On Friday, the Supreme Court sharply limited the regulatory authority of federal agencies, overturning four decades of legal precedent in a ruling with broad environmental implications.
The court rejected the so-called Chevron deference, one of the most cited precedents in U.S. law, which has prompted courts to rely on the expertise of federal agencies in interpreting ambiguous laws. Instead, the justices ruled, courts should have more power to interpret these statutes.
As our colleagues wrote in the Times, environmentalists fear the decision could lead to hundreds of regulations being weakened or eliminated, most notably the Environmental Protection Agency’s restrictions on air and water pollution, regulations on toxic chemicals and policies to address climate change.
The ruling represents a major victory in a decades-long effort by conservative organizations to roll back the federal government’s regulatory powers. Mandy Gunasekara, who served as chief of staff at the EPA under President Trump and is a fellow at the Heritage Foundation, celebrated the court’s decision. “It creates a huge opportunity to challenge these regulations,” she told The Times. “And it could provide additional impetus to curb the large administrative state when the government changes in November.”
To find out what might happen next, we reached out to climate experts, legal experts and activists. We asked each expert about the implications of the ruling and how Americans’ lives could be affected.
We have summarized the responses below:
How could daily life change?
Manish Bapna, chairman of the Council for the Defense of Natural Resources“The Court’s actions have seriously jeopardized the fundamental safeguards on which we depend, and even take for granted, to protect the pillars of a modern society. Clean air and water, healthy nature and land; safe food, medicine, workplaces, airplanes, bridges and cars; an economy unencumbered by predatory lending, stock fraud and credit card scams.”
Tara Brock, Pacific legal director and senior counsel, Oceana: “Unfortunately, any decision that hinders environmental protection will harm Americans’ health and their wallets. The danger of this decision is that more Americans will suffer the worse effects of climate change, air pollution and other environmental harms, as well as other harms that government regulations protect against.”
Sam Sankar, senior vice president for programs, Earthjusticesaid the ruling could have a “profound impact.”
“Every time the Court makes it harder for government to regulate and easier for companies to challenge regulations, it becomes more likely that the industry will harm the public and the planet in search of profit,” he said. “It’s basic economics.”
How could climate regulation change?
Michael Burger, executive director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University: “It certainly makes climate regulations under the Clean Air Act more susceptible to judicial overturning. It shifts power from the agencies to the courts.”
Bapna said new rules from the Biden administration, including measures regulating emissions from cars and trucks, were written in anticipation of the Supreme Court overturning Chevron.
As a result, he said, the new rules may be more resilient to legal challenges: “The EPA has prepared a clear legal analysis explaining why the interpretation of the law is the most important. correct or best reading – the tests that now appear to have the upper hand – along with a strong actual scientific and technical track record to support each rule. That’s no guarantee that the court’s conservative majority will agree. But the agency has provided a solid legal basis for its rules in anticipation of the post-Chevron regime.”
Richard Wiles, chairman of the Center for Climate Integrity: “The sky is the limit for the industry now. No regulation is immune to challenges. To take just one example, if the industry decides to challenge the EPA’s underlying authority to regulate CO2, it could win and that would have a huge impact on climate policy. The same could apply to all regulations, mileage standards, power plant emissions, etc.
Thomas Berry, legal officer, the Cato Institute, And Travis Fisher, director of energy and environmental policy studies: “It is important to note that many climate-related policies are promulgated by independent agencies such as the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. Because these regulators cannot be removed by the president over policy disagreements, they lack a clear chain of democratic accountability.
“Going forward, a court must now evaluate rules based on the court’s best reading of the statutory text (text adopted by Congress, which is elected by the people) without respect for the interpretations of these rule makers – interpretations that are often well-founded. more in the policy preferences of the regulators than in their legal interpretive skills.”
Brok said her organization “saw a glimmer of hope in the court’s decision.”
Of the ruling, she said: “Chief Justice Roberts created a space in which Congress was empowered to delegate agency discretion to fill in the details of a statutory scheme by using language such as ‘appropriate’ or ‘reasonable’ ‘. This could give space to agencies to tackle the climate.”
What happens to US climate goals?
Bapna: “Because new climate rules are not dependent on Chevron, and because Congress, through the Inflation Reduction Act, has strengthened climate and clean energy incentives and the EPA’s regulatory authority, we do not believe this court ruling will impact U.S. climate progress. There will be many lawsuits, but we believe the EPA’s standards meet the court’s new test.”
Wiles: “There is no scenario in which the country can achieve the kind of climate policies needed to actually solve the problem without clear action from Congress. So in that regard, viewed narrowly from a climate perspective, Chevron is merely shining a spotlight on our collective inability to generate the power necessary to weaken the oil and gas industry’s stranglehold on national climate and energy policy.”
Sankar: “It will certainly dampen the enthusiasm of agencies like EPA to issue aggressive new climate regulations based on our existing laws. And it will make it more difficult to defend President Biden’s sweeping pollution control package in court.”
Which regulations will be challenged?
Hamburger: “Right now, every regulation this government has put on the books when it comes to climate change is being called into question almost as soon as they are published. So I don’t know if this makes them more likely to be challenged sooner.”
Brok: “We expect the industry to continue its assault on regulations that protect Americans by protecting the environment. However, in our own marine conservation sector, it is not clear whether this decision will have an impact and, if so, what that impact will be.”
Berry and Visser“In the short term, the ruling means that courts are more likely to limit the EPA’s ability to use longstanding parts of the Clean Air Act to issue sweeping climate regulations,” they said, pointing to power plant regulations. “Courts will now judge EPA’s interpretation solely on its legal justification, without any deference in favor of EPA’s positions.”
Sankar said the biggest targets would be rules where the EPA uses ambiguous language. “But honestly,” he said, “industries are likely to prioritize challenging regulations – new or old – that impose the most substantial costs on them. They will do so when they can argue that the agency’s regulations are not clearly justified by the language of the underlying law.”
5 things to know
New heat rules to protect workers. The Biden administration will propose the first regulations of their kind on Tuesday to protect millions of people exposed to dangerous heat on the job. Last year, the hottest year on record, 2,300 heat-related deaths were reported in the United States, most likely an undercount. In separate decisions, the White House also denied permission for mining and drilling activities to access the Alaskan wilderness.
A bad sign for hurricane season. Over the course of a few days, the system named Beryl intensified from a tropical storm to a Category 5 hurricane, devastating Carriacou, a small island north of Grenada, and setting records for the earliest point in a season where a storm so has become big. Beryl’s rapid growth reflects hot ocean conditions that could lead to more dangerous storms.
Judge ends Biden’s LNG pause. A federal judge on Monday ordered the Biden administration to resume issuing permits for liquefied natural gas export facilities. The government paused that process in January to analyze how these exports affect climate change, the economy and national security. The decision is in response to a lawsuit filed by 16 Republican attorneys general.
Small currents are responsible for this more than half of the water flowing from U.S. watersheds, according to a new study. Last year, the Supreme Court sharply limited the federal government’s ability to pollute these rivers, which are dry for much of the year and only fill again after rain or snowmelt. The findings suggest the ruling could make large bodies of water vulnerable to pollution
The British Labor Party seems to be on the verge of a landslide victory in the country’s elections on Thursday, after 14 years of Conservative rule. Ed Miliband, one of the Labor Party’s most influential figures, told The Guardian that his party wanted to make the country a global climate leader.
