Up next at the Supreme Court: environmental regulation

The U.S. has entered a new era of legal uncertainty, ushered in by the Supreme Court’s decision Friday to overturn long-held precedent protecting the constitutional right to obtain an abortion in the United States.

The Court’s decision in the abortion case, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, indicates the court is willing to throw out precedent, and that could mean trouble for environmental regulations, like those governing what the Environmental Protection Agency can and can’t do.

The Supreme Court is expected to hand down a decision as soon as this week in West Virginia v. EPA, a case with major implications for climate change. The case was brought by several states, including West Virginia, that are seeking to preemptively block the Biden administration from setting clean air standards that could force coal plants to shut down while incentivizing the use of cleaner energy sources.

The EPA derives its ability to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from a 2007 case called Massachusetts v. EPA, which gives the agency the ability to regulate GHG emissions as air pollutants. But the court’s apparent willingness to completely gut established precedent like Roe has some environmental lawyers worried.

“When we get the West Virginia decision next week, we may learn whether the court will take a similarly radical approach to weaken our nation’s most treasured environmental laws,” Robert Percival, director of the University of Maryland’s environmental law program, wrote to E&E News.

“(Chief Justice John) Roberts apparently does not command enough respect to temper the ideological impulses of the extreme right wing that now controls the court,” Vermont Law School professor Pat Parenteau added, also in an email to E&E News. “No environmental precedent is safe.”

Arctic decision looms

The Biden administration is also preparing a major environmental decision on a massive oil development, ConocoPhillips’ Willow project on Alaska’s North Slope. The $6 billion project would create hundreds of miles of roads and pipelines as well as a major processing facility in the middle of pristine Arctic public land.

The Washington Post reports that the administration is nearing completion of a new environmental review, ordered by the courts after the Trump administration failed to consider the climate impacts of the project. The Bureau of Land Management estimated the project could produce 586 million barrels of oil, but ConocoPhillips told investors last year that Willow could ultimately unlock 3 billion barrels of oil.

“This is the single biggest oil and gas proposal on federal lands. It’s just a massive carbon threat, a massive development project in an area that’s already being ravaged by climate change,” Kristen Miller, conservation director of the Alaska Wilderness League, told the Post. “It’s really sort of an existential crisis.”

Quick hits

Quote of the day

Picture this

@mypubliclands

For centuries, five Tribes have inhabited the region surrounding Bears Ears. This week, a historic agreement has been reached for those five Tribes to co-manage the Bears Ears National Monument in Utah.

“We are so pleased to celebrate this unique partnership between Tribal Nations and federal agencies to manage and protect the remarkable and sacred Bears Ears landscape. This is an important step as we move forward together to ensure that Tribal expertise and traditional perspectives remain at the forefront of our joint decision-making for the Bears Ears National Monument. This type of true co-management will serve as a model for our work to honor the nation-to-nation relationship in the future.” -BLM Director Tracy Stone-Manning

📸 Bob Wick

(featured image: A coal-fired power plant in central Wyoming. Greg Goebel, Flickr )