> Congress can still pass a law empowering EPA to regulate greenhouse gas emissions.
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.
>Congress didn't pass a law and disappear. If Congress felt that the EPA was misinterpreting the language of the Clean Air Act it could have passed a law limiting the agency's powers.
It is not congresses job to enforce the law by writing new laws.
> If the EPA can legally grant states the ability to set their own emissions, why can't it revoke it or roll it back?
The government isn't allowed to change policies they've already created unless there is a compelling reason to. Otherwise every government policy would completely change every two years after each election.
> A perfectly legitimate case can be made to modify some EPA regulations, but when that reasonable position is characterized as "eviscerating the EPA", well then we have another problem
>Congress hasn't abdicated anything, they've delegated it, and they retain the power to overrule the EPA
Maybe the congress should do this with everything. The president can just make any rule he wants. Or maybe congress should just do their job instead of just delegating away all of their responsibility.
> The court hasn't completely prevented the EPA from making these regulations in the future - but says that Congress would have to clearly say it authorises this power.
As someone that supports far harsher emissions regulations than were in effect even before this ruling, is it too much to ask that laws should be clear? As others have pointed out, there's no limit to the danger posed by letting the executive branch creatively interpret legislation.
>The Clean Air Act requires the EPA to regulate air pollutants when the agency’s administrator finds that they “cause, or contribute to, air pollution which may reasonably be anticipated to endanger public health or welfare.”
The question is not whether it is a good idea for greenhouse gases to be regulated. The question is if the Clean Air Act mandates it. IANAL, but from what is quoted, I would have a hard time classifying CO2 (which already makes up 0.04% of air) which you exhale every time you breath as an air pollutant. There is no evidence that breathing air with CO2 (at the levels that current industrialization produces) produces harmful effects directly. In fact, if you hold your breath and exhale, the air you exhale likely has a higher local CO2 percentage than the increased levels caused by industrialization. The effects are mediated by its greenhouse effect and global warming. This is analogous to the CFC and the ozone depletion. The CFC's were pretty innocuous at ground level, but their release cause ozone depletion. This was regulated not through the Clean Air Act, but by the Senate ratified Montreal Treaty (https://www.nytimes.com/1988/03/15/science/treaty-on-ozone-i...).
The issue right now is that there is not the political will in the United States to address greenhouse gases, therefore people are trying to accomplish this through a very broad reading of the Clean Air Act. This will not be helpful in the long term as it just further associates fighting climate change with government overreach, and further politicizes what should not be a partisan issue.
> It said congress didn't authorize this, ask them.
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.
> For EPA. Court took power away from unelected bureaucrats and gave it back to elected officials.
The elected officials never lost this power, if congress didn't want the EPA to do something they could draft and vote on a bill to that effect by Tuesday.
> That wasn’t on the list of measures available under the Clean Air Act.
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.
> Doesn't requiring operators of coal plants to produce less electricity have the effect of reducing emissions from power plants a task that was given to the EPA.
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.”
> 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.
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).
This is nonsense. Congress hasn't abdicated anything, they've delegated it, and they retain the power to overrule the EPA, which means that voters have the power to elect representatives to do just that if the EPA made a bad ruling.
And in this particular case, this isn't even remotely a bad ruling. The inability for markets to properly price in their negative externalities is the reason for our current looming crisis, and making up for the failures of markets by properly imposing those externalities is one of the most important roles of government.
Major questions doctrine. They ruled that the current law does not empower EPA to require producers to shift generation to different methods (e.g. natural gas, renewables), and that if Congress had meant for the law to do that, they would have written it explicitly.
Congress can still pass a law empowering EPA to regulate greenhouse gas emissions.
> All Congress needs to do is clarify that they’d like the EPA to regulate carbon emissions
That is one interpretation. The dissenting opinion of Kagan argues that carbon emissions are covered due to Section 111(d), as this covers all pollutants.
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.
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