On Friday, the Supreme Court issued two decisions reaffirming Biden administration regulations aimed at reducing methane and mercury emissions. These regulations were being challenged by industry groups and right-leaning states through emergency applications to block their implementation, which the court rejected without comment and with no noted dissents.
The decision allows for the rules to stay in place while challenges to them proceed in federal appeals courts. The 23 Republican-led states, power plants, mining companies, and industry groups challenging these rules argued in their applications that the new rules would burden them with billions of dollars in costs without any real benefits to public health. While methane dissipates out of the atmosphere quicker than carbon, it is 80 times more potent as a greenhouse gas, and accounts for about a third of the current rise in global temperatures. In arguing their opposition to these rules the states, led by North Dakota, argued that they were part of a broader plan to “force a nationwide transition away from coal for putative climate change reasons – pursuing a national policy choice this Court has expressly held the agency lacks authority to make.”
The application in these cases is part of the Court’s emergency docket, also known as the “shadow docket,” which allows applicants to seek an immediate action from SCOTUS. Resolving such applications with little or no explanation is standard. There has been broad recognition in recent years that the current Supreme Court has abused the shadow docket mechanism to push through unpopular decisions with little or no justification, even when there is no apparent pressing circumstance to justify the “emergency” decision.
The shadow docket was used in 2022 to overturn a 50-year-old interpretation of the Clean Water Act. In a scathing dissent of the conservative majority’s use of the shadow docket in that case, Justice Elena Kagan stated that “the docket becomes only another place for merits determinations – except made without full briefing and argument.” Conservative Chief Justice Roberts sided with the minority in that 5-4 decision. The decision to reject applicants seeking to use the shadow docket in these recent instances to overturn environmental regulations cuts against these prior uses of it.
The plaintiffs may be justified in citing this Court’s own prior decisions, as earlier this summer, SCOTUS overturned a major legal precedent known as the Chevron doctrine, which up to that point had required that courts defer to federal agencies’ interpretations of disputed statutes if they were found to be reasonable, unless said statute was directly addressed by congressional legislation (which is unlikely, as the highly technical and specific nature of many rules issued by federal agencies are generally not addressed specifically in laws written by Congress). This indeed is what has opened up the EPA to challenges like the ones being made in these cases about methane and mercury emissions.
There remains a third challenge to another set of EPA rules along similar lines that has yet to be decided by the Court. Those applications were filed in July and the Court has already been fully briefed.
