Polluters Win, Environment Loses in Supreme Court Ruling

Another day, another important Supreme Court ruling. This time, the court ruled against the Environmental Protection Agency‘s new policies to curb power-plant emissions of mercury and other toxins.

The Court ruled 5-4 that new regulations failed to take cost into account when regulating toxic emissions. The Court estimates that those costs amount to $9.6 billion per year.

In his majority opinion, Justice Antonin Scalia said the extent of the reduction in emissions under the new law was “unclear” and there is no evidence that the benefits outweigh the costs.

The Agency could not fully quantify the benefits of reducing power plants’ emissions of hazardous air pollutants; to the extent it could, it estimated that these benefits were worth $4 to $6 million per year. The costs to power plants were thus between 1,600 and 2,400 times as great as the quantifiable benefits from reduced emissions of hazardous air pollutants.

He went on to say:

EPA refused to consider whether the costs of its decision outweighed the benefits. The Agency gave cost no thought at all, because it considered cost irrelevant to its initial decision to regulate.

In her dissent, Justice Elena Kagan wrote that “the Agency carefully considered costs” and that regulating emissions is necessary because of the harm they cause to the environment. The EPA did a careful cost-benefit analysis, she said, finding that implementing the regulations would “exceed the costs up to nine times over—by as much as $80 billion each year.”

EPA then adopted a host of measures designed to make compliance with its proposed emissions limits less costly for plants that needed to catch up with their cleaner peers. And with only one narrow exception, EPA decided not to impose any more stringent standards (beyond what some plants had already achieved on their own) because it found that doing so would not be cost-effective.

The ruling should have wide-ranging effect in Pennsylvania, a state that has more than it’s share of power plants. Here’s a handy list.