For decades, fossil-fuel companies and their climate-change-denying allies obsessively tried to kill the federal government’s right to regulate greenhouse-gas emissions. Like Ahab, they may find that finally harpooning their white whale risks taking them down with it.

Last week, President Donald Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency retracted its 2009 finding that greenhouse gases are dangerous to human health. In the byzantine scaffolding of US regulatory law, this “endangerment finding” means the EPA must regulate those planet-heating gases under the 1963 Clean Air Act. By inviting EPA restrictions, the finding has been anathema to fossil-fuel companies and the handful of ideologues in the White House driving the effort to rescind it.

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But the status quo also protects fossil fuels in a way. States can’t sue or regulate us, the industry says, because the federal government already has that job, thanks to the endangerment finding. Do away with the finding, and you do away with that protection.

The timing couldn’t be more awkward for fossil fuels: In response to Trump’s crusade against federal climate action, state and local policymakers are increasingly taking action against the industry in court. One ideal scenario could be landing a huge settlement like the one they imposed on Big Tobacco in the 1990s.

Legal efforts to pry money from tobacco companies went nowhere for decades. But when the attorneys general in most states joined forces against it, the tobacco industry succumbed quickly. The legal fight against Big Oil is far more complex. But Trump’s........

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