The U.S. Supreme Court ruled Thursday in West Virginia vs. EPA in favor of plaintiffs who argued that the Environmental Protection Agency does not have the power to regulate carbon dioxide from power plants—the country’s second-largest source of CO2 emissions—without input from Congress.
The ruling almost completely disrupts any major plans to fight climate change at the federal level in the U.S., and is likely to have wide-ranging implications for federal agencies looking to protect public health under bedrock laws like the Clean Air Act. It also signals how the court is likely to rule in other environmentally damaging cases in the pipeline.
The vote was 6 to 3, with the court’s three liberal members in dissent. Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the majority, said that Congress had not explicitly given the EPA the authority to regulate emissions as it designed the Clean Power Plan to do.
“There is little question that the petitioner States are injured, since the rule requires them to more stringently regulate power plant emissions within their borders,” Roberts wrote in the opinion.
In a dissenting opinion, Justice Elena Kagan wrote that the court’s decision “strips the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) of the power Congress gave it to respond to ‘the most pressing environmental challenge of our time.’”
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Source: Supreme Court Rules For Polluters In West Virginia v EPA
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