The Supreme Court has spoken: The Clean Air Act doesn’t give the EPA broad authority to force power plants to abandon fossil fuels. And while the ruling’s most obvious consequences directly affect the Environmental Protection Agency and the Biden administration’s ability to implement green energy plans with no need to rely on Congress, the broader effects will likely be felt far and wide throughout the executive branch. Could this be the death of Biden’s green agenda? With his executive power to regulate from the White House reduced, the president will just have to work with Congress and hope for the best – precisely as the Founders intended.
In a 6-3 ruling on West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency, the Supreme Court ruled that the EPA exceeded its authority to regulate power plants. Chief Justice John Roberts authored the opinion, and was joined by Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett. Justices Elena Kagan dissented and was joined by Sonia Sotomayor and Stephen Breyer. In addition to deciding that the Clean Air Act didn’t grant the agency power to regulate as it pleases, the majority also refuted the EPA’s claim that “Congress implicitly tasked it, and it alone, with balancing the many vital considerations of national policy implications in the basic regulation of how Americans get their energy.” As Liberty Nation reported immediately after the ruling, this will “stand as a breakwater against Congress’ delegation of its lawmaking authority.”
Ain’t It Just Awful?
“It is a major loss not only for the Biden administration’s climate goals, but it also calls into question the future of federal-level climate action and puts even more pressure on Congress to act to reduce emissions,” CNN Climate Reporter Ella Nilsen laments. She’s absolutely right, of course – but that isn’t a bad thing. The presidency was never intended to have the sweeping regulatory power it holds today, and legislating was always supposed to be the purview of Congress.
It’s easy to take the constitutionality of executive branch regulations for granted simply because they’ve been allowed for so long. After all, the Environmental Protection Agency was founded more than half a century ago in 1970, and what purpose does it serve if not to regulate pollution?
Now let’s examine that assumption from a different angle. The EPA has been around for 52 years – but it was founded a whopping 182 years after the Constitution took effect and 134 years after the last remaining Founding Father, James Madison, died in 1836. How quickly we grow used to a government’s power grab.
(Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
The green agenda is far from dead, of course. The administration will continue to attempt executive actions as well as to convince enough senators to sign on to whatever legislation it proposes.
It Ain’t as Bad as It Sounds
Climate change activists fear the worst – Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) was in such a panic she tweeted that SCOTUS and the filibuster both have to go – but things aren’t as bad as the doomsayers want you to believe. In 2020, the Asia Pacific region pumped out 16,753,000,000 tons of carbon dioxide compared to North America’s 5,307,000,000 – and has maintained two to three times the emissions since 2010. China leads Asia and the world with 11,680,420,000 tons of carbon dioxide, and the US leads North America with 4,535,300,000.
As for carbon dioxide reduction, the US has led the world over several years. According to a 2017 BP Statistical Review of World Energy, the United States had reduced its total carbon footprint by 758 million metric tons since 2005 – nearly as much as the 700 million metric tons achieved by all 28 European Union nations combined. That trend continued, according to a 2020 International Energy Agency report, and that was after America achieved energy independence under President Donald Trump’s oil-friendly administration.
Joe Manchin (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
Looking to the Horizon
So do greener pastures lie ahead? Not with the current Senate composition. Even if the left could finish off the filibuster – which hasn’t happened yet, despite the failure of so-called equality and voting rights bills and now even the demise of Roe v. Wade – the Democrats would still face dissension in their own ranks on this issue. Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) simply isn’t willing to kill coal or other proven energy sources. Without a miraculous flip of Manchin or at least one Republican, Biden’s only hope for actual legislative progress lies in convincing America to vote blue in November 2022. But as things stand right now, his budding dreams of being remembered as the president to cancel fossil fuels – like so many other goals – seem to have withered on the vine.
