Sunday, April 19, 2015

June 23, 2014

By  Robert Barnes

The Supreme Court on Monday (click here) mostly validated the Environmental Protection Agency’s plans to regulate major sources of greenhouse-gas emissions such as power plants and factories but said the agency had gone too far in interpreting its power.
The court’s bifurcated opinion on one hand criticized the agency for trying to rewrite provisions of the Clean Air Act. But it nevertheless granted the Obama administration and environmentalists a big victory by agreeing that there are other ways for the EPA to reach its goal of regulating the gases that contribute to global warming.
“It bears mention that EPA is getting almost everything it wanted in this case,” Justice Antonin Scalia said in announcing his opinion from the bench. “It sought to regulate sources that it said were responsible for 86 percent of all the greenhouse gases emitted from stationary sources nationwide. Under our holdings, EPA will be able to regulate sources responsible for 83 percent of those emissions.”...

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