Impact of Supreme Court’s climate ruling spreads – By Alex Guillen (Politico) / July 20, 2022
The legal doctrine that the conservative justices used to strike down an EPA regulation in late June is popping up in a host of new legal challenges — including many having nothing to do with climate change.
Fallout from the Supreme Court’s attack on federal climate regulations is spreading throughout the executive branch, creating legal uncertainty for rules on topics as far afield as abortion, immigration and even amateur auto racing.
Opponents of federal actions on pipelines, asbestos, nuclear waste, corporate disclosures and highway planning are also seizing on the logic of the court’s June 30 decision, which imposed sharp limits on the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to regulate greenhouse gases.
Some regulation foes hope the trend will continue, saying the court has opened the door to a broad rollback of the kinds of agency actions that judges have tolerated for decades.
In their decision, the high court’s six conservative justices invoked what they called the “major questions” doctrine to declare that agencies such as EPA need explicit congressional approval before “asserting highly consequential power” over almost any policy area. But they did not offer a precise definition of what would cause a regulation to qualify as major — a question that agencies and lower courts may now need to spend years wrestling with.
