On Monday, the New York Times published a story proclaiming that the Inflation Redution Act is a "game changer" because it amended the Clean Air Act to "make new regulations much tougher to challenge in court." This would be an incredibly important development if it were true, but it's not, for reasons I will explain.
Here is how the NYT story begins:
When the Supreme Court restricted the ability of the Environmental Protection Agency to fight climate change this year, the reason it gave was that Congress had never granted the agency the broad authority to shift America away from burning fossil fuels.
Now it has.
Throughout the landmark climate law, passed this month, is language written specifically to address the Supreme Court's justification for reining in the E.P.A., a ruling that was one of the court's most consequential of the term. [West Virginia v. EPA, which I discussed here.] The new law amends the Clean Air Act, the country's bedrock air-quality legislation, to define the carbon dioxide produced by the burning of fossil fuels as an "air pollutant."
That language, according to legal experts as well as the Democrats who worked it into the legislation, explicitly gives the E.P.A. the authority to regulate greenhouse gases and to use its power to push the adoption of wind, solar and other renewable energy sources.
