The Supreme Court held in West Virginia v. EPA that the federal agency did not have authority to adopt what amounted to a cap-and-trade system for existing fossil-fueled power plants because this raised a "major question" of "economic and political significance" as to which Congress had not clearly delegated authority to the EPA. But a close reading of the relevant statute, Section 111 of the Clean Air Act, indicates that the EPA has no authority to issue legally binding emissions standards for existing stationary sources—period.
So the Court did not have to create a novel legal doctrine to limit the authority of the Biden Administration to adopt something like the Clean Power Plan. It could have reached the same result simply by paying close attention to the language of the statute that purportedly granted such authority. This second of five guest blog posts on the decision makes this case (here was the first one, suggesting that the decision was an advisory opinion).
We need to know a bit about the statute: When Congress adopted the modern form of the Clean Air Act in 1970, the central regulatory mechanism was a classic exercise in cooperative federalism. The Act required the EPA, in Section 109, to promulgate National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS), setting forth permissible limits on the ambient concentration of certain key air pollutants. Once these NAAQS were established, the states were required, under Section 110, to develop State Implementation Plans (SIPs), setting forth a strategy for achieving the federal standards.
