LIBN Op-Ed — Supreme Court Restricts EPA’s Environmental Protections

On July 11, Long Island Business News published Chris Murray’s opinion piece, “Supreme Court Restricts EPA’s Environmental Protections.”

Here is the full text.

While the Supreme Court’s decisions regarding the election, immunity and abortion access received the most attention this year, two decisions regarding the power of administrative agencies will severely limit the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA’s) ability to protect the environment by curtailing the agency’s ability to enforce environmental laws.

In Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, the Supreme Court overturned a 40-year precedent that gave weight to governmental agencies’ enforcement of the statutes within their purview, such as the EPA’s enforcement of the Clean Water Act and the Clean Air Act. In Ohio v. Environmental Protection Agency, the Supreme Court stayed enforcement of regulations to curb greenhouse gases that migrate over state lines.

In Loper Bright, the court overturned what is known as the Chevron doctrine, adopted in 1984. The Chevron doctrine required courts to defer to administrative agencies’ interpretation of ambiguous statutory language contained in statutes they enforce. In other words, a court would allow the EPA to interpret a Clean Water Act provision if the provision was not clear. This deference was premised on the belief that an agency that deals with a statute on a day-to-day basis is in a better position to understand the statute than a judge who has, at best, only limited experience with the statute.

In Ohio v. Environmental Protection Agency, the Supreme Court issued a stay of regulations adopted during the Obama administration, which sought to regulate emissions that can travel across state lines and harm the ozone layer. The Supreme Court held that the EPA did not properly consider the impact on costs and benefits if some states adopted their own environmental standards. The Supreme Court reasoned that if a number of states adopted their own standards and were not covered by the federal regulations, the enforcement costs would be spread among fewer states and the benefits of the regulations could decrease. As a result, the Supreme Court stayed enforcement of the federal regulations, holding that a challenge to the regulations was likely to be successful because “the EPA’s final rule ‘was not reasonable explained” since, in the majority’s view, the cost/benefit analysis was faulty.

The political context of these decisions is critical to understanding their importance. The Republicans have stacked the courts, including the Supreme Court, with ideological conservatives who want to shift the power to enforce laws away from the “deep state” regulatory agencies and to the courts. However, the regulatory agencies have the scientific expertise to understand how the laws should be enforced to achieve the legislations’ goals–in the case of the EPA, to protect the environment. In contrast, judges and their law clerks deal with a wide range of subjects and have little experience in any particular area, let alone the scientific knowledge to understand the relevant issues.

It is ironic that conservatives, who for years decried the judicial activism of liberal judges, now engage in the very judicial overreach they once complained about. Experts in a field should be the ones to interpret and implement often complicated laws designed to protect us, and the courts should take a more modest role as conservatives have long urged. Moreover, the president and Congress must strengthen the role of the agencies in implementing the statutes they are designed to enforce.