E&E News By Pamela King, Jeremy P. Jacobs | 01/10/2022
As arguments approach in the most significant Supreme Court environment battle of the decade, teams of lawyers are already making their case for how the justices should view EPA’s climate authority.
When the justices take the bench on Feb. 28 to hear arguments in West Virginia v. EPA, they will arrive armed with information from reams of briefs prepared by some of the nation’s leading environmental lawyers.
Those attorneys’ arguments will lay the groundwork in a high-stakes case that has the potential to upend EPA’s ability to regulate greenhouse gases from power plants — one of the nation’s largest sources of carbon dioxide emissions.
The challenge — brought by Republican-led states and coal companies — asks the Supreme Court to overturn a ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit that struck down a Trump-era EPA rule gutting the Obama-era Clean Power Plan.
The 2015 Obama rule invoked EPA’s authority under the Clean Air Act to set systemwide requirements for power plant emissions reductions.
After the D.C. Circuit ruling, President Biden’s EPA had a clean slate to craft its own rule. The agency had said it would not return to the Clean Power Plan, whose goals have already been met by the power sector, even though the regulation never took effect.
The justices then took the unusual step of agreeing to hear a dispute over a regulation that does not technically exist.
More:
https://www.eenews.net/articles/meet-the-lawyers-teeing-up-the-supreme-court-climate-showdown/
