Utility Air Regulatory Group v. EPA
The Supreme Court ruled that the EPA went too far when it decided that a business's greenhouse-gas emissions alone could trigger the Clean Air Act's permitting requirements for factories and power plants, a reading that would have swept in millions of small facilities like offices, schools, and stores.
At the same time, the Court let stand a narrower part of EPA's approach: plants that already need permits because of ordinary pollutants can still be required to use the best available technology to limit their greenhouse-gas emissions too. The decision curbed EPA's greenhouse-gas authority under this program while leaving a substantial slice of it intact.
“An agency has no power to “tailor” legislation to bureaucratic policy goals by rewriting unambiguous statutory terms.”
The Court's rejection of EPA's attempt to raise the statute's numerical permitting thresholds on its own.
How it got here: Industry groups and states petitioned the D.C. Circuit to review EPA's rules; that court dismissed some claims for lack of standing and rejected the rest, and the losing parties sought Supreme Court review.
The Case in Depth
What happened
After the Court ruled in Massachusetts v. EPA that greenhouse gases count as air pollutants, EPA set greenhouse-gas standards for new cars and then concluded this automatically required factories and power plants to get Clean Air Act construction and operating permits based on their greenhouse-gas output. Because the statutory permit thresholds were written for conventional pollutants, applying them to greenhouse gases would have covered millions of previously unregulated small sources, so EPA tried to raise the thresholds itself. Industry groups and states challenged EPA's approach.
The question before the Court
Could the EPA require factories and power plants to get Clean Air Act permits just because of how much greenhouse gas they emitted, and could it make plants that already needed permits install greenhouse-gas pollution controls?
The Court's answer
Partly — the Court said EPA could not make greenhouse-gas emissions alone trigger permitting requirements for factories and power plants, because doing so at the statute's existing 100- and 250-ton thresholds would sweep in millions of small facilities Congress never intended to cover, and EPA had no authority to fix that problem by rewriting the numerical thresholds itself.
But the Court also ruled that plants already required to get permits because of their conventional pollution can still be made to install the best available technology to control their greenhouse gases too. So EPA lost its broadest claim of authority over small emitters, but kept the ability to regulate greenhouse gases at the large industrial sources that were already subject to Clean Air Act permitting.
Curious how the Court got there? See the step-by-step legal reasoning →
Why it matters
The ruling shields most small and mid-size businesses, schools, hospitals, and apartment buildings from a costly federal permitting process based solely on greenhouse-gas emissions, since EPA could not lawfully lower the statutory thresholds to make that regulation workable. Large industrial plants that already need permits for conventional pollution, however, still must address their greenhouse-gas emissions, keeping a meaningful chunk of federal climate regulation in place.
What changes now
The ruling is final on the merits: EPA can no longer treat greenhouse-gas emissions alone as triggering Clean Air Act permitting for new or modified facilities, eliminating the need for its 'Tailoring Rule' thresholds for that purpose. EPA may continue requiring 'anyway' sources — those already needing permits for conventional pollutants — to use the best available technology to limit greenhouse gases, subject to EPA justifying an appropriate minimum emissions threshold for that requirement.
What this does not decide
The Court did not decide whether EPA's specific guidance on how to calculate greenhouse-gas control requirements is reasonable, nor whether 75,000 tons per year is an appropriate cutoff below which no controls are required; it also left open several alternative ways EPA or courts might further limit which pollutants trigger permitting.
Concurrences and dissents
Dissent in part — Justice Breyer
“The Court’s decision to read greenhouse gases out of the PSD program drains the Act of its flexibility and chips away at our decision in Massachusetts.”Breyer's objection that the majority's approach undermines the Court's earlier climate-change ruling.
Justice Breyer agreed that greenhouse-gas emitting 'anyway' sources must use the best available control technology, but disagreed with the majority's method for excluding small greenhouse-gas emitters from permitting. He argued the exception should be read into the word 'source' rather than 'air pollutant,' which would preserve more of EPA's flexibility and avoid undercutting Massachusetts v. EPA, while still exempting facilities too small to sensibly regulate.
Dissent in part — Justice Alito
Justice Alito agreed that EPA could not rewrite the statutory permitting thresholds, but dissented from requiring 'anyway' sources to install greenhouse-gas controls. He argued the best-available-control-technology framework is fundamentally unworkable for greenhouse gases because it depends on local air-quality effects and case-by-case cost-benefit balancing that cannot meaningfully be done for a global pollutant like carbon dioxide.
How the Court got there
The legal reasoning, step by step
- The Court asked whether the Clean Air Act's general, sweeping definition of 'air pollutant' (which the Court had already held covers greenhouse gases) controlled the meaning of 'air pollutant' in the specific provisions that trigger permitting for factories and power plants.
- The Court found it did not: EPA had long given 'air pollutant' narrower, context-specific meanings in various parts of the Act, so the broad general definition was not a command to regulate greenhouse gases wherever the phrase appears, but just a description of what EPA may consider regulating.
- The Court then asked whether EPA could reasonably choose the greenhouse-gas-inclusive reading anyway. It found that reading unreasonable because applying the statute's 100- and 250-ton thresholds to greenhouse gases would explode the number of covered facilities from thousands to millions, a result EPA itself said would be unworkable and contrary to what Congress designed the permitting programs to do.
- Because the statute's numerical thresholds were clear and unambiguous, the Court held EPA could not fix the unworkable result by rewriting those thresholds itself (its 'Tailoring Rule'); agencies must apply the numbers Congress wrote, even when doing so creates practical problems, and cannot revise clear statutory terms just because they don't work well in practice.
- Turning to a separate provision requiring 'best available control technology' for plants that need permits anyway because of ordinary pollutants, the Court found that provision's language less open-ended, and concluded that requiring such plants to also control their greenhouse-gas emissions was a reasonable exercise of the ordinary deference courts give agencies interpreting ambiguous statutes.
Doctrinal impact
Cases affected by this decision
Limits Massachusetts v. EPA (549 U. S. 497)
Clarifies that its broad definition of greenhouse gases as air pollutants doesn't force EPA to treat them as pollutants in every provision.
Distinguishes American Elec. Power Co. v. Connecticut
Says that ruling about a different Clean Air Act program doesn't affect the outcome here.
Reaffirms Chevron U. S. A. Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc. (467 U. S. 837)
Continues to use this case's framework for deciding how much deference to give EPA's interpretations.