Supreme Court keeps alive Biden's power plant emissions rule - for now

WASHINGTON − The Supreme Court on Wednesday declined for now to halt the Biden administration’s plan to reduce climate-changing emissions from coal-fired power plants, despite having blocked a previous plan from the Obama administration.

The court rejected an emergency request from Republican states and energy industry groups to keep the deep reduction requirements on hold while they’re being litigated.

Justice Clarence Thomas said he would have granted the request.

Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch said the states and industry groups are likely to eventually win some of their arguments. But there's no urgency for the Supreme Court to step in before the appeals court issues its opinion, they said, because compliance efforts don’t need to start until next year.

"So this Court understandably denies the stay applications for now," Kavanaugh wrote in a brief statement. "Given that the D. C. Circuit is proceeding with dispatch, it should resolve the case in its current term."

Justice Samuel Alito recused himself from the decision without stating the reason.

The rules were announced by the Environmental Protection Agency in April in an effort to combat climate pollution.

“Climate change is the nation’s most pressing environmental challenge,” the administration’s lawyers told the Supreme Court.

Delaying the compliance deadline would allow millions of additional tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, environmental and public health groups said in a filing.

Challengers argue the technology that would be required to keep coal-fired plants operating is unworkable and that the EPA exceeded its authority – just as it did under the Obama administration in a previous attempt to reduce carbon emissions.

In 2022, an ideologically divided Supreme Court said the EPA couldn’t take such a consequential action without more explicit authority from Congress.

It’s “déjà vu all over again,” Republican attorneys general from 25 states told the Supreme Court.

The states – as well as groups representing power producers and the coal industry − had asked the high court to intervene after the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals in July declined to pause the rules.

The appeals court said a pause wasn’t needed because power plants won’t have to comply until years after the challenge has been resolved.

The court also said that, unlike the EPA’s previous plan struck down by the Supreme Court, the current version “falls well within EPA’s bailiwick.”

After the Obama administration’s rules were blocked by the Supreme Court in 2016, the Trump administration repealed them the next year. But Democratic states challenged the repeal, leading to the high court’s 2022 decision that the EPA had overreached.

Power plants account for nearly a quarter of the nation’s greenhouse gas pollution.

Under the rules, existing coal and new natural gas power plants would have to either cut or capture 90% of their greenhouse gas pollution by 2032.

RelatedThe coal industry, running on fumes, likely to shrink more with new EPA power plant rule

The EPA said the Supreme Court should not second-guess its technical and scientific analysis that it’s possible to achieve that reduction level by capturing carbon dioxide emissions and storing them underground. But opponents say the technology is still developing and hasn’t yet shown it can be deployed as quickly or as extensively as the administration suggests.

And the EPA has projected that most coal power plants will likely close by 2045.

Of about 220 operational coal plants remaining today, dozens have already announced plans to retire in the next decade.

While some power companies challenged the EPA – including the Edison Electric Institute, the trade group for investor-owned utilities – some sided with the agency. Pacific Gas and Electric Company and Con Edison were among the major utilities that asked the Supreme Court to keep the rule alive.