A recent surge of emergency petitions at the U.S. Supreme Court is putting critical air pollution rules introduced by the Biden administration in jeopardy.
Bloomberg Law reported that the Biden administration has actively sought to combat air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions, implementing stringent regulations on power plants and industries. The drive to safeguard the environment by regulating emissions of toxins like mercury and methane reflects Washington's commitment to climate-focused policies.
However, the Supreme Court of the United States has shown a growing penchant for entertaining challenges to these regulations through emergency petitions.
This trend threatens not just the implementation of these crucial rules, but also the overarching stability of environmental protection protocols.
The court’s openness to emergency motions suggests increasing judicial involvement in environmental affairs, a movement that took on momentum following the Ohio v. EPA case this June.
The court's decision to pause tighter ozone regulations endorsed by the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit has opened the gates for more such stays against Biden's environmental regulations.
This shift is evident as myriad entities, including Republican-led states and various industry groups, lodge these emergency petitions.
They argue that the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) mandates stymie innovation and unfairly weigh down industries with excessive costs.
The trajectory now suggests a tangled future for the implementation of environmental programs.
After Ohio, further petitions rapidly emerged, challenging the established legal threshold for deploying new environmental standards. Specifically, recent stays concerning methane leak monitoring underscore the heightened interest in these legal challenges.
Emily Schilling, a legal expert on environmental matters, emphasizes this new environment of precarious legal certainties. "For the EPA, the movement towards the Supreme Court being willing to hear stay motions is going to implement any environmental statutory program, if not more difficult, then it certainly will create more uncertainty,” she noted.
The EPA’s troubles are compounded by claims of inadequate stakeholder engagement and improper scrutiny by the D.C. Circuit—the same issues flagged in the Ohio decision. This recurring problem highlights a potentially troubling trend where initial judicial review plays a decisive role in the fate of environmental legislation.
Paul Miller, another legal scholar, critiques the judicial pivot apparent in the Ohio decision, suggesting that it "flies against the Clean Air Act’s mandate to put health over cost to industry, and it sends a signal to critics that challenges to rules don’t need to be fully litigated to prevail."
The Supreme Court's shadow docket, thus named for its expedited decision-making process without comprehensive briefings, has become a strategic battleground.
Critics like Vickie Patton decry the docket’s fostering of rapid, less scrutinized challenges. “The Supreme Court has created a dynamic on the shadow docket that really invites chaos and invites industry to make outlandish claims that don’t get the scrutiny that they would in the lower courts,” she argued.
The court's increasing involvement in questioning nuanced aspects of EPA rules signifies a shift from a more opaque oversight to a decidedly more critical and detailed examination.
The legal backlog is now crowded with cases that probe the indirect paths through which the Supreme Court can influence environmental law. These developments suggest a judicial skepticism about broad regulatory authority, seen previously under the Obama administration's Clean Power Plan, which faced its share of legal hurdles.
The broader implications of this shift are profound, touching upon America’s ability to commit to its environmental policies. As echoed by Paul Miller, the success of such legal challenges “opens the door, and successfully, for these challenges to halt rules that, in terms of their breadth, are nothing like the predecessor rules.”