Supreme Court Halts Obama Climate Change Plan

The White House released a statement disagreeing with the decision, and it expressed confidence that the plan will be upheld.

Pete Ricketts cheered the U.S. Supreme Court’s Tuesday decision to pause sweeping new environmental regulations aimed at curbing greenhouse gas emissions from power plants. “The Clean Power Plan is a direct threat to co-ops’ ability to provide affordable and reliable electricity to their member consumers and should be erased from the books”.

The 5 to 4 vote, with the four liberal justices dissenting, was an unprecedented ruling, according to The New York Times, as “the Supreme Court had never before granted a request to halt a regulation before review by a federal appeals court”.

Jeffrey Holmstead, an attorney with the law firm Bracewell in Washington DC, who worked at the EPA under President George W. Bush, says this is the first time that the Supreme Court has stepped in to block a major environmental regulation before a lower court ruling.

The states, led by coal producer West Virginia, oil producer Texas and several major business groups in October began the legal effort to block the Obama administration’s plan.

States were supposed to submit preliminary plans for how they would meet their emissions goals to the EPA later this year, with final plans slated for 2018.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit is scheduled to hear oral arguments on the legal challenge to the Clean Power Plan on June 2-3.

Some of the conservative justices have signaled hostility to the EPA in three other Obama administration air pollution regulations in the past three years, including one on climate change. It provides the United States with the means to achieve the emissions reduction target that it had agreed upon during the Paris climate summit in December 2015.

“It portends that we will overturn the illegal climate change agenda of the destructive Obama Administration”, predicted Bob Murray on Wednesday’s MetroNews “Talkline”, a day after the Supreme Court granted an emergency request for a delay until legal challenges are resolved.

MONTAGNE: Tell us what the rule is exactly and why the high court put it on hold.

House of Representatives Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi said it “will enable those states that deny climate science to slow progress in reducing the carbon pollution that threatens the health of all Americans”.

“The best path to a clean energy future is to end wasteful subsidies for unreliable wind power and other mature technologies and instead unleash energy innovation through doubling funding for basic energy research and expand nuclear power”, Alexander said.