Two distinguished climate scientists have filed with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) a 45-page comment on the proposed regulation the EPA announced on May 11, 2023, setting emission standards that would require nearly all of coal- and gas-powered plants in the U.S.to capture almost all—90 percent—of their carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions by 2038 or shut down.

In their comment, William Happer, professor of physics, emeritus, Princeton University, and Richard Lindzen, professor of Earth, atmospheric and planetary sciences, emeritus, make both a legal and a scientific case that the EPA's proposed new rule is based on ideologically driven polices with no basis in legitimate climate science. In a document that appears to be the prelude to filing a lawsuit to block the EPA from implementing the proposed regulation, Happer and Lindzen lay out a science-based case arguing that the new EPA rules designed to limit the use of hydrocarbon fuels in the nation's power plants could end up reducing the world's food supply so dramatically that billions of people worldwide would be at risk of death by starvation.

Happer and Lindzen begin their comment by citing Supreme Court precedent that suggests their comment could easily be the basis for a legal challenge in federal court to block the EPA from implementing the proposed new rule. Happer and Lindzen organized their comments around two specific cases.

First, in Daubert v. Merrell Pharmaceuticals, Inc., 509 U.S. 579, 593 (1993), the Supreme Court ruled that "'scientific knowledge'…must be derived by the scientific method." Second, in Motor Vehicle Manufacturers Ass'n of the United States, Inc. v. State Farm Mutual Automobile Ins. Co., 463 U.S. 29, 43 (1983), the Court held that an agency rule is "arbitrary and capricious if the agency…entirely failed to consider an important aspect of the problem" and "the relevant data."