Supreme Court curbs EPA authority to regulate CO2 from power plants
01 July 2022
The Supreme Court of the US (SCOTUS) has ruled in West Virginia v. EPA that the EPA lacks the authority to set emission standards for power plants so strict as to force a shift of power generation from fossil fuels.
The opinion (6-3) applied the “major questions doctrineâ€, which requires Congress to specify clearly and directly regulatory authority involving issues of vast economic and political significance, rather than allowing agencies themselves to interpret more ambiguous statues to define their own authority.
The opinion holds that Congress did not grant EPA in Section 111(d) of the Clean Air Act the authority to devise emissions caps based on generation shifting—i.e., forcing a shift from higher-emitting to lower-emitting producers." ....
The EPA tried to pull a fast one... and lost.
"… On EPA’s view of Section 111(d), Congress implicitly tasked it, and it alone, with balancing the many vital considerations of national policy implicated in deciding how Americans will get their energy. EPA decides, for instance, how much of a switch from coal to natural gas is practically feasible by 2020, 2025, and 2030 before the grid collapses, and how high energy prices can go as a result before they become unreasonably “exorbitant.â€
There is little reason to think Congress assigned such decisions to the Agency. For one thing, as EPA itself admitted when requesting special funding, “Understand[ing] and project[ing] system-wide …trends in areas such as electricity transmission, distribution, and storage†requires “technical and policy expertise not traditionally needed in EPA regulatory development.â€
… We also find it “highly unlikely that Congress would leave†to “agency discretion†the decision of how much coal- based generation there should be over the coming decades.
… the only interpretive question before us, and the only one we answer, 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. For the reasons given, the answer is no."