You'd be forgiven for thinking that the Obama administration's Clean Power Plan was already dead. After all, President Trump thinks that the problem it was intended to address—climate change—is a hoax, and he signed an executive order directing the Environmental Protection Agency to kill the plan back in March.

But the situation is substantially more complicated than that, as the Clean Power Plan had already been through a formal rulemaking process and was hung up in the courts. To get rid of it, the EPA would need to repeat the rulemaking process, something that could take years. So far, there has been no sign of this happening. Today, though, Reuters is reporting that that's about to change—but only because the judge hearing the challenges to the Clean Power Plan is forcing the agency to act.

The Clean Power Plan was the EPA's policy response to its own finding that greenhouse gas emissions posed a danger to the public (formally, this is called an endangerment finding). It had gone through the full federal rulemaking process, with a proposed plan, public feedback, a revised plan, and formal publishing in the Federal Register. A number of states, however, challenged the rule, leaving it in limbo while the court system examined its legal foundation.

This is where things stood when Trump was sworn in. The new EPA administration asked the courts not to act while it decided on a course of action, and the court set a deadline for the EPA to tell it what was happening. That deadline happens to be this Friday, October 6. In the meantime, the EPA had still not implemented President Trump's executive order to rescind the Clean Power Plan.

With the court deadline hanging over it, however, Reuters obtained a document indicating that the EPA will announce its intention to rescind the rule this week. Doing so will involve repeating the entire rulemaking process, including public input and revisions in response to that—and inevitably a court challenge.

This process will not affect the endangerment finding on greenhouse gases, a finding that compels the EPA to regulate them. This will require a replacement for the Clean Power Plan. Technically, the EPA could wait until the current rule is terminated before starting that process, a course that would be effective if the administration's goal was merely intending to stall until after the next presidential election. But Reuters indicates that the EPA will also solicit input regarding its legally required replacement rule, suggesting that it will start the process of greenhouse gas regulation before it is absolutely required to.

Given EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt's history and the fact that the Department of Energy is enthusiastic about subsidizing coal use, however, it's doubtful that any meaningful regulation will result.