Another hurdle for Biden’s climate goals: the Supreme Court

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Roll Call

As he tries to wrangle environmental support abroad, President Joe Biden faces a new climate challenge in Washington, where the Supreme Court could upend the EPA’s power to regulate carbon emissions under a long-standing air pollution law.

In an order late Friday, the court agreed to hear arguments in a case from Republican attorneys general and coal companies calling on it to limit the EPA’s legal ability to regulate greenhouse gas emissions.

The challenge to EPA’s authority stems from a January ruling from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, which vacated the Trump administration’s primary environmental regulation for electric utilities, sending it back to EPA and giving the Biden administration the chance to write its own rule on emissions from the power sector.

“It’s hard to know how big a deal it will be,” Sean Hecht, an environmental law professor at UCLA, said in an interview. “But it seems unlikely that the court would have accepted review of the case if they weren’t planning on disagreeing with the D.C. circuit.”

The court’s decision to hear the case “certainly isn’t a good sign for climate action at EPA,” he said.