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In a major setback for President Obama and for people who like to breathe, the court (in a 5-4 decision split along party lines) struck down a set of recent EPA regulations aimed at limiting pollution from coal-fired power plants.
The justices embraced the arguments from the industry and 21 Republican-led states that the EPA rules were prohibitively expensive and amounted to government overreach.
The decision, written by Justice Antonin Scalia, ruled that the EPA did not reasonably consider the cost factor when drafting regulation.
The Clean Air Act had directed the EPA to create regulations for power plants that were "appropriate and necessary". The agency did not consider cost when making its decision, the court ruled, but estimated that the cost of its regulation to power plants would be $9.6bn a year.
Original Submission
(Score: 2, Informative) by curunir_wolf on Tuesday June 30 2015, @04:46PM
dealing a blow to the Obama administration’s efforts to set limits on the amount of mercury, arsenic and other toxins coal-fired power plants can spew into the air, lakes and rivers.
Well that's not good - we need stricter limits on mercury and arsenic and other toxins to ensure these things do not pollute our environment. Maybe Congress can act to reinstate the rule? EPA said up to 20% of plants had already made the changes to meet the standard. That's a good thing.
The 5-4 decision was a major setback to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and could leave the agency more vulnerable to legal challenges to its other new carbon pollution rules
Well that's a good thing. The EPA is overreaching on carbon "pollution" (not) standards, and attempts to regulate every drop of water in and around the country. The water regulation rules are especially egregious, as compliance for farmers means more corporate farms using more chemicals, and less small and organic farms that can't afford the overhead for the ridiculous farmland development that the EPA and state environmental agencies are requiring to meet the water regulations.
I am a crackpot
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday June 30 2015, @08:20PM
Well that's not good - we need stricter limits on mercury and arsenic and other toxins to ensure these things do not pollute our environment.
You will need to remove mercury from the environment as well to achieve this fabled non-polluting state. From my reading of this 2013 report [unep.org], natural (non-anthropogenic) global sources emit somewhere around 600 tons of mercury into the environment each year, while the US does somewhere around 40 tons per year by the metric of the report (assuming two thirds of North America total of 60 tons per year). The total human generated sources are about 2000 tons per year. So even if we completely eliminated anthropogenic mercury from the environment, we've reduce mercury emissions from current sources (as oppose to reemissions from past sources) from roughly 2600 tons per year to 600 tons per year. That's a bit over a factor of four reduction in mercury emissions possible, which doesn't strike me as that much to gain.