The Supreme Court Is Jeopardizing Federal Climate Action

The Environmental Protection Agency's ability to regulate power sector carbon emissions was curbed by the Supreme Court in a ruling today.

One of the stranger cases on the docket was the West Virginia case. There was a dispute that didn't exist. There was a complaint about the Clean Power Plan, a set of rules issued by the EPA in 2015. The plan didn't work out. Fossil fuel executives and Republican officials went to court to stop the rules from being implemented. The plan was gone for good after Barack Obama gave the keys to Donald Trump.

When the Supreme Court picked up a challenge to the plan that had been going through the courts, environmental advocates were worried. They had good reasons. The consequences of such a policy were too large for it to be implemented without more explicit authorization from Congress.

Environmental advocates had feared that the rationale would undermine the EPA. The agency will still be able to regulate power plant emissions. The precedent that says the EPA can tackle carbon emissions broadly was not taken away by the court. The decision remains a serious blow as it highlights the court's skepticism of ambitious action from federal agencies and offers a potential road map for future legal challenges to climate policies. Jay Austin is a senior attorney at the Environmental Law Institute.

The Court appoints itself, instead of Congress or the expert agency, the decision maker on climate policy, wrote Justice Elena Kagan in her dissent. I can't think of a more frightening thing.

A group of red state attorneys general brought the dispute because of a part of the Clean Air Act that allowed the agency to set the best system of emission reduction. One of the questions before the court was broad. Congress may have meant for the EPA to require emissions-cutting technology at certain power plants. Maybe it was a broader mandate that allowed measures that might result in shutting down a coal-fired plant in favor of producing cleaner energy elsewhere. The more far-reaching interpretation was chosen by the EPA.

What can government bureaucrats do with vague instructions from Congress? In Washington, elected officials can't be expected to scrawl out every detail of every policy The job of regulatory agencies is to translate the sketched out laws into action. Judges don't want to be in the way of that. The justices have repeatedly said that it is best to let the scientists and policy experts do their jobs.