The U.S. Supreme Court put an important air pollution plan on hold today that would have limited air pollution in about a dozen states while a lower court rules on a challenge to the plan.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Good Neighbor Plan restricts smokestack emissions and industrial emissions that can burden downwind areas outside of the state’s boundaries.
States like Wisconsin and Connecticut have argued that they struggle to meet federal ozone standards because of air pollution from neighboring states. The Good Neighbor Plan essentially attempts to address that.
With the stay in place that prevents enforcement of the rule, the case is now being sent back to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.
The case stems from the 2015 revision of the EPA’s air quality standards for ozone. Once those standards were revised, states had to submit new implementation plans for how they would meet those standards.
Later on, the EPA rejected about 20 of those states’ implementation plans because the regulators claimed they had failed to adequately address obligations under the Good Neighbor Provision. While 20 of the states had their plans rejected, that number was reduced over time.
States and companies like Kinder Morgan challenged the EPA’s actions.
The majority opinion found that the emissions standards set in the EPA’s Good Neighbor Plan would harm the states unless implementation was paused pending a lower court decision.
The Supreme Court blocked the EPA’s ability to enforce the rule on a 5-4 split with Justice Neil Gorsuch penning the majority opinion. Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote the dissenting opinion and was joined by justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Katanji Brown Jackson dissenting.
“Here, the federal government announced its intention to reject over 20 States’ plans for controlling ozone pollution. In their place, the government sought to impose a single, uniform federal plan,” Gorsuch wrote in the majority opinion.
Environmental advocates argue that the Supreme Court’s decision will lead to dirtier air.
“In a hot summer of dangerous smog around the country, this decision means that Americans will be breathing dirtier, unhealthy air,” Christophe Courchesne, director of the Environmental Advocacy Clinic at Vermont Law and Graduate School, said in a press release. “The court gave polluting industries a free pass before their challenges have even been fully heard by lower courts, an extraordinary reversal of the standard process for challenging pollution regulations. The litigation over these well-supported rules will continue, and the courts should ultimately uphold them.”
Barrett wrote that blocking the enforcement of the Good Neighbor Rule “grants emergency relief in a fact intensive and highly technical case without fully engaging with both the relevant law and the voluminous record.”
