Happy Nice Mall

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Friday agreed to hear Republican-led appeals from states and coal companies asking the Environmental Protection Agency to limit its power to regulate carbon emissions under the Clean Air Act.

“This is the equivalent of a nationwide earthquake for those who care deeply about the climate issue,” said Richard J. Lazarus, professor of law at Harvard.

The court’s decision to take the case comes days before President Biden attended the global climate summit in Scotland, where he wanted to reassure other countries about the future of the United States. continue to pursue aggressive policies to combat global warming.

In January, on the last full day of Donald J. Trump’s presidency, a federal appeals court in Washington shot administration’s plan to relax restrictions on greenhouse gas emissions from power plants. The move paved the way for the Biden administration to impose stronger restrictions.

A split three-judge panel of the court, the U.S. District Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, ruled that the Trump administration’s plan, dubbed the Affordable Clean Energy Rule, was based on a “fundamental misconfiguration” of the relevant law. by “a series of tortured misreadings”.

The panel did not reinstate the Clean Energy Plan, a 2015 Obama-era arrangement that would force utilities to move away from coal and switch to renewable energy to reduce emissions. But he rejected the Trump administration’s attempt to repeal that rule and replace it with what critics say is toothless.

The Obama-era plan aimed to reduce emissions from the energy sector by 32 percent by 2030, compared to 2005 levels. To do this, he instructed each state to draw up plans to eliminate carbon emissions from power plants by phasing out coal and increasing renewable energy production.

The measure never took effect. happened Blocked by the Supreme Court in 2016has effectively ruled that states do not have to abide by it until a series of lawsuits from conservative states and the coal industry are resolved. This decision and subsequent changes in Supreme Court membership shifting to the right have made environmental groups wary of what the court can do in climate change cases.

Shortly after Mr. Trump was elected, the Environmental Protection Agency repealed the Clean Power Plan.

Professor Lazarus said the Supreme Court’s decision to hear the case “threatens to cut sharply, if not completely, the new administration’s ability to use the Clean Air Act to significantly limit greenhouse gas emissions from the nation’s power plant.”

Industry-supporting groups welcomed the court’s decision to authorize a review.

“The Supreme Court will reconsider the EPA’s claims of enormous authority to redesign entire industries rather than just require advanced technology,” said Devin Watkins, an attorney for the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a free-market think tank that opposes most environmental regulations. “This is great news because the agency doesn’t have that much power over the law.”

The Biden administration had He urged judges not to hear the caseHe said the court should wait for the administration to issue its own regulations “after taking into account all relevant considerations, including changes in the electricity sector over the past few years”.

States and companies on the other side, the executive’s brief, “call this court to review now to help guide upcoming rule-making, but it’s little more than an inadmissible request for advisory opinion.”

short filed by West Virginia and more than a dozen states have urged judges to take immediate action.

“How we respond to climate change is a pressing issue for our nation, but some of the ways forward carries serious and disproportionate costs for states and countless other affected parties,” he said at the briefing. “Continued uncertainty over the scope of EPA’s mandate will impose costs that we will never be able to recoup because the EPA, the state, and others will have to spend even more years and resources on a business that is – at best – legally uncertain. The court should intervene immediately,” he said.