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Justices Say E.P.A. Has Power to Act on Harmful
Gases
By LINDA GREENHOUSE
Published: April 3, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/03/washington/03scotus.html?
WASHINGTON, April 2 — In one of its most important
environmental decisions in years, the Supreme Court
ruled on Monday that the Environmental Protection
Agency has the authority to regulate heat-trapping
gases in automobile emissions. The court further
ruled that the agency could not sidestep its
authority to regulate the greenhouse gases that
contribute to global climate change unless it could
provide a scientific basis for its refusal.
The 5-to-4 decision was a strong rebuke to the Bush
administration, which has maintained that it does
not have the right to regulate carbon dioxide and
other heat-trapping gases under the Clean Air Act,
and that even if it did, it would not use the
authority. The ruling does not force the
environmental agency to regulate auto emissions, but
it would almost certainly face further legal action
if it failed to do so.
Writing for the majority, Justice John Paul Stevens
said the only way the agency could “avoid taking
further action” now was “if it determines that
greenhouse gases do not contribute to climate
change” or provides a good explanation why it cannot
or will not find out whether they do.
Beyond the specific context for this case —
so-called “tailpipe emissions” from cars and trucks,
which account for about one-fourth of the country’s
total emissions of heat-trapping gases — the
decision is likely to have a broader impact on the
debate over government efforts to address global
warming.
Court cases around the country had been held up to
await the decision in this case. Among them is a
challenge to the environmental agency’s refusal to
regulate carbon dioxide emissions from power plants,
now pending in the federal appeals court here.
Individual states, led by California, are also
moving aggressively into what they have seen as a
regulatory vacuum.
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 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 court also decided a second Clean Air Act case
Monday, adopting a broad reading of the
environmental agency’s authority over factories and
power plants that add capacity or make 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.
The two decisions left environmental advocates
exultant. Many said they still harbored doubts about
the federal agency and predicted that the decision
would help push the Democratic-controlled Congress
to address the issue.
Even in the nine months since the Supreme Court
agreed to hear the first case, Massachusetts v.
Environmental Protection Agency, No. 05-1120, and
accelerating since the elections in November, there
has been a growing interest among industry groups in
working with environmental organizations on
proposals for emissions limits.
Dave McCurdy, president of the Alliance of
Automobile Manufacturers, the main industry trade
group, said in response to the decision that the
alliance “looks forward to working constructively
with both Congress and the administration” in
addressing the issue. “This decision says that the
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency will be part of
this process,” Mr. McCurdy said.
If the decision sowed widespread claims of victory,
it left behind a prominent loser: Chief Justice John
G. Roberts Jr., who argued vigorously in a
dissenting opinion that the court never should have
reached the merits of the case or addressed the
question of the agency’s legal obligations.
His dissent, which Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence
Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr. also signed, focused
solely on the issue of legal standing to sue:
whether the broad coalition of states, cities and
environmental groups that brought the lawsuit
against the environmental agency four years ago
should have been accepted as plaintiffs in the first
place.
This was the issue on which the coalition’s lawsuit
had appeared most vulnerable, given that in recent
years the Supreme Court has steadily raised the
barrier to standing, especially in environmental
cases. Justice Scalia has long been a leader in that
effort, and Chief Justice Roberts made clear that,
as his statements and actions in his pre-judicial
career indicated, he is fully aboard Justice
Scalia’s project.
Chief Justice Roberts said the court should not have
found that Massachusetts or any of the other
plaintiffs had standing. The finding “has caused us
to transgress the proper — and properly limited —
role of the courts in a democratic society,” he
said, quoting from a 1984 decision. And, quoting
from a decision Justice Scalia wrote in 1992, he
said, “This court’s standing jurisprudence simply
recognizes that redress of grievances of the sort at
issue here is the function of Congress and the chief
executive, not the federal courts.”
Chief Justice Roberts complained that “today’s
decision recalls the previous high-water mark of
diluted standing requirements,” a 1973 decision
known as the Scrap case. That was an environmental
case that the Supreme Court allowed to proceed on a
definition of standing so generous as to be all but
unthinkable today. “Today’s decision is Scrap for a
new generation,” the chief justice said, not
intending the comparison as a compliment.
The majority addressed the standing question by
noting that it was only necessary for one of the
many plaintiffs to meet the three-part definition of
standing: that it had suffered a “concrete and
particularized injury,” that the injury was “fairly
traceable to the defendant” and that a favorable
decision would be likely to “redress that injury.”
Massachusetts, one of the 12 state plaintiffs, met
the test, Justice Stevens said, because it had made
a case that global warming was raising the sea level
along its coast, presenting the state with a “risk
of catastrophic harm” that “would be reduced to some
extent” if the government undertook the regulation
the state sought.
In addition, Justice Stevens said, Massachusetts was
due special deference in its claim to standing
because of its status as a sovereign state. This new
twist on the court’s standing doctrine may have been
an essential tactic in winning the vote of Justice
Kennedy, a leader in the court’s federalism
revolution of recent years. Justice Stevens, a
dissenter from the court’s states’ rights rulings
and a master of court strategy, in effect managed to
use federalism as a sword rather than a shield.
Following its discussion of standing, the majority
made short work of the agency’s threshold argument
that the Clean Air Act simply did not authorize it
to regulate heat-trapping gases because carbon
dioxide and the other gases were not “air
pollutants” within the meaning of the law.
“The statutory text forecloses E.P.A.’s reading,”
Justice Stevens said, adding that “greenhouse gases
fit well within the Clean Air Act’s capacious
definition of air pollutant.”
The justices in the majority also indicated that
they were persuaded by the existing evidence of the
impact of automobile emissions on the environment.
The agency itself “does not dispute the existence of
a causal connection between man-made gas emissions
and global warming,” Justice Stevens noted, adding
that “judged by any standard, U.S. motor-vehicle
emissions make a meaningful contribution to
greenhouse gas concentrations.”
Justice Scalia wrote a dissenting opinion, signed by
the other three dissenters, disputing the majority’s
statutory analysis.
The decision overturned a 2005 ruling by the federal
appeals court here.
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