Last week, one day after United Nations scientists issued another alarm about “irreversible” damage from the climate crisis, the increasingly unpopular Supreme Court began considering a landmark case that could permanently restrict the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)’s power to regulate greenhouse gas emissions — and many of the conservative justices are already signaling they agree with climate deniers’ arguments.

If the court does succumb to pressure from oil baron Charles Koch’s network and defangs the EPA, it would be a monumental defeat for climate activists and the future of the planet — but it would be a culminating victory for a legal network that has successfully shifted the judiciary to the hard right.

A newly updated academic preprint details the success of the so-called “law and economics” movement, which seeks to apply free-market principles to legal analysis, and how it used all-expenses-paid conferences bankrolled by corporate interests to indoctrinate a generation of judges — particularly in cases involving regulatory agencies, like the EPA.