Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) is taking credit for a Trump administration retreat on climate.
On Wednesday, Paxton’s office said it had blocked a Biden-era rule that would have directed states like Texas to reduce carbon pollution from their highways — one the Trump administration had declined to defend.
The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals on Wednesday granted the Trump administration’s request to throw out the case, which centered on a lawsuit Paxton brought against the rule in 2023, during President Biden’s term.
The Biden-era rule required states to set limits on the release of planet-heating gases from cars and trucks on interstates, and to gradually bring those numbers down.
After the court granted the Trump administration’s appeal, Paxton released a statement calling the ruling “a major win for Texas and America.”
“Working in partnership with President Trump, all of the Biden Administration’s unlawful regulations and blatant examples of federal overreach will be completely reversed,” Paxton added.
The Trump administration’s decision not to defend the rule is part of a broader policy shift also seen in the administration’s retreat from tighter tailpipe pollution standards passed by the Biden administration, which Trump and his allies repeatedly but inaccurately described as a “mandate” for electric vehicles.
In late January, the new administration announced it would rescind the rule — an echo of a 2018 move by the first Trump administration, which threw out Obama-era rules requiring states to track carbon pollution from their highways.
The U.S. transportation sector accounts for more than a quarter of the nation’s carbon pollution, making it the largest single source of any sector. If U.S. transportation were its own country, it would contribute to the heating of the planet more than the nation of Brazil.
Despite a push within the Biden administration to direct states to reduce pollution from their highways by enough to zero-out U.S. emissions by midcentury — a key administration target — the Department of Transportation ultimately loosened those regulations.
Instead, the Biden Department of Transportation rule gave states wide latitude in setting their own targets to reduce carbon pollution on federal highways.
The new performance measure gave states “a clear and consistent framework to track carbon pollution and the flexibility to set their own climate targets,” Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said at the time.
“The rule does not mandate how low targets must be,” the department wrote, “as long as the targets aim to reduce emissions over time.”
But the rule came amid a legal effort to push back on Biden administration moves on a variety of issues by conservative attorneys general like Paxton, who also sued to block federal attempts to limit pollution from gas-powered stoves and water heaters.
Paxton, a repeated litigant in such suits, in 2023 sued over the highway law in the Northern District of Texas.
He called the rule “another example of the Biden Administration sidestepping the Constitution to make sweeping, destructive policies without authorization.”
That district, like the appellate court that issued Wednesday’s ruling, is one of the most conservative in the country, with Reuters calling it “a favored destination for conservatives suing to block President Joe Biden’s agenda” on issues like climate and gun control.
In March 2024, the district court sided with Paxton and blocked the law. The federal government immediately appealed the decision — a process that only ended with the change in administration.
The following week, the chief district judge of that court said he would not follow recommendations from the U.S. Judicial Conference, which had sought to end the practice of “judge shopping” — or specific targeting of small, sympathetic courts by activists.
