The challengers, including 27 states, the coal industry, and business groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, have unleashed a broad array of legal arguments against the policy, which has been in effect since August and is the centerpiece of Obama’s strategy to combat climate change.
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Opponents of the plan had reason to be buoyed by the Supreme Court’s unusual intervention in part because of increasing evidence the conservative majority are skeptical of the Obama administration’s environmental regulations. Attorneys for the states said, according to SCOTUSBlog, that the Clean Power Plan would turn the EPA into a czar – “the nation’s central energy planning authority” favoring wind and solar power over hydrocarbon-fueled power plants. He says fighting climate change is going to be “an enormous generational challenge”. Those regulations cost consumers nearly $10 billion per year, and many power plants were shuttered in the years between when the EPA issued the rule and the Supreme Court overturned them.
In a statement, Palmer said: “Implementing the Clean Power Plan would have far reaching impacts and profoundly negative consequences for American families and the economy …”
Implementation of the rules is considered essential to the United States meeting emissions-reduction targets in a global climate agreement signed in Paris last month.
“The whole point of the stay was to stop us from having to provide any implementation plan”, Paxton says, “and so we’re not moving forward with anything until this case is resolved”. They also say the plan would constrain the constitutional sovereignty of states to make any rules for industries operating inside their boundaries.
West Virginia and 26 other states have fought the Clean Power Plan, calling the regulations an “unprecedented power grab” by the Obama Administration.
“We remain confident that we will prevail on the merits”, the White House said, adding that the Environmental Protection Agency will continue to work with states that want to cooperate and that it will continue to take “aggressive steps” to reduce carbon emissions.
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Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan would have denied the request for delay.
