Supreme Court Upholds Most of Obama's Climate Plan

The climate deniers in the GOP suffered another defeat at the hands of the United States Supreme Court when the court ruled yesterday and upheld the bulk of the Obama administration/EPA's rules to restrict greenhouse gas emissions.  Despite the spin of those knuckle dragging elements in the far right to disguise the fact that they suffered a major defeat, the reality is that the new rules will largely proceed intact.  A piece in Mother Jones looks at the Court's ruling and where we go from this point forward.  The ultimate irony?  Antonin Scalia wrote the majority opinion. Here are highlights:

"Supreme Court Limits EPA's Global Warming Rules."

"Supreme Court Ruling Backs Most EPA Emission Controls."

These are just a couple of the many contradictory headlines in response to Monday's US Supreme Court ruling in Utility Air Regulatory Group v. EPA, a case filed by industry groups and several states challenging some of the environmental agency's efforts to restrict greenhouse gas emissions. So what's going on here?

Despite some applauding headlines from the right—"Supreme Court Hits Obama's Global Warming Agenda," claimed the Washington Times—the ruling actually had very little effect. "This is not doing much of anything to hobble EPA," explains Richard Revesz, director of the Institute for Policy Integrity at the New York University School of Law, adding: "Nothing that is being done today calls into question the EPA's ability to regulate power plants, both new and existing, under section 111 of the Clean Air Act."

The decision, authored by Antonin Scalia, is actually the latest in a series of rulings by the Supreme Court on the ability of the EPA to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. The most important of these, 2007's Massachusetts v. EPA, found that the agency had the authority to regulate these emissions under the Clean Air Act. In 2011, the court went further in American Electric Power v. Connecticut, ruling that states, cities, and other entities could not independently sue greenhouse gas emitters because the Clean Air Act and the EPA "displace" their ability to do so. It's on the basis of such rulings that President Obama's EPA has stepped forward to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from a variety of sources, including automobiles, newly constructed power plants, and, most recently, existing or older power plants.

The Supreme Court ruled that the EPA can't target emitters based on their greenhouse gases under this program, but the court also said the agency can require major emitters already permitted under the PSD program for other types of emissions to curtail their greenhouse gas emissions, too. And by these lights, the EPA can still regulate 83 percent of all stationary sources of these emissions.