The Supreme Court refused Friday to block the Biden administration鈥檚 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鈥檚 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鈥檚 refusal to intervene in the two cases does not mean that the EPA will necessarily prevail. But 鈥渋t鈥檚 a good thing they鈥檝e learned how to say no,鈥� said David Doniger of the Natural Resources Defense Council.
According to the EPA, methane is a 鈥渟uper pollutant鈥� 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 鈥渆mergency docket,鈥� all of which are challenging new EPA regulations aimed at reducing carbon dioxide from older coal-fired power plants.
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