During the last week before the summer break, the Supreme Court of the United States issued another controversial ruling. They stop the Ministry of the Environment’s ability from the EPA to implement certain types of climate policy regulations.
In West Virginia’s ruling against the EPA, the court’s conservative majority voted for West Virginia, the coal industry’s stronghold, which sued the EPA for regulations that were not voted through in the US Congress.
“It is not reasonable for Congress to give the EPA a mandate to implement its own regulations,” HD chief judge John Roberts wrote in the ruling.
The verdict was expected, but it is a setback for Joe Biden’s climate policy ambitions. Biden has promised that the United States will have a carbon dioxide-free electricity network by 2035, a promise that is now becoming more difficult to keep.
It is also a setback for those who want to see the EPA as an independent body whose regulations are dictated by climate policy experts and researchers, rather than by politicians. Democrats have sought to establish the EPA as an agency more akin to the FDA, regulating food and drugs based on scientific expertise rather than day-to-day policy fluctuations.
“The court appoints itself, instead of the congress or the authority that are experts, as decision-makers in climate policy. I can not imagine anything more frightening “, wrote the HD judge Elena Kagan in her reservation against the verdict.
Climate researcher Michael Mann writes that there is a common thread between the ruling on climate policy and the previous rulings on abortion laws and weapons. It should be seen as a continuation of the court’s attempt to deprive citizens of “fundamental rights to privacy, security and a planet we can live on,” Mann writes.
Going forward, more climate policy reforms will now be forced to go through the slow process of Congress.
Other climate policy experts say the verdict was not as extreme as they feared. It does not make new regulations impossible, but makes it difficult for the President to implement climate policy regulations by decree, or for the EPA to make its own decisions based on climate policy expertise.
Many climate scientists were worried that the ruling would be the end of the entire broad regulatory framework introduced by the Clean Air Act in the United States in the 1970s, but it did not.
– They avoided a more comprehensive verdict. They do not ban the EPA from other greenhouse gas regulations and they did not attack the broader regulatory process, writes Robert Rohde, climate researcher at Berkeley Earth.
Going forward, more climate policy reforms will now be forced to go through the slow process of Congress. Today, all ambitious reforms are stopped by West Virginia, a small state where the coal industry has a loyal senator in Joe Manchin.
Rather than end the debate on how the US government should regulate emissions, the HD ruling is set to be the beginning of a new wave of legal battles in federal courts and states.