3 worst supreme court decisions8/7/2023 ![]() ![]() “The court has signaled its willingness to ignore the language and structure of a statute based on some nominal idea that Congress could not have meant for EPA to regulate in such an important area,” said Danis. Congress is also deadlocked over climate legislation and has not passed any significant laws on the issue, forcing agencies to rely on existing law. The court says it is protecting lawmakers’ power from agency overreach, she said, but Congress routinely delegates its power to agencies that have substantive expertise in an area. The opinion “uses the language of protecting congressional power to transfer power to the Supreme Court,” said Jennifer Danis, a senior attorney at the Niskanen Center. While the court’s precise limitations are unclear, experts said the decision could give the court more sway in regulatory issues. “The court gives little guidance on what constitutes a ‘major’ question for purposes of statutory interpretation,” she said in an email. It’s hard to predict what the effects of the ruling will be because the doctrine at issue is “mostly a fabrication of the new right-wing court,” said Madison Condon, an associate environmental law professor at Boston University. Observers also had mixed views on how the ruling would affect proposed changes to company disclosure statements about climate-related risks at the SEC, or FERC’s proposal for how to assess the emissions of individual interstate natural gas projects before they are approved for construction. It was the first time the court had actually used the major questions doctrine label in a ruling, and Gerrard predicted “a lot of case law will emerge as to: What does it mean? What doesn’t it mean?” “Going forward, we are going to see a whole lot of litigation because people who are challenging regulation or an agency action may well throw in a major questions doctrine claim in their lawsuit,” Michael Gerrard, director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia Law School, said on the school’s “Columbia Energy Exchange” podcast. The decision invalidated the 2015 Clean Power Plan, which never went into effect, and will put some limits on how the Biden administration and future presidents can write new rules for existing power plants ( Greenwire, June 30).ĮPA could now face a similar challenge to its proposed emissions standards for cars and trucks, the largest source of planet-warming pollution in the country. The Supreme Court’s 6-3 ruling in favor of West Virginia, as well as other red states and coal companies, stated that EPA had overstepped its authority under the Clean Air Act by creating a rule requiring power plants to begin shifting from fossil fuels to renewable energy. The regulations that could be subject to the court’s interpretation of a “major questions” issue - which involve “vast economic or political significance” - could run the gamut from EPA’s rules to boost car emissions standards, new climate accounting proposals from the Securities and Exchange Commission and new Federal Energy Regulatory Commission initiatives. “You can’t do nothing just because it’s a big problem, but you can’t do too much because it’s a big problem. ![]() Ruhl likened the situation to a Goldilocks scenario - the court in 2007 found that EPA wasn’t doing enough to regulate greenhouse gases, only to say last week in West Virginia v. “It’s opened up a whole new world of speculation.” Ruhl, the co-director of Vanderbilt University Law School’s Energy, Environment and Land Use program. “Anything now that agencies do to respond to climate change with regulatory authority, I would fully expect the interests that feel they are on the losing end of the proposal, will launch a major questions challenge,” said J.B. ![]()
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