What Everyone Is Getting Wrong About The Supreme Court’s Mercury Pollution Ruling

[kristopher]

What Everyone Is Getting Wrong About The Supreme Court’s Mercury Pollution Ruling
BY EMILY ATKIN POSTED ON JUNE 29, 201


Despite reports to the contrary in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and briefly this publication, the Supreme Court didn’t actually “strike down” the EPA’s regulations of toxic air pollution from power plants on Monday.

What the Supreme Court did do was put the regulation — which limits toxic heavy metal pollution like mercury from coal and oil-fired plants — in jeopardy. In a 5-4 decision led by Justice Antonin Scalia, the court said the EPA acted unlawfully when it failed to consider how much the regulation would cost the power industry before deciding to craft the rule.

However, that doesn’t mean the rule is gone. In fact, it’s still in place at this very moment. Right now, power plants are still required to limit their emissions of mercury, arsenic, chromium, and other toxins. A spokesperson for the EPA confirmed this to ThinkProgress.

What the Supreme Court’s ruling does is send the current mercury rule to the D.C. Circuit court for further consideration. The D.C. Circuit could very well invalidate the rule. But it could also uphold it, if the court finds more harm than good would be done by repealing it, or if the agency can offer a reasonable explanation of why costs weren’t included early on in the administrative record.

The D.C. Circuit has often left rules in place under similar circumstances...

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2015/06/29/3675141/no-supreme-court-did-not-invalidate-mercury-rule/

[elleng]

1. Thanks for the explanation.

These are often useful when addressing court matters, as they're often laden with procedural aspects that are not explained or understood by the media.

[riversedge]

2. and the rule is still in place....

Lazy reporting.


.....At its core, Monday’s ruling just says that consideration must come earlier in the process. And while Scalia’s ruling hinted that he thought the rule was too expensive to be justified, the effect of the ruling says nothing of the sort.

“[The ruling] said EPA had to consider costs, but it’s not saying anything about how EPA is supposed to consider costs and whether that particular decision would be right or wrong,” Pew said.

Another reason environmentalists might breathe at least a small sigh of relief is that many of the requirements set by the mercury regulations are already in place. A big chunk of power plants were forced to be in compliance with the rule back in April, meaning many power plants already have their emissions control systems installed. Of course, if the ruling is eventually invalidated, those plants could just turn those systems off if they really wanted to.

[Romeo.lima333]

3. it failed to consider how much the regulation would cost the power industry before deciding to craf

why should this be a consideration. power companies dont consider how their rate hikes will affect consumers

[riversedge]

4. Huff post has an article that does not mention any of your post..

although it does have other good information

this is confusing--and irritating!


.....


http://www.huffingtonpost.com/davidhalperin/meet-the-lawyers-who-push_b_7690466.html?utm_hp_ref=tw
David Halperin

Attorney, advocate, writer at RepublicReport.org

Meet the Lawyers Who Pushed the Supreme Court to Block Toxic Power Plant Rules
Posted: 06/29/2015 3:36 pm EDT Updated: 31 minutes ago


In the last announced decision of its term, the U.S. Supreme Court today, by a 5-4 vote and an opinion by Justice Antonin Scalia, struck down the Environmental Protection Agency's carefully crafted rules to limit the emission of mercury and other toxic pollutants from oil and coal power plants.

Justice Scalia concluded that the EPA failed to meet its duty to consider the financial costs of the regulations. But as Justice Elana Kagan documented in her dissent for four justices, Scalia failed to acknowledge that the agency did in fact repeatedly consider costs, and he essentially substituted five justices' expertise for that of the agency, in violation of long-standing precedents. Kagan noted that the EPA found that benefits of the rule included 11,000 fewer premature deaths per year, along with many more avoided illnesses.

A brief filed by a group of nonprofit organizations that intervened in the case -- including the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Lung Association, the NAACP, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and the Sierra Club -- pointed to EPA findings that the power plants at issue "remain huge emitters of numerous congressionally designated toxics, including ones that cause permanent neurological impairment, birth defects, and cancer." Meanwhile, even a group of utility companies had argued that the rules were "economically practicable and have already been achieved by a large portion of the power sector"; the companies told the Court that they and others had "invested billions in installing emissions controls and developing state-of-the-art, highly efficient, low- or zero-emissions electric generation units. Yet, until the Rule takes effect, such plants will continue to be competitively disadvantaged relative to old, high-emitting facilities that do not bear the cost of controlling emissions of hazardous air pollutants, thereby discouraging further investments to modernize the Nation's generation fleet."

But the five-justice majority ignored all these considerations and threw out the entire regulation.....

[kristopher]

5. Time: "Supreme Court Ruling Is Far From a Death Sentence for Obama’s Clean Power Plant Rule"

...Stock of Peabody Energy, a major coal company (and one of the many petitioners in the case), shot up Monday morning shortly after the ruling, and news articles said the court decision “threw out” and “struck down” the rule, which has been 25 years in the making. But legal experts say that’s not true.

“The court didn’t do anything to this rule. The case now gets remanded to the D.C. Circuit [court],” Richard Revesz, director of the Institute for Policy Integrity and dean emeritus of New York University Law School, said shortly after the ruling was released. “I don’t think this is any blow at all. I think it is pretty clear that this rule will ultimately be upheld.”

http://www.newsweek.com/supreme-court-ruling-far-death-sentence-obamas-clean-power-plant-rules-348249

[oldandhappy]

6. Thank you

I was not careful in my first reading/reaction. Appreciate this.

[cprise]

7. Doesn't this put polluters' finances and business models into a protected class?

The aim of the court seems to make the EPA limit its regulation to problems that have already been identified as cheap to deal with: Don't go near expensive problems with long-term or complex, insidious impacts.

I've only read a few articles, not the ruling itself, but so far it seems pretty far-reaching to me. If they have to frame their efforts as financial problems from the start, then the EPA won't be effective going forward.