Today’s decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit in Coalition for Responsible Regulation v. EPA is quite significant for environmental law. The court turned away the state and industry challenges to the EPA’s decision to begin regulating greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act. The only element of the decision that is at all surprising is the court’s dismissal of the challenges to the EPA’s “tailoring rule” due to a lack of standing.
On the merits, the court rejected challenges to the EPA’s determination that the emission of greenhouse gases causes or contributes to air pollution that which may be reasonably anticipated to endanger public health or welfare (the “endangerment finding”) and rejected claims that the EPA’s new standards for GHG emissions from mobile sources were arbitrary and capricious. This was to be expected. As I’ve noted before, judicial review of these sorts of decisions is highly deferential, and the EPA did not have to do much to support its decision. Even if the industry challengers had been able to convince the court that climate change is not that big of a deal, this would not have been enough to overturn the endangerment finding, provided the EPA gave a sufficient explanation of its conclusions — which it did.
The more interesting parts of the opinion concern whether the petitioners could challenge the EPA’s decision to regulate stationary source GHG emissions generally, and the EPA’s adoption of the tailoring rule in particular. On the former question, the court concluded that industry petitioners could challenge a decades-old EPA determination that the regulation of a pollutant from mobile sources under Section 202 of the Act triggers stationary source regulations. This was because there were some plaintiffs who had never-before been subject to stationary source regulation under the Clean Air Act because it was not until carbon dioxide was treated as a pollutant that these plantiffs emitted enough of a regulated substance to fall within the Act’s controls.
This small victory on ripeness was but a prelude to a loss on a larger question: Whether large emitters of greenhouse gases could challenge the EPA’s decision to forego regulation of smaller sources. No, the court concluded, because the industry petitioners did not satisfy the requirements for Article III standing to challenge the EPA’s failure to regulate someone else. However great the injury some industry groups may suffer from GHG regulation, the court reasoned, forcing the EPA to regulate additional sources would provide no meaningful redress. It does not matter that the EPA’s tailoring rule flatly contradicts the plain text of the Clean Air Act and represents a dramatic assertion of agency discretion over a detailed, legislatively crafted scheme. If there’s no standing, the suit cannot proceed.
This decision will be the last stop for most, if not all, of the industry challenges to the GHG rules. En banc and cert petitions may get filed, but I can’t see either the full D.C. Circuit or the Supreme Court having much interest in the endangerment finding or the EPA’s mobile source rules. If any claim has a chance to go on, it would be the standing argument. If there’s an issue in this case that could catch the Supreme Court’s attention, this would be it. Among other things, it could giver the Supreme Court the opportunity to address how recent standing decisions affect standing claims based upon alleged competitive harm (i.e. the harm suffered by company A due to the government’s favorable treatment of company B). Still, I would not bet on it. In all likelihood those who oppose GHG regulation under the Clean Air Act will have to direct their attention to Congress. They’re done in the courts.
Cross-posted at the Volokh Conspiracy.