Republican efforts to stall President Joe Biden’s climate agenda are slowly beginning to take shape. In March, a coalition of 12 Republican state attorneys general filed a lawsuit challenging Biden’s executive order creating a working group to establish a metric for the “social cost of carbon.” Led by Missouri’s attorney general, Eric Schmitt, the lawsuit charges that the order is an “enormous expansion of federal regulatory power” and that such cost calculations are “inherently speculative, policy-laden, and indeterminate” and should instead be undertaken by Congress. 

In a similar vein, 21 Republican-controlled states, led by Texas and Montana, have sued the Biden administration over its decision to revoke a permit for the Keystone XL pipeline, calling it an unconstitutional overuse of executive power that would diminish the states’ economies and tax revenue. Both lawsuits are pending in federal courts. Separately, in response to Biden’s alleged “hostility to the energy industry,” Texas Governor Greg Abbott issued an executive order in January directing state agencies to “use all lawful powers” to challenge federal policies […]