West Virginia V. EPA Decision Handicaps Efforts To Fight Climate Change

One Democratic senator warned the high court’s right-wing majority “could unleash a new era of reckless deregulation that will gut protections for all Americans and the environment.”

Climate advocates are apprehensively watching the U.S. Supreme Court Thursday morning as it’s expected to deliver a ruling that could imperil the federal government’s regulatory authority to rein in carbon dioxide emissions from power plants, striking a potentially fatal blow to global efforts to fight the climate crisis.

Emissions bellow from smokestacks with an urban environment in the foreground

The closely watched case, formally known as West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency, is the culmination of a yearslong legal campaign by Republican attorneys general and right-wing activists financed by the oil and gas industry, which is hoping the high court’s right-wing supermajority will hand down a decision that guts the EPA’s rulemaking authority.

If the court does just that, it would spell doom for President Joe Biden’s stated goal of transitioning the U.S. to a 100% clean electricity sector by 2035. As the Washington Post notes, West Virginia v. EPA “comes before a Supreme Court that’s even more conservative than the one that stopped the Obama administration’s plan to drastically reduce power plants’ carbon output in 2016.”

“This will undoubtedly be the most important environmental law case on the court’s docket this term, and could well become one of the most significant environmental law cases of all time,” said Jonathan Adler, an environmental law expert at Case Western Reserve University School of Law.

Given the United States’ status as the world’s largest historical emitter and second-largest current emitter of planet-warming carbon dioxide, the Supreme Court’s decision will have serious ramifications for global efforts to avert climate catastrophe.

“The Supreme Court could hand down an extreme decision in the case of West Virginia v. EPA, which would devastate the federal government’s ability to curb climate chaos,” Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) tweeted late Wednesday. “The Supreme Court must not give corporations license to recklessly destroy our planet.”

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) similarly warned earlier this week that the Supreme Court’s ruling “could unleash a new era of reckless deregulation that will gut protections for all Americans and the environment.”

During oral arguments over the case earlier this year, the Supreme Court’s conservative justices appeared inclined to restrict the EPA’s regulatory authority to slash carbon emissions—authority that the court affirmed a decade and a half ago in Massachusetts v. EPA.

Climate experts and advocates fear the worst from the industry-friendly Supreme Court majority.

“Each morning at 10 am, my anxiety spikes,” Sara Colangelo, director of the Environmental Law and Justice Clinic at Georgetown University Law Center, told the Post Thursday morning, referring to the time the court’s ruling is expected to drop.