July 1, 2022 |
A “clean win for Wyoming.” That’s how Governor Mark Gordon summed up yesterday’s milestone Supreme Court ruling. In the case of West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency, the High Court knocked down attempt by both the Obama and Biden White Houses to do the job of Congress in setting carbon emission rules at electric power plants.
In a case brought by the coal-producing state of West Virginia, the court ruled 6-3 vote that the EPA does not have the authority to use the Obama-era Clean Power Plan to force power plants to switch from coal-fired generation to other sources of power to reduce emissions.
West Virginia Solicitor General Lindsay See noted that the administration was using the EPA “to reshape the nation’s energy sector, or most any other industry for that matter, by choosing which sources (of power generation) should exist at all, and setting standards to make it happen.”
The State of Wyoming had joined the lawsuit. Governor Mark Gordon called the High Court’s decision a clean win for Wyoming.” The governor said the state joined the lawsuit to protect Wyoming’s coal-fired plants from a White House hell-bent on curtailing coal-fired electric generation.
“The legal authority to regulate emissions properly lies with Congress and the states,” the governor said in a statement, “not an overzealous federal bureaucracy insulated from practical accountability.”
In a majority opinion authored by Chief Justice John Roberts, the justices ruled that in the latest example of Democratic overreach, the Environmental Protection Agency was not specifically authorized by Congress to reduce carbon emissions when it was set up in 1970.
Wyoming Senator Cynthia Lummis also applauded the decision. Lummis said in a statement, “Domestic energy production has been under constant attack by both the Biden and Obama administrations, and I’m glad the Supreme Court ruled the Clean Air Act does not give the EPA the power to decide unilaterally what fuels power plants can and cannot use.”
Senator John Barrasso, the ranking member of the Energy and Natural Resources committee, said the decision “confirms Congress, not the EPA, has the authority to create environmental policy.”
The White House, meanwhile, called the court’s decision “devastating.” Democrats, green groups and the non-carbon energy industry view the decision as a major blow to President Joe Biden’s globalist goal of de-carbonizing the power sector by 2035.
