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Richard Revesz, professor and director of the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University School of Law, said the Supreme Court’s decision would limit but not remove the EPA’s power to regulate power plant emissions. “The administration still has a lot of tools in its toolbox," he said.

The real wrecking ball in West Virginia v. EPA is how the court unnecessarily tied our societal hands from most effectively tackling a major problem. This case could be a canary in the coal mine for a wider attack on regulatory safeguards.

Observers had mixed views on how the ruling would affect proposed changes to company disclosure statements about climate-related risks at the SEC, or FERC's proposal for how to assess the emissions of individual interstate natural gas projects before they are approved for construction. The disclosure rule is designed to be a proxy for the financial risk facing companies, including from potential environmental regulation, and does not force companies to reduce their emissions, according to recent public comments filed by the Institute for Policy Integrity.

“While this is a setback for addressing the climate crisis, EPA still retains the authority, and an obligation, to limit greenhouse gas emissions, including from the power sector,” Adler said in an email. Besides increasing the efficiency of power plants through heat rate improvements, the EPA can look to other ways to lower carbon emissions such as co-firing with low-carbon fuels and carbon capture and sequestration, according to Adler.

 Adler warned that the case could be the “canary in the regulatory coal mine” because the court relied on the little-used “major questions doctrine” to reach its conclusion that EPA had veered beyond its congressionally approved instructions. Adler warned that applying the major questions legal theory more broadly — as conservative judges on the court have increasingly done to block regulatory initiatives — “will create more uncertainty for agencies and the entities that they regulate.”

In a blow to the fight against climate change, the Supreme Court today limited how the nation’s main anti-air pollution law can be used to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from power plants. Richard Revesz, an environmental expert at the New York University School of Law, called the decision “a significant setback for environmental protection and public health safeguards.” But Revesz said in a statement that the EPA still has authority to address greenhouse gas emissions from the power sector. 

KALW Radio will discuss the Supreme Court’s ruling on EPA’s power to force power plants to cut down their carbon pollution: how will this ruling impact President Biden’s climate agenda, including plans to decarbonize the energy grid by 2035? Jack Lienke, regulatory policy director of the Institute for Policy Integrity, will be a speaker.

Climate regulation could be the next Democratic priority to fall to the Supreme Court. West Virginia argued the EPA doesn’t have the authority to set standards that encompass an entire sector of the energy industry and, rather, is limited to only setting restrictions on individual power plants. Max Sarinsky, a senior attorney at the Institute for Policy Integrity, however, said there are some power plant-specific regulations that can be effective at fighting climate change. “Source-specific regulations like heat rate improvements, co-firing, carbon capture or some combination of various approaches — they can be quite environmentally effective,” Sarinsky said. 

The case, West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency, is the product of a coordinated, multiyear strategy by Republican attorneys general, conservative legal activists and their funders, several with ties to the oil and coal industries, to use the judicial system to rewrite environmental law, weakening the executive branch’s ability to tackle global warming. But legal experts say that the Republican attorneys general and their allies have taken such strategies to a new level, in their funding and their tactics. “They’ve created out of whole cloth a new approach to litigating environmental regulations, and they’ve found sympathetic judges,” said Richard Revesz, a professor of environmental law at New York University.

The impacts of climate change are often described as small changes in temperature or massive emissions, which doesn’t always make sense to people, said Peter Howard, an economist at the Institute for Policy Integrity. “Putting it in dollar terms helps the public really understand what the magnitude of the climate costs are.”