Climate Point: Supreme Court axes EPA climate regulation, oil inspectors told to stay at their desks
Welcome to Climate Point, your weekly guide to climate, energy and the environment. I’m Janet Wilson from Palm Springs, California.
The Supreme Court on Thursday knocked down an Environmental Protection Agency effort to regulate greenhouse gases from power plants, dealing a blow to the Biden administration in one of the most significant climate cases decided by the high court in more than a decade.
Those emissions have unequivocally been tied by scientists to rapidly increasing climate change. But 19 states, led by West Virginia, challenged regulations to rein them in approved by President Barack Obama and abandoned by President Donald Trump.
Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the opinion for a 6-3 majority, the latest in a series of major decisions in which the court's conservatives largely stuck together. The court's three liberal justices dissented.
At the center of the climate case was whether the EPA had authority to curb carbon emissions from power plants, writes John Fritze for USA Today. Simmering below the surface was a deeper debate over how much authority a federal agency has to regulate something without explicit direction from Congress – an issue with far-reaching implications.
The ruling doesn’t strip the agency of all power to regulate greenhouse gases for coal-fired plants, reports Bloomberg Law's Jennifer Hijazi, but it does severely constrict them. And states still have strong regulatory powers if they choose to use them.
Water and Power
In California, which has long bragged of being a world leader on climate regulation, Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration had enviros seeing red after slipping language into next year's budget bills that gave state water officials the authority not only to buy power on the energy market to avoid blackouts, but also to “construct, own and operate” power plants, as reported by CalMatters' Julie Cart.
Foes said the language, which was slightly modified but passed, stripped out local or public reviews of major solar and wind projects, and gave new life to polluting diesel generators and gas-fired power plants along the California coast. That's per Sammy Roth with the Los Angeles Times.
In other news, I talked to California oil inspectors who told me they felt forced to skip reviews of wells near homes and schools and do quick reviews from their desks, in a bid by managers to drive up numbers on paper. Arizona passed a $1 billion package to help grapple with water scarcity, and from Indiana, we learn why some folks call them fireflies and others call them lightning bugs, and how, no matter the name, some species' flickering light appears to be blinking out.
Read on for those stories and more.