WASHINGTON (CN) — Fossil fuel industry groups and over two dozen Republican-led states on Friday asked the Supreme Court to block the Environmental Protection Agency’s emissions regulations for power plants.
In hopes of ushering in climate-friendly energy alternatives, the Biden administration’s rule would force fossil fuel power plants into retirement, West Virginia said. Joined by 24 other states, the Mountain State argued the justices needed to prevent a likely unlawful regulatory campaign from damaging the country’s energy grid.
“Make no mistake — these consequences are severe,” Michael Williams, West Virginia’s solicitor general, wrote in the states’ brief. “Forced reliance on ‘less reliable sources’ destabilizes the grids and pushes ‘major’ rate hikes.”
The EPA wants coal-fired power plants to control 90% of their carbon pollution, further limit emissions of toxic metals, reduce wastewater pollutants and safely manage coal ash.
When the rule was announced in late April, EPA Administrator Michael Regan said it would tackle climate change by cutting pollution and ensuring power companies make smart investments in reliable electricity.
In its own Supreme Court petition, one coal and mining group said that while carbon capture could be the technology of the future, right now it's only a “pipe(line) dream.” That group, NACCO Natural Resources Corporation, said no commercial plant has consistently captured 90% of carbon emissions and that there are no sequestration sites to store the carbon if it was possible to do so.
“EPA thought none of that mattered,” the group wrote in a brief before the court. “It read old D.C. Circuit caselaw to permit it to treat [federal emissions law] as a tool to force development of new technology."
"That is legally wrong," the group continued. "Since the Rule hinges on that misinterpretation, applicants are likely to succeed in vacating it.”
Industry groups and Republican states say the rule violated limits Congress set on the Clean Air Act, like the agency’s previous carbon-capping plan.
In 2022, the conservative supermajority threw out a power plant emissions regulation, finding that the policy posed a “major question” and therefore must be directly addressed by Congress.
The states and industry groups said the same logic applied to the EPA’s current rule.
“Addressing the same statute and same segment of power generation, this court saw EPA’s task as regulating the industry as it finds it — not remaking it by ‘direct[ing] existing sources to effectively cease to exist,’” West Virginia wrote.
The D.C. Circuit, however, disagreed. A three-judge panel found that the rule did not implicate the major questions doctrine in West Virginia v. EPA. The current challenge falls under the same name.
The National Mining Association and America’s Power, a coal advocacy group, said the court needed to correct the appeals court’s error. The groups said thousands of jobs would be lost if the rule was enforced.
“The D.C. Circuit misapplied this court’s caselaw when it concluded that Applicants’ members will not suffer irreparable harm during the pendency of this litigation,” the mining and coal groups wrote in a brief to the court.
They said that because the coal industry is capital-intensive, enforcing the rule even for a short time would result in a steep decline in coal demand.
The National Rural Electric Cooperative Association — which represents nearly 900 electric businesses, public power districts and public utility districts — said the rule assumes power plants would start working toward compliance now even though the rule does not take effect until the fall. But without the necessary technology, they said plants would be forced to shut down.
"Forced shutdowns will slash electric reliability across the country and impose other enormous, 'nonrecoverable' compliance costs," the electric group wrote in their brief. "Multiple NRECA members face costs of $10 billion or more each."
Those costs come from replacing power to offset the electricity supply the rule eliminates, buying new power, building new units or buying new equipment to retrofit existing units.
Unless the court intervenes, the rule is set to take effect on Nov. 8.
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