The Supreme Court issued a ruling Thursday limiting the Environmental Protection Agency‘s authority to regulate power plants’ greenhouse gas emissions.
The 6-3 ruling delivers a blow to Democrats and environmental groups, who want the agency to crack down on emissions from power plants and other sources to mitigate climate change.
“The only question before the Court is more narrow: whether the ‘best system of emission reduction’ identified by EPA in the Clean Power Plan was within the authority granted to the Agency in Section 111(d) of the Clean Air Act,” the majority opinion read. “For the reasons given, the answer is no.”
Chief Justice John Roberts drafted the opinion and the court’s other five conservatives concurred, while its three liberals dissented.
The case in question, West Virginia v. EPA, stems from a petition from a mix of coal-producing states and coal companies that asked the high court justices to establish whether the Clean Air Act, one the nation’s most influential environmental laws, gives the agency broad authority to restrict power plant emissions.
Legal experts described the case as a “surprising” one for the court to take on, considering it dealt with the merits of the Trump-era Affordable Clean Energy rule and the Obama-era Clean Power Plan — neither of which President Joe Biden’s administration has any stated interest in defending.
The Biden administration had urged the court not to take the case in the first place, and Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar argued before the court that the justices should not rule because the administration was currently drafting its own rule, expected to be proposed this year.
The decision to limit the EPA’s authority to regulate power plant emissions constrains the agency’s ability to act on President Joe Biden’s agenda to slow climate change and get the ball rolling on his target of decarbonizing the power sector by 2035.
Justice Elena Kagan’s dissenting opinion said the court “strips the Environmental Protection Agency of the power Congress gave it to respond to ‘the most pressing environmental challenge of our time.'”
To what extent Congress gave the EPA the authority under the Clean Air Act to respond to climate change, as the Obama-era Clean Power Plan sought to do, was at the center of the case.
Roberts’s opinion invoked the “major questions doctrine” to hold that the Clean Air Act does not allow the EPA to impose carbon emission caps by mandating a shift in energy generation to cleaner resources.
The major questions doctrine is based on the idea that if Congress wants to offer an administrative agency the power to make “decisions of vast economic and political significance,” it must say so explicitly.
West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey, whose state was the case’s lead petitioner, cheered the decision.
“This is about maintaining the separation of powers, not climate change,” Morrisey said in a statement, celebrating that the court “returned the power to decide one of the major environmental issues of the day to the right place to decide it: the U.S. Congress.”
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) slammed what he called a “MAGA, regressive, extremist Supreme Court” that is “intent on setting America back decades.”
“The Republican-appointed majority of the MAGA Court is pushing the country back to a time when robber barons and corporate elites have complete power and average citizens have no say,” he said.
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