Supreme Court limits EPA’s power to cut emissions
Headlines about Supreme Court cases are almost uniformly misleading, because they suggest the Court is making decisions on policy issues rather than legal issues.<p>The very first words of the opinion, on p. 2, make clear that the legal issue before the Court is very different: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.supremecourt.gov&#x2F;opinions&#x2F;21pdf&#x2F;20-1530_n758.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.supremecourt.gov&#x2F;opinions&#x2F;21pdf&#x2F;20-1530_n758.pdf</a><p>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.<p>This decision gives legs to something that has been called the &quot;major questions doctrine.&quot; The gist of that doctrine is that an agency can&#x27;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&#x27;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.