On Friday, the Supreme Court sharply limited the regulatory authority of federal agencies, upending 40 years of legal precedent in a ruling with broad implications for the environment.
The court threw out the so-called Chevron deference, one of the most cited precedents in American law, which has guided courts to defer to the expertise of federal agencies when interpreting unclear laws. Instead, the justices ruled, courts should have more power to interpret these statutes.
As our Times colleagues wrote, environmentalists fear that the decision could lead to hundreds of rules being weakened or eliminated, particularly Environmental Protection Agency limits on air and water pollution, regulations on toxic chemicals, and policies to tackle climate change
The ruling represents a significant win in a decades-long push by conservative organizations to roll back the federal government’s regulatory powers. Mandy Gunasekara, who served as chief of staff at the E.P.A. under President Trump and is a fellow at the Heritage Foundation, celebrated the court’s decision. “It creates a massive opportunity for these regulations to be challenged,” she told The Times. “And it could galvanize additional momentum toward reining in the administrative state writ large if the administration changes in November.”
To find out what could happen next, we reached out to climate experts, legal experts and activists. We asked each expert about the effects of the ruling and how Americans’ lives could be affected.
We’ve excerpted the responses below:
How could everyday life change?
Manish Bapna, president of the Natural Resources Defense Council: “The Court’s actions have put at grave risk the foundational safeguards we depend on, and even take for granted, to protect the mainstays of a modern society. Clean air and water, healthy wildlife and lands; safe food, medicine, workplaces, airplanes, bridges and cars; an economy unhindered by predatory lending, stock fraud and credit card scams.”
Tara Brock, pacific legal director and senior counsel, Oceana: “Unfortunately, any decision that impedes environmental protection will harm Americans’ health and their pocketbook. The danger of this decision is that more Americans will suffer from worse effects of climate change, air pollution, and other environmental harms as well as suffer from other harms that government regulations protect against.”
Sam Sankar, senior vice president for programs, Earthjustice, said the ruling could have a “profound impact.”
“Any time the Court makes it harder for the government to regulate, and easier for businesses to challenge regulations, it makes it more likely that the industry will injure the public and the planet in search of profits,” he said. “It’s basic economics.”
How climate regulation could change?
Michael Burger, executive director for the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University: “It certainly makes climate regulations under the Clean Air Act more susceptible to judicial reversal. It shifts the power from the agencies to the courts.”
Bapna said that new Biden administration rules, including measures that regulate emissions from cars and trucks, had been written in anticipation that the Supreme Court would roll back Chevron.
As a result, he said, the new rules may be more resistant to legal challenges: “The E.P.A. laid out a clear legal analysis explaining why its reading of the law is the correct or best reading — the tests that now seem to prevail — along with a strong factual scientific and technical record to support each rule. That’s no guarantee the court’s conservative majority will agree. But the agency has provided a sound legal basis for its rules in anticipation of the post-Chevron regime.”
Richard Wiles, president of the Center for Climate Integrity: “The sky’s the limit for industry now. No regulation is immune from challenge. As just one example, if the industry decides to challenge the E.P.A.’s underlying authority to regulate CO2, they might win and it would have an enormous impact on climate policy. The same could apply to all rules, mileage standards, power plant emissions, etc.”
Thomas Berry, legal fellow, the Cato Institute, and Travis Fisher, director of energy and environmental policy studies: “It’s important to note that many climate-related policies are promulgated by independent agencies such as the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. Since these rule makers cannot be removed by the president on the grounds of policy disagreement, they lack a clear chain of democratic accountability.
“Going forward, a court must now review rules based on the court’s best reading of the statutory text (text that was passed by Congress, which is elected by the people) without deference to the interpretations of these rule makers — interpretations which are often grounded more in the rule makers’ policy preferences than in their legal interpretive abilities.”
Brock said her organization saw “a glimmer of hope in the court’s decision.”
Of the ruling, she said: “Chief Justice Roberts created a space to allow for congressional delegation of agency discretion to fill in the details of a statutory scheme by using language like ‘appropriate’ or ‘reasonable.’ This could give space to agencies to address climate.”
What happens to U.S. climate goals?
Bapna: “Because new climate rules don’t rely on Chevron, and because Congress, through the Inflation Reduction Act, has strengthened climate and clean energy incentives and the E.P.A.’s regulatory authority, we don’t think this court ruling will, or should, block U.S. climate progress. There will be lots of lawsuits, but we believe the E.P.A.’s standards meet the court’s new test.”
Wiles: “There is no scenario where the country can achieve the kind of climate policy needed to actually solve the problem without a clear act of Congress. So in that regard, looked at narrowly from a climate perspective, Chevron just shines a spotlight on our collective failure to generate the power needed 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 E.P.A. to issue aggressive new climate regulations based on our existing laws. And it will make it harder to defend President Biden’s expansive suite of pollution control regulations in court.”
Which regulations will be challenged?
Burger: “At this point, every regulation that this administration has put on the books when it comes to climate change is already being challenged pretty much as soon as they are published. So I don’t know that this makes them any more likely to be challenged sooner.”
Brock: “We expect industry to continue its assault on regulations that protect Americans by protecting the environment. In our own marine conservation sector, however, it is not clear whether this decision will have an impact and, if it does, what that impact will be.”
Berry and Fisher: “In the short term, the ruling means courts are more likely to restrict the E.P.A.’s ability to use long-extant sections of the Clean Air Act to enact sweeping climate rules,” they said, pointing to regulations on power plants. “Courts will now evaluate the E.P.A.’s interpretation solely on the strength of its legal justification, without any deference favoring the E.P.A.’s views.”
Sankar said that the biggest targets would be rules where the E.P.A. has 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’ll do that whenever they can argue that the agency’s regulation isn’t clearly justified by the language of the underlying law.”
5 things to know
New heat rules to protect workers. The Biden administration on Tuesday will propose first-of-their-kind regulations to protect millions exposed to dangerous heat on the job. Last year, the hottest in recorded history, 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 operations to access the Alaskan wilderness.
A bad sign for hurricane season. Over the course of a few days, the system called Beryl intensified from 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 that a storm has grown so big. The fast growth of Beryl reflects hot ocean conditions that could bring 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 had paused that process in January to analyze how those exports affect climate change, the economy and national security. The decision is a response to a lawsuit filed by 16 Republican state attorneys general.
Small streams are responsible for over half of the water flowing out of America’s river basins, according to a new study. Last year, the Supreme Court sharply restricted the federal government’s ability to limit pollution in these streams, which sit dry for much of the year and fill up only after rainfall or snowmelt. The findings suggest that the ruling could leave large bodies of water vulnerable to pollution
Britain’s Labour Party appears to be on the cusp of a landslide victory in the country’s elections on Thursday, after 14 years of Conservative government. Ed Miliband, one of the Labour Party’s most influential figures, told The Guardian that his party wanted to make the country a global climate leader.