The Clean Air Act, which some legal experts call the world’s most powerful environmental law, was passed in 1970, with the birth of the environmental movement.
Since then, it has been the source of many remarkable regulations on air pollution, including soot, smog, mercury and toxic chemicals that cause acid rain.
The case, which the Supreme Court ruled on Thursday in West Virginia against the Environmental Protection Agency, is part of a larger court battle over whether and to what extent the Clean Air Act can be used to combat climate change. The result could handcuff President Biden’s plans to reduce global pollution in the United States.
The law aimed to combat rising levels of air pollution in American cities, which were directly linked to harmful effects on human health.
He ordered the then-established Environmental Protection Agency to draw up – and periodically update – national standards and rules to control several pollutants that were already known to endanger human health. These include carbon monoxide, lead, ground-level ozone, nitrogen dioxide, particulate matter and sulfur dioxide.
However, the Democratic-controlled Congress drafted the act with the intention of giving EPA great flexibility in interpreting the law, envisioning that it could be used to address environmental hazards that lawmakers have not yet devised.
And that happened when fears began to escalate from global warming, which was caused by rising emissions of carbon dioxide, a heat-capturing gas that was already ubiquitous in the Earth’s atmosphere but was also produced by burning fossil fuels.
The Clean Air Act does not explicitly direct the EPA to regulate carbon dioxide – rather, it requires the agency to regulate pollutants that “endanger human health.” In 2007, the Supreme Court ordered the EPA to determine whether carbon dioxide met this description, and in 2009 the agency concluded that it was.
This conclusion meant that carbon dioxide could be legally identified as a pollutant and prompted the Clean Air Act requirement that the EPA regulate its emissions, which are mainly produced by gasoline-powered vehicles and coal and gas-fired power plants.
President Barack Obama, after unsuccessfully trying to pass a law on climate change through Congress, turned to the Clean Air Act, using it to publish basic regulations on vehicle and power pollution. The conflicting rules were aimed at transforming the nation’s economy – shifting Americans from gasoline cars to electric vehicles and from coal and gas-fired power plants to wind and solar energy.
President Donald J. Trump has repealed those measures, but Mr. Biden wants to restore and expand them.
A series of recent lawsuits have sought to sharply limit EPA’s powers to use the Clean Air Act to enforce such rules. While these cases will not prevent the EPA from regulating carbon dioxide for the time being, they could sharply limit how far the agency can go using that power.
Instead of changing the rules that would essentially end the use of coal-fired power plants and gasoline-powered cars, the administration can use the law to justify modest provisions that would slightly reduce pollution – but will not impose the economic transformation it says scientists need to combat climate change.
To that end, Congress will have to pass a new law.
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