My understanding is that federal law gives states the option of either following the EPA rules or the CARB rules.

Sure, along with other undesirable effects. But just as it is a mistake to decide what authority they have based on just their name, it would also be a mistake to do so based on just a one–sentence summary. We really should be quoting out of the enabling legislation.

Suffice to say that this legislation is long and complex, but it specifically gives the EPA the authority to mandate design improvements to new power plants (prior to construction) so that they will operate at the best possible efficiency, and also the authority to mandate the installation of new systems to reduce the pollution put out by both existing plants and new ones. This has historically been things like scrubbers to remove pollutants from the waste stream. Think of new hardware devices that you can add to a plant or a factory that reduce the pollution while maintaining their function.

The EPA tried to argue that they had devised a “system” under the meaning of the law that allowed them to shift power generation from coal to gas or renewable power. The Court pointed out that this would gut the word of all useful meaning, and that it would give the EPA the power to unilaterally decide the entire industrial policy of the country. They would be able to use the same language to simply ban almost anything they wanted, and it’s pretty clear that Congress never intended that. The EPA could use that new authority to reduce pollution by banning virtually all industrial activity, causing it all to be done in other countries, for example.

There is another interesting aspect of the enabling legislation. It requires the EPA to investigate multiple systems that achieve the goal of reducing some specific pollutant from some specific source (such as soot from a power plant or whatever), then to determine how much reduction the best of those systems would achieve. Then instead of mandating that everyone has to install that specific system, they are allowed to mandate that everyone must achieve the same reduction by some means. This gives the operators a chance to beat the EPA on either cost or performance, and avoids forced mistakes. If the EPA accidentally selects the second–best system rather than the best, nobody is forced to use a sub–par means of reducing the pollutant.

However, in the case of the EPA’s new generating–shifting “system”, everybody would be required to participate in the same way for it to work. The opinion states: “By contrast, and by design, there is no control a coal plant operator can deploy to attain the emissions limits established by the Clean Power Plan.”

You should at least read the six–page syllabus to the opinion: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/21pdf/20-1530_n758.pdf

> But in the end it was all about regulating CO2.

The regulations were about how to stop things OTHER than CO2 from polluting the atmosphere without destroying the US economy. Things like Sulfur Dioxide and fly ash.

CO2 may fall under the language as written, and it may be appropriate for the EPA to regulate it, but that was not the central example of an airborne pollutant back in the 70s when this was written (Or 90s, when it was amended).

Did I get that right?

There's a whole bunch of wrong rolled up here. The regulations were about how to stop CO2 from polluting the atmosphere. From there, you try to play Senator CS to shift this into some sort of weird "delegating an industry" language.

But in the end it was all about regulating CO2.

If the EPA had acted outside its authority, in what you term "delegating an industry," lower courts would have said that.

Instead, in order to stop the EPA's actions, the Supreme Court had to change the scope of the law that was passed.

The rest is opinions about that finding.

Where, exactly, are you claiming that the EPA ran afoul of the law?

Not in the US so I'm perhaps missing some context related to which bodies are responsible for which regulation but... why can't EPA regulation reduce wildfires?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_Power_Plan

> The plan will require individual states to meet specific standards with respect to reduction of carbon dioxide emissions.[22] States are free to reduce emissions by various means, and must submit emissions reductions plans by September 2016, or, with an extension approval, by September 2018.[23] If a state has not submitted a plan by then, the EPA will impose its own plan on that state.[23]

The post you are responding to explains that the specific type of legislation that the parent is asking about was explicitly identified in federal law as allowable.

They did. The House and Senate passed different language, and it never got reconciled.

"The first related to an oversight during the reconciliation of the Clean Air Act amendment in 1990 that resulted in the House and Senate versions of § 7411(d) to never be reconciled, and both versions were codified into the signed law. The House version had stated that because other parts of the Clean Air Act had covered regulation of carbon dioxide, the EPA could not use § 7411(d) to cover carbon dioxide emissions from existing plants, while the Senate version allowed for § 7411(d) to overlap carbon dioxide emissions coverage." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Virginia_v._EPA

Due to a fuckup, SCOTUS got to pick the side they preferred.

Upon further review: a reading of the SCOTUS pdf combined with the referenced laws, I do now believe this was a bad conclusion.

Major questions doctrine seems unbased in an measurable way. Instead, the court should have ruled that the EPA currently had the authority to do this as it was clearly granted in law, and if Congress wanted to limit it, then they would need to do so legislatively. Not the current decision which says that Congress probably didn't mean what they wrote into law because they dun deligated a lot of power.

Edit: someone else wrote this, which does make sense if their supposition is. Regardless, I'll need to read more of the laws beyond 111d.

> No it isn’t. The Clean Air Act is all about requiring polluters to use control technology, and requiring new sources to use better and more expensive control technology than existing sources. That’s the program Congress designed. Restructuring the energy industry to address climate is a different solution to a different problem, related only by the commonality of emissions into air. It’s like using drug laws to regulate processed foods because both involve harm caused by ingesting things.

We can't be opposed to police creatively interpreting laws to target minorities and be okay with the EPA creatively interpreting laws to target fossil fuel companies. Just because the latter is in the service of a good cause doesn't make it legal. The ends do not justify the means--down that way lies peril.

Congress gave the EPA broad discretion that it could have revoked -- using your argument -- at any moment. This issue has been bouncing around for over a decade, and Congress has systematically declined to do so.

The effect of the Court’s order, followed by the Trump administration’s re- peal of the rule, was that the Clean Power Plan never went into effect. The ensuing years, though, proved the Plan’s moderation. Market forces alone caused the power industry to meet the Plan’s nationwide emissions target—through exactly the kinds of generation shifting the Plan contem- plated. See 84 Fed. Reg. 32561–32562 (2019); Brief for United States 47. So by the time yet another President took office, the Plan had become, as a practical matter, obsolete. For that reason, the Biden administration announced that, instead of putting the Plan into effect, it would commence a new rulemaking. Yet this Court determined to pronounce on the legality of the old rule anyway. The Court may be right that doing so does not violate Article III mootness rules (which are notoriously strict). See ante, at 14–16. But the Court’s docket is discretionary, and because no one is now subject to the Clean Power Plan’s terms, there was no reason to reach out to decide this case. The Court today issues what is really an advisory opinion on the proper scope of the new rule EPA is considering. That new rule will be subject anyway to immediate, pre-enforcement judi- cial review. But this Court could not wait—even to see what the new rule says—to constrain EPA’s efforts to ad- dress climate change. The limits the majority now puts on EPA’s authority fly in the face of the statute Congress wrote. The majority says it is simply “not plausible” that Congress enabled EPA to regulate power plants’ emissions through generation shift- ing. Ante, at 31. But that is just what Congress did when it broadly authorized EPA in Section 111 to select the “best system of emission reduction” for power plants. §7411(a)(1). The “best system” full stop—no ifs, ands, or buts of any kind relevant here. The parties do not dispute that generation shifting is indeed the “best system”—the most effective and efficient way to reduce power plants’ car- bon dioxide emissions. And no other provision in the Clean Air Act suggests that Congress meant to foreclose EPA from selecting that system; to the contrary, the Plan’s regulatory approach fits hand-in-glove with the rest of the statute. The majority’s decision rests on one claim alone: that gen- eration shifting is just too new and too big a deal for Con- gress to have authorized it in Section 111’s general terms. But that is wrong. A key reason Congress makes broad del- egations like Section 111 is so an agency can respond, ap- propriately and commensurately, to new and big problems. Congress knows what it doesn’t and can’t know when it drafts a statute; and Congress therefore gives an expert agency the power to address issues—even significant ones—as and when they arise. That is what Congress did in enacting Section 111. The majority today overrides that legislative choice. In so doing, it deprives EPA of the power needed—and the power granted—to curb the emission of greenhouse gases.

tl;dr: the majority chose to rule on a plan that never went into effect and will never go into effect, in practice taking on an advisory role rather than waiting for an actual concrete plan to rule on. Beyond that, Congress intentionally chose the broad language of "best system of emissions reductions" but the majority asserts that congress should have instead referred to generation shifting by name despite the technology not existing at the time of drafting