangerment finding, which of course as we've talked undergirds all of the regulation of greenhouse gas emissions from every source, you know, mobile sources, cars and trucks, but also stationary sources,

21:54power plants, etc. So they've already repealed the tailpipe emission standards for cars and trucks. And now they've repealed the greenhouse gas controls for power plants. And in addition to repealing the Biden administration rules for power plants, they've also initiated another rulemaking to completely eradicate greenhouse gas emissions from the Clean Air Act. So this is a two-step kind of process that they're engaged in, but all of it is premised on their argument that in fact EPA lacks authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Air Act. So, you know, that's what they're going for. What they want is a case to get back to the US Supreme Court and have the court review its ruling in the landmark Massachusetts versus EPA case,

22:54and either overturn it completely or at least revise it to the point where it agrees with EPA now that EPA doesn't have the authority to regulate these emissions. So that's kind of where we are. So if EPA doesn't have the authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, then which agency has the authority? Well, no federal agency would. The question would be, does that open the door to state regulation? And the answer would be yes, it would. I mean, to the extent that some states, like California, of course, and others, might be willing to step in and try to fill the gap, but that's not the kind of program that would be successful. You don't want to leave it up to individual states to decide whether they're going to regulate and if so, to what extent they're going to regulate. That will defeat a coordinated, comprehensive, intelligent way of transitioning away from fossil fuels to cleaner sources of energy, which is what we need.

23:58So the point of this rule revocation is to save coal and natural gas plants? Yeah, it's primarily coal. Gas plants don't have as much trouble meeting emission standards, frankly. The state-of-the-art gas plants, you know, they could definitely benefit from some carbon capture and sequestration, but it's really the coal plants that the Trump administration is trying to salvage. And of course, they they ordered through the Department of Energy, the Trump administration, ordered old power plants in Michigan to keep operating, even though the utilities wanted to shut them down, because they're not, you know, not cost-effective, right? So the first part of what EPA has done is to say we don't believe that CCS, carbon capture and storage, is a viable technology. Now, that's of course contradicted by the industry itself, which has been using CCS

25:00for decades. They use it to capture the carbon so that they can inject it into oil and gas formations to recover what they call secondary recovery of oil and gas. So we know that CCS works, there is a question about whether it's, quote, ready for prime time, the Biden administration, you know, required 90% capture of carbon emissions from coal plants, but they gave the Biden administration, gave the utilities until 2032 to figure out how to do that. So, I mean, there is a legitimate question under the terms of the Clean Air Act, which requires adequate demonstration of control technologies. There is a question about whether 90% capture and storage is commercially feasible, but you know, if it isn't 90%, is it 50% because even that would be useful, right? So

26:04the legal question on the immediate repeal of the greenhouse gas regulations of power plants is going to turn on a technical determination by the courts. Is CCS really a viable, achievable technology right now? Is the EPA actually arguing that greenhouse gases from power plants don't endanger human health or the environment? Yeah, they've already said that with regard to emissions from cars and trucks. So there's a, you know, another technical question about whether that finding applies also to stationary sources like power plants, but the bottom line is the Trump administration and Zeldin have already determined that the endangerment finding was wrong, and that the Supreme Court was wrong in Massachusetts versus EPA to say that greenhouse gases are air pollutants subject to control under the Clean Air Act. So this is just a follow-through on that

27:05earlier determination that Zeldin has made, but it's much more specific now, and it's also going to affect, you know, the oral argument in front of the Supreme Court in the Sun Court case. Coming up next, what happens when this gets to the Supreme Court? I'm June Grasso and you're listening to Bloomberg. Some people treat Chachy-P-T like some kind of smart search engine, and some use it to get work done. Chachy-P-T work is a new way of working in Chachy-P-T that can take action across your apps and files, stay with a project for hours if needed, and turn a goal into finished work. It's designed to help you move from a chaotic starting point to a reviewable first version. So all the source materials, briefs, and scattered information that you have to grind through to turn into something useful can just become something useful. Put Chachy-P-T to work on your most ambitious ideas and projects. Get started at Chachy-P-T dot com by selecting Work Mode, available on plus and pro plans. You already know how AI is changing how every day work gets done,

28:11how much ground you can cover, and how fast a team can scale. To stay ahead, you need the tools that give you a competitive advantage built for this new era. Welcome to a GenteG revenue. Adio is the CRM for this world. It meets you where you work, compounds every customer signal into context, then acts on it across your pipeline to let you move it on match speed and scale. With agents and animations for every job in revenue, Adio orchestrates your work around the clock, built to handle the scale of your workloads, extensible with API, and MCP, and with the infrastructure to keep up with your most ambitious agents. Loved by high growth startups like Granola, MOTO, and EDGT, Adio runs the work behind every win. That's Adio, the agent at CRM, the intelligent system that never sleeps, picks up leads at 2 a.m. catches renewals before they slip, hands you the answer before you ask. Try Adio free at adio dot com slash ihard. That's adio dot com slash ihard. Early morning on a Manhattan sidewalk, a shooting caught on surveillance video.

29:16It was an assassination style killing, and everybody saw it. Now, as Luigi Mangioni prepares to stand trial for the murder of United Health Care CEO Brian Thompson, which he denies, a new podcast series from ABC Adio in 2020 goes inside this captivating case. I'm ABC News legal analyst Brian Buckmeyer. Listen to burden of proof Luigi Mangioni, wherever you get your podcasts. The Trump administration is rescinding climate controls on coal and gas fired power plants. It's one of its most aggressive moves so far to unwind US environmental regulations. The EPA is ending a Biden era mandate requiring existing and future fossil fuel fired power plants to dramatically curb their emissions in the coming decades through the use of specific technologies including carbon capture and storage. I've been talking to environmental law professor Pat Peranto

30:20of their amount law and graduate school. Pat, we were talking about how the EPA is now arguing that greenhouse gases from power plants don't endanger human health or the environment. Do they have any scientific backing for that? Isn't all the evidence against that position? Oh, it certainly is against it. And in fact, to the point where Zeldin's original instinct or proposal was that the endangerment finding was wrong on the science. Well, that fell apart. And the National Academy of Sciences issued in a very comprehensive detail and pointed analysis of why that kind of thinking was completely nuts, not their words. So no, there's no possible scientific argument to say that greenhouse gases don't endanger public health and welfare. They clearly do. And the science is overwhelming on that. So, you know, Zeldin and Trump are now trying

31:22to argue, you know, maybe these things are a danger, but we don't have the authority to do anything about it. That's what they're arguing now. Blue states and environmental groups are going to sue over this. I mean, what would the basis of their suits be? They're going to argue that, again, you know, the narrow focus right now is on carbon capture and storage, okay? So they're going to argue that that technology is proven, is available, is being used throughout the world, by the way, not just in the United States. There have been several major power plants, one in Texas, that were demonstrating that you could in fact capture and store carbon emissions. Again, the legal question is going to be, yeah, but at what level of carbon capture is commercially available, is adequately demonstrated right now? That's the question for the DC circuit. The DC circuit is not going to overturn Massachusetts versus EPA. It's not going to agree with EPA now that it lacks authority to regulate.

32:30The Supreme Court has said it does and the DC circuit can't second-guess that. So the only hope that the Trump administration has for these moves they're making is to get the case to the US Supreme Court and get a different decision from the court. And they're fighting the clock because, getting a case all the way to the Supreme Court takes a long time and they may run out of time. That's kind of what the challengers to these moves that EPA is making are counting on. That they can slow walk the litigation, drag it out, stretch it out, and get to a point where a new administration, fingers crossed, comes in and undoes what Zeldin has done. Let's just say that this rule went through and their theories here. Then that would hamper future administrations from regulators. Yes, that's their goal. Yes, tie the hands of future administrations by having the Supreme Court say, yeah, we agree now that you don't have authority.

33:32I've been reading all these scary numbers about how the Trump administration's rollbacks of federal greenhouse gas rules have altered this country's emissions curve. The EPA itself estimated that the power plant repeal will result in an additional 553 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions by 2040. Yeah, I mean, if you just look at power plant emissions, they would rank number five in the world just behind China. That is one of the arguments I should mention that Zeldin is also making that, well, controlling these emissions wouldn't make any meaningful impact on climate change because of the global emissions. That's just not true. Isn't the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States reason enough to regulate them? I mean, you know, their logic is unless you can regulate emissions to the point

34:38where you eliminate them, they're not meaningful, but that's not the law. That's never been the law. And the US reversal on carbon cutting policy comes as China starts to move in the opposite direction and this whole campaign where Trump and Zeldin want to keep the coal plants going. Isn't that a losing battle because there are cheaper and cleaner sources of power? Yes, the market is trying to kill coal and Trump is trying to prop it up and keep it alive. It's a zombie technology, right? It's the dirtiest way of producing energy imaginable, right? Maybe we were stuck with it for a very long period of time, but we're not stuck with it anymore. The cheapest source of generating electricity in the world is solar by leaps and bounds and storage technology which is improved by leaps and bounds, right? So there's no economic case for maintaining these old, some of these plants, these coal plants are 50 years old for crying out

35:41loud. So there's no economic case for keeping them going. The smartest thing utilities can do is get rid of them, close them as fast as possible and shift to these cleaner sources. In some cases that definitely is gas, right? But no, there's no there's no future for coal. And going back to the Supreme Court, Pat, is it possible that they might rule for the Trump administration and reverse themselves, change? That risk isn't there. Yeah, I mean, I can't say that's a zero possibility. So, you know, it's certainly on questions like, is a technology suitable for imposing the cost? Because, you know, these technologies do cost a lot of money. They're not the best way to achieve the goal of reducing emissions and eliminating emissions. But here's another point that EPA is going to run into in the litigation. And that is they've changed the rules for doing cost benefit analysis for these rules. They will no longer, this is amazing.

36:47They will no longer consider the public health benefits of regulating these emissions, which is just insane, frankly. And no court is going to accept that. You can't just look at the cost to industry of compliance without looking to the benefits of the public of reducing these emissions. And yet, that's what Zeldin is doing. And the reason for that is because the public health benefits are overwhelming in favor of regulating. When you regulate the carbon emissions, you're also regulating a lot of other emissions that are coming out of the plant. Things like mercury, things like carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide. So, you know, there's going to be litigation over whether EPA has done a proper cost benefit analysis under the law. Has the Trump administration, has the EPA succeeded in basically erasing the most consequential climate policies of Biden and Obama?

37:54Well, I guess you'd have to say based on what they've done so far. Yes. I mean, the challenge to the repeal of the endangerment finding and the repeal of the tailpipe emission standards, which by the way are the largest emissions, right, from all the vehicles. They're even larger than the coal plant emissions. So, the point is that the groups did not move to stay the impact of that recession of the endangerment finding and the repeal of the tailpipe standards. So, as of right now, we have no standards for greenhouse gas emissions at all, right? So, in that sense, for the moment, the Trump administration has succeeded in eliminating regulation. And tell us about the case coming up this Supreme Court, the first case of the new term. This also relates to the argument in what's called the Suncor versus Boulder County commissioners case that the Supreme Court will hear on October 5th, the first case on their docket.

38:58And that case, you know, the issue is whether federal law pre-empts Boulder and other states and cities from suing the oil companies for the damage that climate change is causing and the costs of adapting to it. And their argument is the oil companies have deceived the public about the dangers of climate change and their products. And so, they're arguing you should be held accountable for misleading us and making the problem worse, not giving us time to adapt, plan for adaptation, et cetera. And the oil companies have got the Supreme Court to agree to review whether all of those claims are preempted by federal law. But here's the catch. And here's how it relates to what Zellin has just done with power plant emissions. Now that EPA has said we have no authority to regulate emissions under the Clean Air Act,

40:02how can you then say that the Clean Air Act pre-empts the states from pursuing these remedies in state court? Well, you can't. It's logically inconsistent to say on the one hand, the Clean Air Act pre-empts these cases, but on the other hand, the Clean Air Act doesn't even regulate these emissions, right? So, that's going to be, I think, a focal point of the argument, at least one of many, probably focal points, in the argument on October 5th. I'm actually looking forward to the start of the new term. Thanks so much, Pat. That's Professor Pat Peranto of the Vermont Law and Graduate School. And that's it for this edition of the Bloomberg Law Show. Remember you can always get the latest legal news on our Bloomberg Law Podcast. You can find them on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and at www.bloomberg.com slash podcast slash law. And remember to tune into the Bloomberg Law Show every weeknight at 10 p.m. Wall Street Time. I'm June Grasso, and you're listening to Bloomberg.

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