The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday batted away several industry and state challenges to recent U.S. Environmental Protection Agency rules imposing tougher standards on coal plants and oil and gas facilities.
The court’s decisions leave in place new EPA regulations that, in one case, force coal facilities to reduce mercury and other toxic emissions within three years and, in another, require states to quickly adopt plans to reduce methane and “volatile organic compound” emissions from oil and gas wells and plants.
The court has yet to resolve another pending set of industry and state challenges to an EPA rule requiring significant reductions in carbon emissions from power plants set to take effect next decade. That rule requires fossil fuel-burning power plants to install new carbon capture sequestration technology, or CCS, to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 90% by 2032.
Still, Friday’s denials are a noticeable break from the court’s decisions last term to take up, and ultimately rule in favor of, an emergency docket industry and state challenge to an EPA rule regulating air quality standards in upwind states.
The denials are likely only a temporary reprieve for the agency as litigation is all but certain to continue in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit; the groups had sought emergency “stays” that would have blocked the rules from taking effect while they challenge the merits of the regulations in court.
Still, the high court’s decision to deny such relief means the EPA will, for now, continue its efforts to go after arsenic, lead and mercury emitted by coal-fired smokestacks.
One of the agency’s recent rules imposes more stringent emissions standards and monitoring on a handful of coal plants around the country, at an estimated cost of $860 million over a 10-year period, which is expected to fall mostly on a handful of outdated facilities. Most of the industry is already, or will soon be, in compliance with the rule.
In a one-line order, with no public dissents, the court threw out a flurry of emergency applications to the EPA’s latest rule announcing mercury and air toxics standards for coal-fired power plants. The challengers, which include more than 20 states with Republican attorneys general, argued that the EPA exceeded its authority under the Clean Air Act and that the rule would impose excessive costs with little public health benefits.
“It is meaningless to consider a rule’s costs without considering its corresponding benefits,” one challenger, NACCO Natural Resources Corp., wrote in its application to the Supreme Court. “Regulation for the sake of regulation is not ‘appropriate,’ let alone ‘necessary.'”
Environmental groups defended the revised MATS rule, and said the EPA program to reduce mercury and other toxic emissions from power plans “has been a huge boon for public health.”
Still, they said, “MATS’s broad success in reducing toxic emissions has not been universal; it is the remaining gaps, with corresponding dangers for affected populations, that the Update Rule addresses.”
The EPA defended its action and counseled the court to deny the stay.
“[T]he rule is not arbitrary and capricious because EPA adequately considered costs, benefits, power-grid reliability, and all other important aspects of the problem,” the agency wrote.
The court on Friday also rejected two additional challenges to a recent EPA rule requiring states to submit plans to regulate methane and volatile organic compound emissions from oil and gas facilities. Oklahoma led the attack on the methane rule.
Recognizing that requiring states to complete a “herculean task” of designing such plans “from scratch in a two-year period would be impossible,” the EPA announced presumptive standards that the states would have to comply with, in contravention of the federalism principles of the CAA, Oklahoma wrote.
The EPA insisted, however, that its guidelines for state standards are “consistent” with the statute’s approach to “cooperative federalism.”
The cases are NACCO Natural Resources v. EPA, No. 24A178; Westmoreland Mining Holdings v. EPA, No. 24A179; North Dakota v. EPA, No. 24A180; Midwest Ozone Group v. EPA, No. 24A186; Talen Montana v. EPA, No. 24A197; America’s Power v. EPA, No. 24A199; Natural Rural Electric Cooperative Association v. EPA, No. 24A203; Oklahoma v. EPA, No. 24A213; and Continental Resources v. EPA, No. 24A215.