The United States Supreme Courtconservatively inclined, limited on Thursday the possibilities of the federal government to control the emission of greenhouse gasesa decision that curtails the ability of the White House to fight climate change.
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The court’s six conservative justices ruled, against their three progressive colleagues, that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) could not issue blanket rules to regulate emissions from coal-fired power plants, which produce almost 20 percent of US electricity.
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“Setting a cap on carbon dioxide emissions at a level that would require a national shift away from coal to generate electricity could be a relevant solution to the current crisis. But it is unlikely that Congress gave the EPA the authority to enact such action,” Judge John Roberts wrote in the ruling.
“Today, the Court stripped the Environmental Protection Agency of the power that Congress gave it to address the ‘most pressing problem of our time,'” Elena Kagan denounced on behalf of the progressive justices, recalling that in the last decade the United States experienced its six warmest years.
The ruling was immediately greeted with satisfaction by several Republican governors at the origin of the lawsuit filed with the court.
Democrat Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called the Supreme Court’s decision “catastrophic.” Following her decision last week on abortion, this is a new
change of the Supreme Court with respect to previous rulings.
In 2007, the highest court had decided by a narrow majority that the EPA was competent to regulate the emissions of gases responsible for global warming, in the same way that a law from the 1960s gives it the power to limit air pollution.
But things changed after former Republican President Donald Trump, a climate change skeptic hostile to any binding measures for the industry, appointed three justices to the court who cemented the body’s current solid conservative majority (six of nine judges).
President Barack Obama had adopted in 2015 an ambitious “Clean Power Plan” to reduce CO2 emissions whose implementation fell to the EPA, but the project was blocked before it was implemented.
In 2019, Donald Trump published his own “Affordable Clean Energy Rule”, limiting the scope of the EPA’s action, which took away the possibility of remodeling the electricity production network.
After a federal court invalidated that version, several conservative states and the coal industry asked the Supreme Court to step in and clarify the EPA’s powers.
The government of Democrat Joe Biden made it known that he had no intention of reviving Barack Obama’s plan, so he asked the high court to declare the file null.
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