The Court’s move to grant standing to fuel producers marks a turning point in how climate policy will be fought. No longer can sweeping regulations hide behind abstract benefits and diffuse harms; the justices signaled that when a rule is designed to erase an industry, the targets get a day in court. That means California’s 2035 electric vehicle mandate is no longer a political symbol—it is a legal defendant, forced to justify every premise on which it stands.

What happens next reaches far beyond one state’s climate agenda. If California’s authority to steer national markets through its size and strictness is cut back, other states lose their most powerful template. Regulators will have to draft rules that survive not just protests but probing judges. The future of decarbonization may still arrive—but only after it passes through a courtroom first.