Supreme Court refuses, for now, to block new EPA rules to fight climate change

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A view of the U.S. Supreme Court building / Getty Images

The Supreme Court refused Friday to block the Biden administration’s new anti-pollution regulations, rules that impose tougher standards on mercury emissions from coal-fired plants and that regulate methane emissions from crude-oil and natural gas facilities.

Mercury is a potent neuro-toxin, and methane is a potent greenhouse gas. Limiting them is part of the EPA’s effort to fight climate change.

Industry groups, and some two dozen Republican-run states challenged the rules, going quickly to the Supreme Court to ask that the regulations be blocked while litigation takes place in the lowers courts. But the justices, in a break from the way they have handled most such cases in the recent past, rejected the emergency pleas, telling the challengers to litigate their claims in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia before coming to them for help. There were no noted dissents.

The court’s refusal to intervene in the two cases does not mean that the EPA will necessarily prevail. But “it’s a good thing they’ve learned how to say no,” said David Doniger of the Natural Resources Defense Council.

According to the EPA, methane is a “super pollutant” that has 80 times the warming power of carbon dioxide during the first two decades it is in the atmosphere; it accounts for 30% of the rise in global temperature.

The court took no action in a third set of cases that are pending on its so-called “emergency docket,” all of which are challenging new EPA regulations aimed at reducing carbon dioxide from older coal-fired power plants.