Democrats must be really desperate to sell the impact of the Inflation Reduction Act as a huge win for environmentalists. Otherwise, why would the New York Times make things up to spin the legislation as doing things it does not do?
“When the Supreme Court restricted the ability of the Environmental Protection Agency to fight climate change this year,” the New York Times’s Lisa Friedman writes, “the reason it gave was that Congress had never granted the agency the broad authority to shift America away from burning fossil fuels. Now it has.”
“Throughout the landmark climate law, passed this month, is language written specifically to address the Supreme Court’s justification for reining in the E.P.A., a ruling that was one of the court’s most consequential of the term,” Friedman says. “The new law amends the Clean Air Act, the country’s bedrock air-quality legislation, to define the carbon dioxide produced by the burning of fossil fuels as an ‘air pollutant.’”
This is an odd claim since it has been settled law for more than 15 years that the Clean Air Act already does define carbon dioxide as an air pollutant. It even came up in oral argument. Friedman seems not to know this or much else about the substance of this ruling.
Early on in the proceedings, Justice Sonia Sotomayor specifically asked West Virginia Solicitor General Lindsay See: “Massachusetts v. EPA said that carbon dioxide is a pollutant under the Clean Air Act. So that’s clear, right?”
See replied, “We’re not challenging that, correct.”
Contrary to the New York Times’s disinformation, the issue at question in West Virginia v. EPA was not whether carbon dioxide is a pollutant. It was whether or not the Clean Air Act, passed in 1970, gave the EPA the legal authority to create the carbon cap-and-trade plan that Congress specifically rejected in 2010. The court very sensibly ruled that it did not.
One can question whether or not Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) got the best deal for his state when he signed off on the Inflation Reduction Act. But he definitely did not sign off on giving the Biden administration the power to completely shut down West Virginia’s coal industry, which is exactly what the original cap-and-trade plan by President Barack Obama’s EPA was designed to do.
