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Supreme Court rules against EPA on power plant emissions

The pollutants can lead to developmental problems in children.

By Andrew V. Pestano
The Supreme Court ruled against the Environmental Protection Agency and the administration of President Barack Obama, which aimed to limit mercury and other toxic pollutant emissions without accounting for costs. File Photo by Stephen Shaver/UPI
The Supreme Court ruled against the Environmental Protection Agency and the administration of President Barack Obama, which aimed to limit mercury and other toxic pollutant emissions without accounting for costs. File Photo by Stephen Shaver/UPI | License Photo

WASHINGTON, June 29 (UPI) -- The Supreme Court on Monday ruled against the Environmental Protection Agency's aims to limit mercury and other toxic pollutant emissions without accounting for costs.

The court ruled in a 5-4 decision. Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Antonin Scalia, Samuel Alito, Anthony Kennedy and Clarence Thomas voted in the majority.

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"EPA must consider cost -- including cost of compliance -- before deciding whether regulation is appropriate and necessary. It will be up to the Agency to decide (as always, within the limits of reasonable interpretation) how to account for cost," the court's ruling read.

"What EPA claims for itself here is not the power to make political judgments in implementing Congress' policies, nor even the power to make tradeoffs between competing policy goals set by Congress," Thomas wrote in the majority opinion. "It is the power to decide... which policy goals EPA wishes to pursue."

Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Justice Elena Kagan dissented.

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"The majority arrives at a different conclusion only by disregarding most of EPA's regulatory process. It insists that EPA must consider costs -- when EPA did just that, over and over and over again," Kagan wrote in the court's dissent. "The result is a decision that deprives the Agency of the latitude Congress gave it to design an emissions-setting process sensibly accounting for costs and benefits alike."

"The result is a decision that deprives the American public of the pollution control measures that the responsible Agency, acting well within its delegated authority, found would save many, many lives," Kagan concluded.

The EPA rules were established by President Barack Obama. The Supreme Court's vote delivers a blow to his administration's clean-energy goals.

In the lead case, Michigan v. Environmental Protection Agency, industry groups and Republican-led states challenged Obama's order to reduce electricity-generating power plant emissions on mercury and other pollutants that can lead to respiratory illnesses, birth defects and developmental problems in children.

The EPA action is against coal and oil-fired power plants that contribute to about half of the country's output of mercury. The new rules on mercury and other pollutants such as chromium, arsenic and nickel, were to begin in April and would have taken full effect in 2016, with the aim of reducing toxic emissions by 90 percent.

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Justices needed to decide whether health risks were the only consideration for regulating hazardous pollutants or if costs are also a factor. The EPA factored in costs at later stages of writing the regulations.

Nearly 60 percent of power plants that generate electricity by burning coal are more than 40 years old and the EPA believes those older facilities create much of the air pollution that's detrimental to the nation's health and environment.

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