Gutting the EPA, the latest Supreme Court ruling dictates that only Congress can regulate emissions coming from existing power plants.
In 2015, the Environmental Protection Agency issued a directive to all standing coal power plants in the U.S. to either reduce production or contribute to alternate energy subsidies. The directive was never implemented, because since the day after it was issued it has been under challenge in court. One case, known as West Virginia v. the Environmental Protection Agency, made to to the Supreme Court.
The EPA was tasked by Congress in its creation to make the decisions balancing consumer need with environmental protection. That is what it is, and always has been for. But 6 of the 9 current Supreme Court justices disagree.
“There is little reason to think Congress assigned such decisions,” about environmental protections to the Environmental Protection Agency, wrote Chief Justice John Roberts in the majority opinion gutting the EPA.
“Capping carbon dioxide emissions at a level that will force a nationwide transition away from the use of coal to generate electricity may be a sensible ‘solution to the crisis of the day.’” Roberts wrote, dismissing the matters of climate change and widespread air pollution as ‘the crisis of the day.’ “But it is not plausible that Congress gave EPA the authority to adopt on its own such a regulatory scheme.”
Again, that authority is precisely what the EPA was created to be. That is the whole, entire reason for which Congress created it.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said in a statement that the ruling “adds to a number of dangerously outrageous decisions that have rightly tarnished the public’s confidence in the Court.”
The same 6/3 set of the court has also in recent weeks thrown out medical privacy along with the federal right to abortion, allegedly in the name of state’s rights, while almost simultaneously saying that New York state had no right to write their own weapon restrictions.
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