Supreme Court to Tackle EPA Regulation of Greenhouse Gas Emissions

In its 2007 decision in Massachusetts
v. Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Supreme Court
handed federal regulators a landmark victory by holding that the
“sweeping definition of ‘air pollutant’” in the Clean Air Act
allowed the EPA to regulate the emission of greenhouse gases. On
Monday, the Supreme Court will return to this contentious area when
the justices consider a new case testing the bounds of the EPA’s
regulatory reach.

At issue in
Utility Air Regulatory Group v. Environmental Protection
Agency is the EPA’s 2010 determination that the Clean Air
Act allows the agency to impose new permitting requirements on
stationary greenhouse gas emitters, such as coal-fueled power
plants. According to the EPA, although the language of the federal
law may not specifically mention this regulatory expansion, a fair
interpretation of the language allows for the new regulations.

The Utility Air Regulatory Group and the other legal challengers
take the opposite view. As they see, the EPA has exceeded its
statutory powers and effectively rewritten federal law to suit its
purposes. As the challengers told the Court in one legal filing,
“EPA freely acknowledged that regulation of carbon dioxide
emissions under the Title I and Title V permitting programs
subjects ‘an extraordinarily large number of sources’ to the [Clean
Air Act] for the first time, contrary to explicit congressional
intent to cover only a limited number of large industrial
facilities.”

The case therefore not only deals with the hot button issues of
environmental regulation and climate change, it also raises
significant questions about whether an executive branch agency
violated the separation of powers.

A decision is expected by June.