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Wednesday, May 17, 2006
Law - "Justices to Hear Environmental Appeal on EPA Emissions Rule"
"Justices to Hear Environmental Appeal on EPA Emissions Rule" was the headline to a story yesterday in the Washington Post by Charles Lane. His report expands upon a this ILB entry from Monday (final item). Some quotes from the Lane story:
The Supreme Court announced yesterday that it will review a controversial federal court ruling that environmentalists had said would weaken pollution-control requirements for aging power stations across the country.In a one-line order, the justices said they will hear Environmental Defense's appeal of a June 2005 ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit, based in Richmond, which said that Duke Energy Corp., a North Carolina utility, could operate refurbished power plants even though their total annual emissions would go up.
The court's decision injects the justices into a half-decade-old battle between environmentalists and the Bush administration, which has sought to ease what it says is an excessive regulatory burden on the nation's utilities. * * *
In the case the court agreed to hear yesterday, Environmental Defense v. Duke Energy Corp. , No. 05-848, the specific question is how to measure utilities' compliance with the Environmental Protection Agency's "new source review" rules, which govern emissions from plants that have been modernized or expanded. * * *
The EPA's position traditionally has been that the Clean Air Act requires modified plants to reduce their total annual emissions, and Environmental Defense says that interpretation is correct.
But the 4th Circuit disagreed and said that plants should only have to show a reduction in their hourly rate of emissions. This was a victory for utilities because they could run their updated plants for many more hours than previously.
The case against Duke Energy was one of many initiated by the EPA across the country in the waning days of the Clinton administration.
The Clinton crackdown was bitterly opposed by utilities, and the Bush administration promised to change EPA enforcement policy.
But the EPA continued to press cases that were already pending when the administration took office in 2001, so the Bush EPA and Environmental Defense had been on the same side of the Duke Energy case until the 4th Circuit's ruling.
After the 4th Circuit ruled, the administration proposed new clean air regulations that incorporated the 4th Circuit's decision and would have applied it across the country.
Then the administration asked the Supreme Court not to intervene in the case. The court's decision to take the case over the administration's objection was a surprise; since the adoption of modern environmental legislation in 1970, the court had agreed to hear just two previous cases in which an environmental group was the petitioner.
Posted by Marcia Oddi on May 17, 2006 12:35 PM
Posted to Environment | General Law Related