The Supreme Court on Thursday blocked an Environmental Protection Agency rule cracking down on power plant pollution, delivering another blow, at least in the near term, to the Biden administration as it looks to deliver on its ambitious decarbonization goals.
In a 5-4 decision, justices agreed to pause the EPA’s so-called good neighbor rule, which seeks to strictly limit ozone pollution from power plants and other industrial sources in 23 states, as well as air pollutants that can drift downwind to other states and cause additional harm.
Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, Amy Coney Barrett, and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented.
The EPA's plan, which originally applied to 23 states and was intended to provide a national solution to ozone pollution, was met instead with litigation from Republican-led lawsuits.
In September 2023, Ohio, Indiana, and West Virginia filed an emergency request to the Supreme Court, arguing that the EPA had overstepped its authority in imposing the plan and that it imposed costly and ineffective burdens on their states.
Plaintiffs further argued that the EPA rule should not be enforceable because it relied on the assumption that all 23 states the agency put on notice in the rule would participate in the "good neighbor" plan.
Writing for the majority, Justice Neil Gorsuch agreed with the states' assertion that the EPA's implementation of the provision was likely an overstep of their authority and posed an undue burden to certain states.
"The problem stems from the way EPA chose to determine which emissions 'contribute[d] significantly' to downwind States’ difficulty meeting national ozone standards," Gorsuch said.
Implementation of the rule is paused in 12 states due to lower court decisions — prompting complaints by the remaining 11 states that they are unfairly tasked with bearing the brunt of the burden.
Those 12 states are Alabama, Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Nevada, Oklahoma, Texas, Utah, and West Virginia.
Environmental groups took umbrage at the ruling Thursday.
“Contrary to what some of the Justices seem to believe, human lives are infinitely more important than corporate compliance costs with basic, decade-old air pollution standards,” Holly Bender, the chief energy officer at the Sierra Club, said in a statement . “Our most vulnerable are at risk from this dangerous pollution crossing from one state to another, and that the Court is turning away from an approach to protecting air quality it itself had blessed just ten years ago should concern us all.”
Meanwhile, some industry groups hailed the decision as a reversal of what they viewed as a flawed EPA rule. American Petroleum Institute senior vice president and general counsel Ryan Meyers said in a statement Thursday that the decision “prevents the risk of electric power outages and crippling delays to industrial supply chains for now," though he added that "[s]till more is needed from Washington to ensure long-term energy reliability for American consumers.”
The ruling comes as the Supreme Court's 6-3 conservative majority has taken a more skeptical view of the discretion that administrative agencies should have on the rulemaking process, including regulations related to matters on climate and the environment.
In 2022, the Supreme Court issued a sweeping decision that limited the EPA’s ability to regulate carbon emissions from power plants. Last year, the court weakened the Clean Water Act by limiting the agency’s ability to regulate wetlands.
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The Supreme Court is poised to soon determine whether to overturn Chevron deference, a decades-old court doctrine giving administrative agencies broad discretion to write rules, which could expose the Biden administration 's climate and clean energy regulations to further legal challenges.
At issue is the legal test established by the Supreme Court in its 1984 Chevron U.S.A. v. National Resources Defense Council ruling, which granted administrative agencies authority to interpret and issue rules pertaining to laws passed by Congress, so long as the statutes could be considered ambiguous and the rulemakings considered to be a “reasonable interpretation" of the law.
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