The Supreme Court may be on the verge of eliminating a legal tool that for decades has helped the Environmental Protection Agency defend clean air rules and start to regulate climate pollution.
A decision known as Chevron, a 1984 Supreme Court case that environmentalists lost, has in recent years become a target for conservative groups. The Chevron doctrine says that courts should give agencies some benefit of the doubt when they interpret laws like the Clean Air Act — the basis for EPA efforts to slash greenhouse gas emissions.
If the justices go that route, they would be following about a dozen states that have eradicated or weakened the broad powers given to agencies within their own borders, Pamela King writes.
Conservatives are hopeful that the Supreme Court, with its 6-3 supermajority of Republican appointees, will be sympathetic to their claims that the doctrine takes too much power from Congress and gives it to federal agencies that are far removed from the voters.
‘Random judges’
Groups supporting a rollback of Chevron say successful efforts to weaken agency deference in some states, including Arizona and Ohio, show that doing so at the federal level would not be catastrophic for federal protections of air, water and the climate.
“The sky has not fallen,” said Jon Riches, vice president of litigation at the Goldwater Institute, which helped Arizona enact a law in 2018 to eliminate agency deference.
Defenders of Chevron say that stripping broad regulatory powers from any administration, Republican or Democratic, places too much power in the hands of unelected federal judges with lifetime tenure and limited accountability to voters.
“We’re going to have random judges … exercising the control,” said Renée Landers, a law professor at Suffolk University.
In recent years, Chevron has fallen out of favor at the Supreme Court. The federal government doesn’t cite the doctrine to defend its rules. The justices don’t mention it in their decisions.
But some lower courts still apply Chevron to uphold federal rules, and conservative lawyers have asked the justices to stop them. The Supreme Court will hear arguments in their cases — Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo and Relentless v. Commerce — in January.
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An irony defines the legacy of Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), a coal-state lawmaker who announced Thursday he won’t seek reelection in 2024.
Manchin, a fierce supporter of the fossil fuel industry, will be most remembered for playing a critical role in passing Democrats’ climate law in 2022, writes Timothy Cama.
Manchin has been one of the few Democratic voices pushing for an “all-of-the-above” energy policy that embraces both renewables and fossil fuels. But his eventual support of the Inflation Reduction Act, with about $400 billion to support an energy transition, allowed the law to pass without any Republican support.
After signing the IRA into law, Biden handed Manchin the pen he signed it with.
“Without Sen. Manchin, there probably wouldn’t have been an IRA,” said Robbie Diamond, president and CEO of the nonprofit SAFE, which advocates for domestic energy production.
Manchin also pushed hard for building a domestic supply chain for cleaner industries, even if that slows down renewable energy and electric vehicle deployment, write Jame Bikales, Kelsey Tamborrino, Zack Colman and Ben Lefebvre.
His insistence on building clean energy supply chains in the U.S. opened a door for new industries to replace high-emission businesses in states like West Virginia where coal businesses have declined.
“He was able to make workers a central part of the conversation and not just simply emissions,” said Collin O’Mara, CEO of the National Wildlife Federation. “There’s a whole lot of workers in the energy industry that actually have a future now because of the work that he did.”
Manchin has been a headache to climate-conscious Democrats and environmentalists hoping to rapidly cut carbon emissions. But his absence would be felt even to climate hawks, as Democrats face a tough Senate map in 2024.
Manchin’s Senate seat is most likely to go to Jim Justice, the Republican governor of West Virginia who, like Manchin, has deep ties to the coal industry.
“I think environmentalists will really miss him when he’s gone,” said Alex Trembath, deputy director at the Breakthrough Institute, a progressive think tank focused on climate issues.
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