The implications of the Supreme Court’s decision in West Virginia v. EPA go far beyond dramatically limiting the federal government’s ability to address climate change — significant as that is.
With this decision, the court has done nothing less than transform the law’s basic assumptions about the role of the federal government. From now on, this opinion declares, the courts will enforce a strong presumption against the federal government addressing major social and economic problems. This will have profound implications across, as the court puts it, “all corners of the administrative state” — including environmental protection and worker safety, battling consumer fraud, blocking dangerous pharmaceuticals and taming tech giants’ abuses.
West Virginia v. EPA involved several states’ challenge to the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan, which sought to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in electricity generation in a “systemic” way. The plan prodded utilities not just to make individual plants more efficient but more broadly to shift from coal to natural gas (or to purchase emission credits if they couldn’t do so).
The rule was never implemented, because it was enjoined by the Supreme Court, canceled by the Trump administration and not revived by the Biden administration. Ordinarily, this would cause the Supreme Court to dismiss the case as moot. This particular court, however, was evidently eager to continue the mission to narrow federal regulatory power that it had begun...
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