The Supreme Court's EPA Ruling: A Loss of Authority for Federal Agencies or a Lesson for Conservatives in 'Be Careful What You Wish For'? - Inside Climate News

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

52% : But it could take many more lawsuits -- and possibly, years -- to see whether the Environmental Protection Agency can find some leeway to regulate greenhouse gases from power plants.
52% : Some analysts said the West Virginia v. EPA could prove to be just as monumental, turning the clock back to the pre-New Deal era in charting a smaller role for federal agencies.
51% : In conservative legal circles, the idea of applying this reasoning more broadly gained currency as a way to rein in federal regulation.
48% : The court did not reverse -- or even revisit -- its 2007 decision that EPA has the authority to regulate greenhouse gases as pollutants under the Clean Air Act.
47% : But 20 states, led by fossil fuel-dependent West Virginia and North Dakota and joined by the coal mining industry, asked the court to restrict EPA authority, even before the Biden administration had a chance to write its own greenhouse gas rules.
47% : "This is a tremendously urgent problem, and this is a significant authority that EPA still has," he said.
46% : "But it is not plausible that Congress gave EPA the authority to adopt on its own such a regulatory scheme" under the section of the Clean Air Act that governs stationary sources of air pollution.
46% : In fact, West Virginia's attorney general made clear from the start he was not seeking to overturn the landmark decision, known as Massachusetts v. EPA.
46% : The options that are left for EPA, ironically, could be more restrictive and more expensive for the power sector than the cap-and-trade approach that the Supreme Court said was clearly outside the agency's authority.
44% : Instead, the court reads the law as saying EPA can only impose limitations on emissions within the fenceline of each individual power station.
43% : The decision in West Virginia v. EPA could result in more expensive and restrictive carbon regulation -- or the erosion of agencies' ability to address society's most pressing needs.
43% : With its authority now limited by the court's ruling Thursday in West Virginia v. EPA, the agency could write new carbon regulations requiring technologies like carbon capture that would be far more expensive than the approach the court rejected.
43% : "Capping carbon dioxide emissions at a level that will force a nationwide transition away from the use of coal to generate electricity may be a sensible 'solution to the crisis of the day,'" Roberts wrote.
40% : But the court's decision clearly has limited what EPA can do under the Clean Air Act without further, explicit instruction from Congress -- the kind of lawmaking on climate change that Congress has shown itself to be incapable of over three decades.
40% : But looming in the future, whatever approach EPA decides to take, is more litigation from the fossil fuel industry and its allies.
38% :Kagan painted a much different picture of the history of regulation, one in which Congress set out broad principles that are applied by appointees of the president in the executive branch agencies to address changing circumstances and new problems.
28% : Roberts stopped short of the sweeping language many environmentalists feared, for example, by saying EPA had no power to act on climate change; instead, he focused on limiting EPA's authority under one section of the Clean Air Act.

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