A coal-fired power plant in Thompsons, Texas. The Clean Air Act orders the EPA to regulate pollutants that “endanger human health.” Credit … Tamir Kalifa for The New York Times
The Clean Air Act, which some legal experts call the most powerful environmental law in the world, was enacted in 1970, with the birth of the environmental movement.
Since then, it has been the source of numerous historical regulations on air pollution, such as soot, smog, mercury, and toxic chemicals that cause acid rain.
The case the Supreme Court ruled Thursday, West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency, is part of a broader legal fight over whether and to what extent the Clean Air Act can be used. to combat climate change. The result could shake President Biden’s plans to reduce U.S. pollution from global warming.
The law was intended to combat rising air pollution rates in U.S. cities, which were directly related to harmful effects on human health.
He directed the then newly created Environmental Protection Agency to draft and periodically update national rules and regulations to curb various pollutants that were already known to endanger human health. These include carbon monoxide, lead, tropophonic ozone, nitrogen dioxide, particulate matter, and sulfur dioxide.
A Democratic-controlled Congress, however, devised the act with the intent of giving the EPA great flexibility in its interpretation of the law, anticipating that it could be deployed to address environmental hazards that lawmakers had not yet conceived. .
And this is what happened when fear began to rise over global warming, which is caused by rising emissions of carbon dioxide, a gas that traps heat that was already ubiquitous in the Earth’s atmosphere. , but which is also produced by the burning of fossil fuels.
The Clean Air Act does not explicitly order the EPA to regulate carbon dioxide, but more broadly calls on the agency to regulate pollutants that “endanger human health.” In 2007, the Supreme Court ordered the EPA to determine whether carbon dioxide fit that description, and in 2009, the agency concluded that it did.
This finding meant that carbon dioxide could be legally defined as a pollutant and led to the Clean Air Act’s requirement that the EPA regulate its emissions, which are produced primarily by gasoline vehicles and coal-fired power plants. gas.
President Barack Obama, after unsuccessfully trying to enact a climate change law through Congress, resorted to the Clean Air Act, using it to publish major regulations on vehicle and power plant pollution. The controversial rules were intended to transform the nation’s economy, moving Americans from gasoline cars to electric vehicles and from coal and gas power plants to wind and solar electricity.
President Donald J. Trump repealed these measures, but Biden wants to restore and expand them.
A number of recent legal cases are aimed at drastically limiting the EPA’s authority to use the Clean Air Act to enact such rules. While these cases, for now, would not prevent the EPA from regulating carbon dioxide, they could drastically restrict the extent to which the agency could come to use that authority.
Instead of radical rules that would essentially put an end to the use of coal-fired power plants and gasoline cars, the administration could use the law to justify modest regulations that would slightly reduce pollution but not force the economic transformation that scientists say it is necessary. to fight climate change.
Therefore, Congress should pass a new law.