The Environmental Protection Agency said Monday that state and industry challenges to its far-reaching climate rule are “hyperbolic” at best, while using Supreme Court precedent to cobble together a defense against claims of overreaching federal authority.
“Petitioners’ core legal arguments largely rest on hyperbolic mischaracterizations of this rule as broadly regulating energy markets and generation,” EPA argued Monday in a brief sent to federal appeals court judges laying out its defense. “The rule will indirectly impact energy markets, but those impacts do not mean EPA has overstepped its authority,” the EPA said.
Thirty states and dozens of industry groups are suing the agency over its Clean Power Plan, a landmark regulation to cut greenhouse gas emissions from the utility sector that is the centerpiece of President Obama’s climate agenda. Many scientists say greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels are to blame for manmade climate change, causing catastrophic weather.
Those fighting the plan in the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals say the agency has no authority to devise and implement the plan, which oversteps its Clean Air Act authority and the Constitution. They also argue that the EPA is looking to take away states’ ability to enforce their own energy policies.
“This rule is an air-pollution rule specifically authorized by the Clean Air Act,” EPA argued. “It is not an energy rule. The rule limits emissions of an exceptionally important air pollutant that is emitted in huge quantities by power plants, but it does not regulate any other aspect of energy generation, distribution or sale.”
However, the EPA goes deeper than the Clean Air Act to defend itself. It uses key decisions by the Supreme Court from 2007 to 2011 as a key part of its defense. That may show that the agency is more worried about the Supreme Court than the appeals court, especially as Republicans look to block President Obama’s pick to replace the late Justice Antonin Scalia. If Obama gets his nominee confirmed, it could stack the court in the EPA’s favor. But if a Republican wins the Oval Office next year, it will likely present a problem for the agency’s climate rule.
In a 2011 ruling, the Supreme Court said the EPA had the ability to regulate carbon dioxide, a principal greenhouse gas, from power plants. The court reviewed the same authority in question in the appeals court case — section 111(d) of the Clean Air Act — and “concluded that the act provides a means for EPA to provide … limitations on power-plant CO2 emissions that would abate their contribution to climate change.”
The EPA added that the Clean Power Plan regulates “the very largest CO2 polluters in the nation, which have long been subject to extensive [Clean Air Act] regulation and which the Supreme Court recognized … were subject to Section 111(d),” its brief reads.
Even before the 2011 decision, the Supreme Court ruled in the landmark case Massachusetts v. EPA that the agency had the authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions as a pollutant under the Clean Air Act.
Critics of the EPA’s Clean Power Plan say Republicans haven’t done enough on Capitol Hill to undercut these arguments.
Oral arguments for the case are scheduled for June.
