Its six conservative judges ruled, once morest the advice of their three progressive colleagues, that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) might not enact general rules to regulate emissions from coal-fired power plants, which produce nearly 20% of electricity in the United States.
“Putting a cap on carbon dioxide emissions at a level that would require a nationwide move away from coal to generate electricity might be a relevant solution to today’s crisis. But it is not plausible that the Congress has given the EPA the authority to enact such a measure,” Judge John Roberts wrote in the ruling.
“Today, the Court stripped the Environmental Protection Agency of the power Congress gave it to address the + most pressing problem of our time +”, denounces in a separate argument the magistrate Elena Kagan on behalf of progressives, recalling that the six hottest years have been recorded during the last decade.
The judgment was immediately welcomed by several Republican governors behind the legal proceedings, but deemed “catastrophic” by the elected Democrat of the House of Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
After the abortion flip-flop last week, he represents yet another change of footing at the Supreme Court.
In 2007, it had decided by a narrow majority that the EPA was competent to regulate the emissions of gases responsible for global warming, in the same way that it is charged by a law of the 1960s with limiting air pollution.
But since then, former Republican President Donald Trump, a climatosceptic hostile to any binding measure for the industry, has brought three magistrates into the temple of American law, cementing his conservative majority (six judges out of nine).
The file finds its source in an ambitious plan adopted in 2015 by Barack Obama to reduce CO2 emissions. This “Clean Power Plan”, whose implementation fell to the EPA, had been blocked before coming into force.
In 2019, Donald Trump published his own “Affordable Clean Energy Rule”, limiting the scope of the EPA’s action within each electricity production site, without authorizing it to remodel the entire network.
A federal court having invalidated this version, several conservative states and the coal industry asked the Supreme Court to intervene and clarify the powers of the EPA.
The government of Democrat Joe Biden had made it known that it did not intend to resurrect Barack Obama’s plan and had asked the High Court to declare the file null and void.
A “devastating” decision
A spokesman for the White House denounced Thursday “a new devastating decision of the (Supreme) Court which aims to set our country back”, following the institution weakened the power of environmental regulation of the federal state.
US President Joe Biden “will not hesitate to use his powers under the law to protect public health and address the climate change crisis,” according to a short statement released to the press.
