US Supreme Court curbs EPA’s power to regulate greenhouse gas emissions

The US Supreme Court has curbed the ability of the country’s top environmental regulator to limit greenhouse gas emissions from power plants in a landmark ruling that deals a blow to the administration of Joe Biden in its fight against climate change.

In a majority opinion authored by Chief Justice John Roberts, the court ruled 6-3 that the Environmental Protection Agency was not specifically authorised by Congress to reduce carbon emissions when it was set up in 1970. The ruling leaves the Biden administration dependent on passing legislation if it wants to introduce regulations to reduce emissions.

The opinion from the majority-conservative court said that “a decision of such magnitude and consequence rests with Congress itself”.

The justices said they doubted Congress intended to delegate the question of “how much coal-based generation” there should be “to any administrative agency”.

The decision marked a setback for Biden, who was elected president on a platform of fighting climate change. He has vowed to remove carbon from the US power grid by the middle of the next decade, setting the country on a path to net zero emissions, but his attempts to push climate legislation through Congress have stalled.

Responding to the decision, Biden said he would “not relent” in using his powers to tackle the climate crisis. “I have directed my legal team to work with the Department of Justice and affected agencies to review this decision carefully and find ways that we can, under federal law, continue protecting Americans from harmful pollution, including pollution that causes climate change,” he said in a statement.

The dissenting opinion, authored by Justice Elena Kagan and supported by the court’s other two liberal justices, said the EPA had the authority to regulate “stationary sources” of polluting substances that are harmful to the public. She added that curbing greenhouse gas emissions was “a necessary part of any effective approach for addressing climate change”.

“The limits the majority now puts on EPA’s authority fly in the face of the statute Congress wrote,” Kagan wrote.

The agency’s administrator Michael Regan said that while he was “deeply disappointed” by the court’s decision, the agency was “committed to using the full scope of EPA’s authorities to protect communities and reduce the pollution that is driving climate change”.

At the heart of the case is a disagreement over how broadly the EPA should interpret portions of the 1970 Clean Air Act, particularly the sections that direct the agency to develop emissions limitations for power plants.

The ruling centres on a Barack Obama-era proposal known as the Clean Power Plan that would have ordered power plants to cut emissions by 2030, but was suspended by a previous Supreme Court decision.

The coal industry welcomed Thursday’s ruling, with the National Mining Association saying the court had shown there were “limits to the authority that administrative agencies have to unilaterally issue transformative rules”.

But renewables groups criticised the decision. “At a time when we should be using the most powerful tools . . . to combat the climate crisis, the Supreme Court is blunting our key instruments,” said Gregory Wetstone, head of the American Council on Renewable Energy.

Kirti Datla, a lawyer at Earthjustice, said: “The court took off the table an effective rule to combat the climate crisis, and a world in which the court says that is too far in terms of climate policy, is not a great world.”

Dick Durbin, the Democratic whip in the Senate, said the decision was “a dangerous step backwards and threatens our air and our planet”.

Ron Wyden, the Democratic chair of the Senate finance committee and an advocate of the party’s fledgling clean energy tax package, said it was “crystal clear” that the Supreme Court was not going to allow “any meaningful administration efforts to combat climate change”.

The ruling by the court’s conservative majority was the latest in a number of decisions that have challenged established legal precedents, including the reversal of Roe vs Wade, the 1973 decision that gave women the constitutional right to seek an abortion.

Last week, it also struck down a century-old New York state law requiring an individual to show “proper cause” to carry a concealed gun in public, deeming the statute unconstitutional. The court on Monday also ruled in favour of a former high school coach dismissed for praying at football games, fuelling the fraught debate on the separation of church and state.