Supreme Court Ruled on April 2, 2007 – Clean up Green House Gases – Part 2

As reported by the New York Times, Federal, State and Local court cases around the country had been held up while awaiting the Supreme Court decision on the case of green house gases and the Environmental Protection Agency and Automobile Emissions. Among the cases put on hold is a challenge to the environmental protection agency’s refusal to regulate carbon dioxide emissions from power plants, which is now pending in the federal appeals court in Washington, D.C. Individual states, led by the great state of California, are also moving aggressively into what they have seen as a regulatory vacuum.

Supreme Court Justice Stevens, joined by Justices Anthony M. Kennedy, David H. Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer, said that by providing nothing more than a “laundry list of reasons not to regulate,” the environmental protection agency had defied the Clean Air Act’s “clear statutory command.” He said a refusal to regulate could be based only on science and “reasoned justification,” adding that while the statute left the central determination to the “judgment” of the agency’s administrator, “the use of the word ‘judgment’ is not a roving license to ignore the statutory text.”

The Supreme Court also decided that a second Clean Air Act case Monday, adopting a broad reading of the environmental protection agency’s authority over factories and power plants that add production capacity or make technical renovations that increase emissions of air pollutants. In doing so, the court reopened a federal enforcement effort against the Duke Energy Corporation under the Clean Air Act’s “new source review” provision. The vote in the second case, Environmental Defense v. Duke Energy Corp., No. 05-848, was 9 to 0.