Read the dissent and see if you don't find it equally convincing. Supreme Court justices are very smart and very good at their jobs and it's not surprising that pretty much everything they write sounds reasonable and well-argued.
Key quote from the dissent:
> Section 111 of the Clean Air Act directs EPA to regulate stationary sources of any substance that “causes, or contributes significantly to, air pollution”
and that “may reasonably be anticipated to endanger public health or welfare.”
So, does CO2 qualify, or is it a "major new problem"? Sounds like a policy issue to me.
The dissenting justices argue that congress already voted to give EPA the mandate to address air pollution. The majority opinion is that “climate change” is a different issue than “air pollution”.
For my part, I think it’s a bit of a stretch to say that CO2 emissions aren’t covered by the clean air act. And since the decision clearly follows the conservative agenda, it’s hard to not see it as a politically-driven decision.
Yes, and later on when the EPA made CO2 a pollutant (WEST VIRGINIA v the EPA) the supreme court ruled "Actuaally... JK, ignore that last ruling because you can't do this". [1]
As in, they literally ignored their ruling made just a few years prior because when the EPA called their bluff it would result in an outcome they didn't like.
Bit of a sleight of hand there: you were arguing first that this court case was about whether CO2 was a pollutant or not, and I simply pointed out that there was nobody arguing it wasn't and all agreed that the EPA had the authority to designate it as such, as opposed to your "pollution is whatever pdonis feels in his gut is pollution" standard.
So, sure, I'm criticizing the Court's decision, because it's an incoherent and ideologically motivated decision. Doing so helps remove the mystique of the SCOTUS justices as some kind of apolitical actors in the sytem.
Yes, you're right. I was initially thinking this came down to an intelligible clause similar to how people argue OSHA is unconstitutional due to competiting intelligible clauses. My failure was thinking new and existing pollutants needed to have the same solution, and the constraints for arriving to the correct solution were in competition.
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.
The court has already ruled in Chevron v. NRDC that executive agencies have deference in interpretation of statues if Congress has not explicitly granted that power. The Clean Air act was passed in 1970 to ensure air quality, through science and the advancement of our understanding the EPA has identified CO2 as a toxic pollutant. I don't understand why we need an updated law by Congress when the EPA is much closer to the issue.
> Congress intended to grant the EPA broad authority to regulate pollution
CO2 is not pollution. People and animals breathe it out. Plants breathe it in. Any such thing is obviously not pollution. The EPA calling it "pollution" does not make it pollution, any more than calling a dog's tail a leg makes it a leg.
If Congress wants to grant the EPA authority to regulate things that are obviously not pollution, in order to promote some other policy objective, it needs to say so explicitly. Which is exactly what the Court's opinion says.
Congress granted the EPA power to regulate air pollution. CO2 and methane are harmful pollutants that cause a greenhouse effect, and the EPA was granted the authority to address this.
Our activist extremely biased Supreme Court has several members who are part of a political advocacy operation called the federalist society and ensures that members get Supreme Court placement specifically to achieve federalist society goals.
Nothing about this is secret.
Nothing about this is acceptable
No. No. Wrong. The Supreme Court's mandate is to be the Supreme Court, not to be the solve-the-current-crisis fixer. I want the planet not to fry and to still have a constitutional democracy at the end of that process.
The problem is that people want to handle this "on the cheap", by executive order, rather than by the actual existing mechanism, which is through Congress. Yes, Congress created the EPA. They didn't give them the authority to regulate CO2, though. That was an overreach when the executive order came out, and that reality finally caught up legally.
You want to regulate CO2? Then do it the right way - by having Congress pass a bill that grants that power to the EPA. That's the difference between rule of law and rule of the president.
You say those states have too much power? No they don't. There's only 18 of them. That's only 36 senators. They don't have a majority of the House, either. So go do it the way it should have been done from the beginning, instead of trying to get away with using a lazy back door.
[Edit: Reading other posts here, the issue may not have been CO2 emission, but rather management of the electrical grid. I still think that CO2 was a massive over-reach when the EPA started regulating that. It was almost certainly beyond the scope that Congress conceived of when they created the EPA.]
The fundamental issue is, is carbon dioxide an air pollutant? This is not so much about interpretation of the Clean Air Act IMO, as it is about peoples' opposing views on carbon dioxide as a significant contributor to climate change.
Those who believe carbon dioxide absolutely is contributing to climate change and harming our planet would likely classify carbon dioxide as an air pollutant and thus believe the EPA has the power to regulate it. Those that believe otherwise are not going to consider carbon dioxide an 'air pollutant' and thus not subject EPA regulation.
Headlines about Supreme Court cases are almost uniformly misleading, because they suggest the Court is making decisions on policy issues rather than legal issues.
The Clean Air Act does not purport to give the EPA blanket regulatory authority over anything involving emissions into the air. It has detailed provisions focused on reducing the amount of toxic pollutants, in particular through the use of control (scrubbing) technologies. This case concerns whether the EPA can use its power to impose control technologies on power plants, to force the industry to use a particular mix of power generation sources (solar, gas, etc.). The Court decided that the statute did not confer on the EPA the power to do that. The relevant discussion begins on page 16.
This decision gives legs to something that has been called the "major questions doctrine." The gist of that doctrine is that an agency can't stretch some pre-existing grant of Congressional authority to create sweeping regulations addressing a major new problem. As applied here, that means that the EPA can't rely on authority delegated by Congress to, for example, tell coal plants what kind of scrubbers they have to use, to tackle climate change. pp. 17-19.
One thing I liked about this Supreme Court decision is that it pointed out that part of the EPA’s unconstitutional new rule was a cap and trade system for CO2, which Congress has tried half a dozen times in recent years to implement. Congress wasn’t able to find a system that satisfied enough people to get it passed, but the fact that they were trying so hard is proof that Congress did not think that this authority had been delegated to anyone.
None of the parties or judges dispute that CO2 is a pollutant.
Even if you personally dispute it, Congress explicitly granted the EPA the authority to determine what's an air pollutant and what's not:
> For the purpose of establishing national primary and secondary ambient air quality standards, the Administrator shall within 30 days after December 31, 1970, publish, and shall from time to time thereafter revise, a list which includes each air pollutant—emissions of which, in his judgment, cause or contribute to air pollution which may reasonably be anticipated to endanger public health or welfare;
Congress giving the EPA a mandate over emissions of pollutants and the EPA setting emissions targets for coal power plants seems to be a clear and objective function through an intelligible clause.
Addendum :
The CAA doesn't contain a list of pollutants. It contains a definition, which CO2 fits. This already went before the Supreme Court in Massachusetts vs. EPA and set the precedent that CO2 must be considered a pollutant under the CAA. This precedent was already challenged by a few states and was upheld, and the Supreme Court didn't overrule it today either, instead going for another line of argument.
First of all, the Supreme Court doesn't make such an argument, and the fact that CO2 fits the definition of pollutant was upheld in federal jurisprudence.
The CAA does not contain a specific list of pollutants. It has a definition, and the EPA may regulate any emissions of substances that fit those definitions. So, the EPA can consider a given substance that fits the definition to be under the purview of a program under the CAA on a case by case basis.
It actually would be and I would welcome all the new ones the government wants to allow (following regulations of course). We're out of time on climate change. One advantage of the new Supreme Court lineup is they might actually give the middle finger to some of the NIMBYs and greens blocking nuclear power. The downside of that is they will be doing similar to regulations like the Clean Water Act soon as well :(
The headlines aren’t entirely wrong. If you look at the conservative majority opinions, you’ll find that indeed, it’s about the relevant legal issues, ie. what the law actually says. On the other hand, if you read liberal dissents, they’re mostly about what they think appropriate policy should be.
In this particular case, the majority opinion starts off by quoting the relevant statute and analyzing its meaning, whereas the dissent starts off by saying (quoting) that “climate change is the most pressing environmental challenge of our time”, and continues with a long litany of how bad it is.
Really, I find the entire thing to be rather crazy: if the Congress wants EPA to regulate emissions the way they tried to do, all it needs to do is to pass a law explicitly instructing it to do so. Of course, it won’t, because there is no political will in Congress to pass this. At the same time, the EPA’s argument in this case was that the Congress has already delegated this to EPA. Considering that the Congress won’t pass a law confirming that yes, it did in fact delegate authority to execute these particular regulations (which, again, would render the entire SCOTUS decision irrelevant), I find the EPA’s argument of rather dubious quality.
I think this law/provision was passed at a time before there was a clear notion of CO2 from burning fossil fuels being connected to climate change, and they were thinking about more traditional pollutants/harms like logging and drilling oil.
(In my opinion) This historic law/provision is not specific enough (or it does not create a novel enough kind of cause of action) for the climate change type of problem, to be enforceable as it gets tested up the judicial chain. (see my other comment in this story)
It is important to remember that the Clean Power Plan, the subject of this ruling, was never implemented. They took this case to strike a blow to lay low the EPA, no plaintiff had any standing.
It is telling that just this particular iteration of the Supreme Court decided that the EPA lacked this regulatory authority; as early as 2007 a conservative Supreme Court ruled CO2 was a pollutant and compelled the Bush Administration to regulate it as such, even though EPA at the time was loathe to do so, leaving no doubt the power of the EPA to regulate.
The EPA's regulatory authority was only ever a question worthy of raising when the Supreme Court's composition changed; conservative judicial radicalism was normalized, hence the ruling. There was no deeper principle behind this ruling.
Key quote from the dissent:
> Section 111 of the Clean Air Act directs EPA to regulate stationary sources of any substance that “causes, or contributes significantly to, air pollution” and that “may reasonably be anticipated to endanger public health or welfare.”
So, does CO2 qualify, or is it a "major new problem"? Sounds like a policy issue to me.
By the way, it definitely isn't a major new problem, the Nixon administration viewed CO2 and climate change as settled science in the 60s before he signed the Clean Air Act: https://www.nixonlibrary.gov/sites/default/files/virtuallibr...
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