Category: JUDICIAL_CN Politics_CN TA_Individuals_CN

The late afternoon sun washed over the United States Supreme Court building as a group of protesters hauled a 15-foot tall prop, modeled after the United States Constitution, through the nearby streets. Instead of “We the People,” though, it read “We the Corporations,” above logos of companies like Shell, Chevron and Amazon. Cardboard flames licked the edges of the banner, and nearby signs read “Supreme Climate Deniers” and “SCOTUS Kills.”

Environmental lawyers say the Supreme Court sent a clear message in its landmark ruling in West Virginia v. EPA: If a federal agency wants to craft robust climate regulations, it better not crow about them.
If EPA — or any other federal agency, the White House or even advocacy groups — touts a regulation’s climate significance, lawyers said, that rule could fall victim to the so-called major questions doctrine, which the six-justice conservative majority applied last month in West Virginia to strike down the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan (Greenwire, June 30).

When the Supreme Court limited the Environmental Protection Agency’s power to combat climate change last week, Republican attorneys general and conservative legal activists cheered the ruling.

The Supreme Court yesterday limited the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to regulate power plant emissions, dealing a significant blow to the Biden administration’s climate change agenda. The ruling is the product of a longstanding campaign by some conservatives to curtail or dismantle the power of the so-called administrative state, the system of agencies that regulate wide areas of the economy. It is already altering the balance of power between businesses and the regulators that oversee them.

A reasonable reaction to the week’s Supreme Court rulings, which culminated in Thursday’s gutting of the Clean Air Act, would be: we are so screwed.

In a blow to the fight against climate change, the Supreme Court on Thursday limited how the nation’s main anti-air pollution law can be used to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from power plants. By a 6-3 vote, with conservatives in the majority, the court said that the Clean Air Act does not give the Environmental Protection Agency broad authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from power plants that contribute to global warming.

The Supreme Court just made it much harder for the U.S. government to respond to climate change in a 6-3 decision in the case of West Virginia v. EPA.

Court sides with Republican states as ruling represents landmark moment in rightwing effort to dismantle ‘regulatory state’.

The Supreme Court has made it more challenging for the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate greenhouse gases and fight climate change, as justices ruled Thursday in favor of Republican-led states and coal companies that asked the court to limit how much the EPA can control emissions from power plants.

Many of the headlines about the Supreme Court’s 6-3 ruling on West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency on Thursday have suggested an existential setback: a major blow to American decarbonization and global climate ambition. But the effect is less like a nail in the coffin and more like putting an additional set of brakes on an already stalled project. For the time being, at least, the decision functions chiefly to cement the status quo.