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Judgment of the Supreme Court Thursday limiting The ability of the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate carbon emissions could have far-reaching consequences, according to legal experts, which could slow down President Biden’s ambitious plans to tackle climate change along with pollution. air and water.
He Decision 6 to 3 West Virginia vs. United States. EPAwhere the court ruled that the agency exceeded its authority with rules to reduce pollution from global warming from power plants, occurs when conservatives are waging a bigger legal battle to curb the federal government’s ability to address urgent environmental issues.
The outcome of these cases could determine whether the fight for U.S. environmental policy shifts decisively to states, where some will weaken protections as others continue to pursue strict limits on greenhouse gas emissions and other forms of pollution.
“West Virginia may end up being part of a pattern of cases in which this conservative Supreme Court generally reduces federal regulatory power to tackle new problems,” said William Buzbee, director of the University’s environmental law and policy program faculty. of Georgetown.
“Of course, states can go beyond what federal laws require,” he added. “Many states do it. But many states don’t.”
In its fall term beginning in October, the Supreme Court will accept a challenge to the Clean Water Act that could reduce the scope of the law in ways that companies and developers have long sought. Meanwhile, in lower courts, Republican attorneys general are fighting to prevent the Biden administration from taking climate change into account in important decisions and reducing climate pollutants from vehicle exhaust pipes.
In the majority opinion in West Virginia, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. he wrote that the EPA can only make radical changes to the nation’s electricity sector with the explicit approval of Congress. But lawmakers have not granted it to the agency, given partisan divisions on environmental issues in recent decades.
The EPA “must aim for a ‘clear Congressional authorization’ for the power it claims,” Roberts wrote in the majority opinion, which was joined by Judges Samuel A. Alito Jr., Amy Coney Barrett, Neil M. Gorsuch, Brett M. Kavanaugh. and Clarence Thomas.
Katie Tubb, a researcher at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, said the court was right in restricting EPA powers.
“Many on the left want the EPA to regulate emissions to achieve a radical climate agenda,” Tubb said. “But it matters in this country who makes those decisions. From my point of view, it’s important that U.S. representatives are the … rather than the unelected bureaucrats in the EPA.”
Jody Freeman, a professor at Harvard Law School, said the court could have gone further to limit EPA authority. Most allowed the agency to continue regulating carbon emissions from power plants; it simply cannot do so by forcing utility companies to switch from coal to renewable energy.
There’s “something of affection here,” Freeman said. “It leaves a path for the EPA to still set meaningful standards.”
However, the West Virginia The ruling may not bode well for the Biden administration in challenging the Clean Water Act scheduled for this fall, jurists say. In this case, Sackett v. EPA, conservative judges could too finding that the EPA exceeded its authority in regulating the country’s wetlands and waterways, despite the lack of clear guidance from Congress.
“The court had a strong message that the EPA should not read its authority too broadly,” said Dan Farber, a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley. “And that will certainly be very unhelpful in terms of Sackett. “
The Clean Water Act case is a long-running dispute involving an Idaho couple, Chantell and Mike Sackett, who tried to build a house on their land near Lake Priest. The couple has said their plans were thwarted by an EPA order, which determined the property contained a wetland and needed federal permission.
The Supreme Court is taking an EPA case that could reduce the Clean Water Act
The case raises the question of what constitutes “U.S. waters,” which the Clean Water Act passed to protect in 1972. The Sacketts favor a more limited definition proposed by the late Judge Antonin Scalia and advocated by business groups such as the US Chamber of Commerce. If imposed, according to some estimates, 90 percent of federally regulated waterways in the United States would lose protections.
“Over the last 30 or 40 years, the Clean Water Act has become much more than a basic water quality program,” said Damien Schiff, a senior lawyer with the Pacific Legal Foundation, who represents the Sacketts. “In practice, it’s become something like a mini federal zoning code.”
Meanwhile, Republican attorneys general are pushing to prevent Biden from raising a key metric that takes into account the real costs of climate change. This metric, called the social cost of carbon, applies to consequent decisions affecting the extraction of fossil fuels on public lands, infrastructure projects and even international climate negotiations.
The Supreme Court in May allowed the Biden administration, for the time being, to continue to consider the social costs of climate change while drafting new regulations and strengthening existing ones. But there is still the possibility that lower courts may frustrate him use as the legal battle progresses.
“The social cost of carbon litigation, and in particular the willingness of states to take it to the Supreme Court, indicates that there are groups that are genuinely willing to press aggressive, often new, legal arguments to challenge the actions of the Supreme Court. Biden administration to address climate change, ”said Kirti Datla, director of strategic legal advocacy at Arthjustice, an environmental law firm.
Conservative politicians have also challenged Biden’s efforts to curb emissions from cars and light trucks, a major source of greenhouse gases. Led by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R), a coalition of 15 Republican-led states has demanded the administration’s final rule to reduce exhaust emissions, which would prevent billions of tons of carbon dioxide entering the atmosphere. The litigation is pending in the DC Circuit Court of Appeals, one of the most important federal courts in environmental policy.
While the courts could limit the federal government’s ability to reduce pollution from power plants, some states are moving forward with clean energy requirements, although other states are putting them aside.
About 4 in 10 Americans live in a state, city, or territory that is committed to reaching 100 percent clean electricity by 2050 at the latest, according to a League of Voters analysis. of Conservation, an advocacy. group. And 24 governors have pledged to halve greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 and achieve zero net emissions by 2050, according to the U.S. Climate Alliance, a bipartisan coalition of governors committed to maintaining the goals of the Paris climate agreement.
In Oregon, Gov. Kate Brown (D) signed one of the country’s most aggressive clean energy plans last year. The plan requires the state’s largest utility companies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent by 2030, 90 percent by 2045 and 100 percent by 2040. This schedule is similar to Biden’s goal of eliminating emissions from the nation’s electricity sector by 2035.
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“Regardless of what the U.S. Supreme Court decides, we will continue to move forward because we are seeing the impacts of climate change every day,” Brown said in an interview, citing the state’s vulnerability to deadly wildfires, heat waves and severe drought fueled by rising global temperatures.
In Connecticut, Gov. Ned Lamont (D) last month signed into law the goal of achieving a zero-carbon grid in 2040. The move came after Connecticut’s last coal-fired power plant it went offline, ending a 53-year run as it struggled to compete with cheaper natural gas and renewable energy.
“Investing in a clean, resilient power grid is something that has long been a priority for Connecticut, like many states, because of the huge benefits: jobs and economic development that investing in clean energy production entails. cleaner air and better health for our children and families, and better protection against extreme weather and volatile price changes that lead to dependence on fossil fuels, “Lamont said in a statement.
Under the leadership of Gov. Glenn Youngkin, a Republican, Virginia has gone in the opposite direction. Youngkin has announced plans to withdraw the status of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, an effort to reduce carbon emissions from the electricity sector in the Northeast and the mid-Atlantic, calling it a “bad deal “for consumers.
Pennsylvania Republican lawmakers have also tried to prevent Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf from joining the group. The issue will be decided in November, when voters will elect a new governor of Pennsylvania for the first time in eight years. GOP candidate Doug Mastriano has warned that the program would increase jobs in the energy industry.
Meanwhile, in Nebraska, a red state that Donald Trump won with 58.7 percent of the vote in the 2016 presidential election, all three public companies have pledged to achieve zero net emissions by 2050 at the latest.
The decision was largely driven by corporate demand for clean energy. Big companies like Facebook have located data centers in Nebraska, the third windiest state in the country, hoping to meet their commitments to use 100 percent renewable energy.
“The market is moving towards clean energy regardless of what happens to the Supreme Court …