The EPA in the Supreme Court - Important Case to Watch | Eastern NC Now

    On Tuesday October 15th, the Supreme Court decided it will hear a case brought against the Environmental Protection Agency for creating its own regulations to combat greenhouse gases from stationary sources like power plants. This power grab by the EPA is initially set to begin on power plants and factories but the self-appointed power will extend to small facilities like hospitals, restaurants, family farms, hotels and even churches.

    This follows on a 2007 decision in Massachusetts v. Environmental Protection Agency that the EPA to regulate emissions from new automobiles if they pose a harm to public health. In 2009 the EPA created such a regulation but included stationary buildings as well.

    The Clean Air Act had named 6 pollutants, but CO2 was not among them. Five justices still ruled that CO2 was a pollutant and the EPA could create regulations concerning CO2 emissions on automobiles. Despite the fact that CO2 is expelled when you breathe and is used by plants to create oxygen and produced by some plants at night.

    The Wall Street Journal explains the details of the case:

    When Congress wrote the Clean Air Act, it created numerical thresholds specifying that the government could only start regulating after a plant was shown to be putting out more than 100 tons a year of a pollutant. Congress had in mind traditional pollutants like sulfur dioxide or ozone, but in the case of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide 100 tons a year can be reached by 40 lawyers breathing. (OK, maybe a few more.)

    By the EPA's own estimates, applying that 100-ton threshold to greenhouse gases would require some six million buildings to get environmental permits, including such grand polluters as churches and farms. Recognizing that such a rule would create "absurd results" like shuttering the entire economy, the EPA rewrote Congress's numbers and adjusted the threshold to 75,000 tons from 100 tons. EPA's clear political purpose was to escape a large political backlash to its new rules by unilaterally limiting their reach.

    The EPA says that its rewrite is no big deal, and that plaintiffs should have no standing to sue since the agency was doing everyone a favor by lifting the thresholds. But regulatory agencies don't have the power to rewrite laws on their own without the authority granted by Congress. All the more so when that rewrite is intended to limit political accountability for a rule that could cost the economy $300 billion to $400 billion a year.

    This case, expected to come up in 2014, will follow up on the 2007 ruling on whether the EPA has the authority to create its own regulations. Constitutionalists note that only Congress can create laws, but currently Executive Federal Agencies have been creating their own rules and regulations and then enforce them as if they were law. Even the President has declared laws by Executive Order despite lacking the Constitutional Authority to do so. This case thus becomes important because it will highlight or destroy the Constitutional separation of powers between the Legislative and Executive Branches.