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The Inflation Reduction Act is probably protected from SCOTUS. New environmental regulations? Not so much.
Climate change is a huge danger to countless lives. All indications are the Biden administration takes the threat seriously. The Inflation Reduction Act, in particular, demonstrates that climate change has become a top priority for the Democratic coalition. But with Republicans in control of the House of Representatives, further sweeping legislation is off the table for at least two years.
The good news is Congress has already given the executive branch ample authority to address climate change. The bad news is it's highly likely that the Republican-controlled Supreme Court will stop it from using this authority. The Republican super-majority on the Court is coming for climate regulation.
The crucial harbinger of what is likely to come is the 2022 case West Virginia v. EPA. On one level, the decision’s effects were narrow, because the program it held to be unconstitutional (Obama’s Clean Power Plan) had never gone into effect. But the decision is ominous because of the grounds on which the Court struck down the CPP.
In an opinion written by Chief Justice Roberts and joined by other conservative justices, the Court held that the program ran afoul of the recently-invented “major questions” doctrine.” According to Roberts, the doctrine means when considering some “extraordinary cases” with heightened “economic and political significance,” the Court should “hesitate” and require that the administrative agency point to “clear congressional authorization” for its actions. Roberts asserted that the Environmental Protection Agency had failed to show a clear authorization, and hence the CPP exceeded the EPA’s authority.
The decision reflects an implausibly narrow view of the EPA’s authority. Section 111 of the Clean Air Act authorizes the EPA to regulate pollutants that “may reasonably be anticipated to endanger public health or welfare.” It also authorized the EPA to identify the “best system of emissions reduction” for power plants. The Clean Power Plan fell squarely within the statutory scheme. Greenhouse gases that accelerate climate change would seem to a paradigmatic example of what Congress wanted the EPA to regulate – carbon emissions are pollutants, and there can be no serious question that climate change poses a major threat to public welfare and safety. And the CPP’s measures to encourage power companies to either use cleaner sources or participate in a cap-and-trade program fall within its authority to select the best system for emissions reduction.
The majority’s holding that the CPP falling within the terms established by the statute was insufficient because a problem as big as climate change requires more specific authorization is perverse. As Justice Kagan observed in her dissent, a “key reason Congress makes broad delegations like Section 111 is so an agency can respond, appropriately and commensurately, to new and big problems.” Congress did not think it could anticipate every environmental problem that could be caused by air pollution, which is precisely why it delegated the authority to address unexpected problems to the EPA.
Indeed, environmental regulation is a classic example of why Congress’s authority to delegate should be deferred to rather than subjected to ad hoc rules created by the federal judiciary. Environmental science is not a static field. There are frequently new findings about the effects of various environmental hazards and new technologies for addressing these hazards in an economically feasible way. Even a highly functioning and efficient legislature filled with experts in environmental science and economics would not be able to issue specific regulations reflecting new evidence and technological developments, and the actually existing, frequently gridlocked Congress meets neither of these conditions. This is why the longstanding practice is for Congress to set the goals and for the EPA to issue regulations commensurate with these goals, subject to oversight by elected officials in the legislative and executive branches.
The next major legal battleground over environmental regulations is likely to be the new clean air rules being proposed by the EPA. These proposals are also an excellent illustration of how the process should work. The federal agency charged by Congress with helping to preserve the environment is taking advantage of the latest scientific discoveries to update rules for the first time in more than a decade in order to protect Americans from being exposed to dangerous pollutants. A legal universe in which any new set of rules triggers litigation in front of hostile federal judges frustrates the goals Congress sought to accomplish by establishing the EPA.
Indeed, the reason Republican judges are targeting this system is not because it doesn’t work, but because it does. When it invokes newly-minted rules like the “major questions” doctrine, the Court claims to be upholding the prerogatives of Congress. But it is easy to see that this is disingenuous ruse. As University of Texas Law professor Steve Vladeck points out, “*no* Congress will ever have the *capacity* to regulate across every issue with the specificity that "major questions" requires. It's not pro-democracy; it's anti-regulation.” West Virginia v. EPA does not reflect a desire to uphold the authority of Congress; it reflects the Republican Party’s hostility to environmental regulation.
It is true that other approaches taken by Congress may be less likely to face judicial hostility. The major climate provisions in the Inflation Reduction Act generally rely on direct federal spending, which is less likely to provoke a negative response from the judiciary. It would be premature to conclude there will be no effective legal challenges to these climate provisions, but generally clean energy spending is less likely to be struck down than new regulations. But while if this situation holds it gives Congress some leeway to establish some climate goals, it would not be sufficient. Protecting the environment and combating climate change requires the regulation of polluters, not just spending on clean energy.
And this is what makes West Virginia v. EPA such an ominous precedent. Even if a Democratic Congress and Democratic president of the future could overcome a Senate tilted in favor of fossil fuel-producing states and pass an updated Clean Air Act that more clearly authorized the EPA to regulate carbon emissions, it is not clear how they could overcome the obstacle of a Supreme Court that is both hostile to environmental regulation and willing to engage in bad faith readings of statutes to get its way. When Congress updated the Voting Rights Act to reject the narrow interpretation of its anti-discrimination provisions advanced by the Reagan administration, the Roberts Court just willfully misread the statute as if Reagan (and his lead Department of Justice spokesperson on the issue, John Roberts) had actually won the initial fight.
As long as conservatives control the Supreme Court, environmental regulators won't be allowed to do their jobs.
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New York City may very well be the epicenter of this particular fight.
It’s official: the Moss Landing battery fire has galvanized a gigantic pipeline of opposition to energy storage systems across the country.
As I’ve chronicled extensively throughout this year, Moss Landing was a technological outlier that used outdated battery technology. But the January incident played into existing fears and anxieties across the U.S. about the dangers of large battery fires generally, latent from years of e-scooters and cellphones ablaze from faulty lithium-ion tech. Concerned residents fighting projects in their backyards have successfully seized upon the fact that there’s no known way to quickly extinguish big fires at energy storage sites, and are winning particularly in wildfire-prone areas.
How successful was Moss Landing at enlivening opponents of energy storage? Since the California disaster six months ago, more than 6 gigawatts of BESS has received opposition from activists explicitly tying their campaigns to the incident, Heatmap Pro® researcher Charlie Clynes told me in an interview earlier this month.
Matt Eisenson of Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Law agreed that there’s been a spike in opposition, telling me that we are currently seeing “more instances of opposition to battery storage than we have in past years.” And while Eisenson said he couldn’t speak to the impacts of the fire specifically on that rise, he acknowledged that the disaster set “a harmful precedent” at the same time “battery storage is becoming much more present.”
“The type of fire that occurred there is unlikely to occur with modern technology, but the Moss Landing example [now] tends to come up across the country,” Eisenson said.
Some of the fresh opposition is in rural agricultural communities such as Grundy County, Illinois, which just banned energy storage systems indefinitely “until the science is settled.” But the most crucial place to watch seems to be New York City, for two reasons: One, it’s where a lot of energy storage is being developed all at once; and two, it has a hyper-saturated media market where criticism can receive more national media attention than it would in other parts of the country.
Someone who’s felt this pressure firsthand is Nick Lombardi, senior vice president of project development for battery storage company NineDot Energy. NineDot and other battery storage developers had spent years laying the groundwork in New York City to build out the energy storage necessary for the city to meet its net-zero climate goals. More recently they’ve faced crowds of protestors against a battery storage facility in Queens, and in Staten Island endured hecklers at public meetings.
“We’ve been developing projects in New York City for a few years now, and for a long time we didn’t run into opposition to our projects or really any sort of meaningful negative coverage in the press. All of that really changed about six months ago,” Lombardi said.
The battery storage developer insists that opposition to the technology is not popular and represents a fringe group. Lombardi told me that the company has more than 50 battery storage sites in development across New York City, and only faced “durable opposition” at “three or four sites.” The company also told me it has yet to receive the kind of email complaint flood that would demonstrate widespread opposition.
This is visible in the politicians who’ve picked up the anti-BESS mantle: GOP mayoral candidate Curtis Sliwa’s become a champion for the cause, but mayor Eric Adams’ “City of Yes” campaign itself would provide for the construction of these facilities. (While Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani has not focused on BESS, it’s quite unlikely the climate hawkish democratic socialist would try to derail these projects.)
Lombardi told me he now views Moss Landing as a “catalyst” for opposition in the NYC metro area. “Suddenly there’s national headlines about what’s happening,” he told me. “There were incidents in the past that were in the news, but Moss Landing was headline news for a while, and that combined with the fact people knew it was happening in their city combined to create a new level of awareness.”
He added that six months after the blaze, it feels like developers in the city have a better handle on the situation. “We’ve spent a lot of time in reaction to that to make sure we’re organized and making sure we’re in contact with elected officials, community officials, [and] coordinated with utilities,” Lombardi said.
And more on the biggest conflicts around renewable energy projects in Kentucky, Ohio, and Maryland.
1. St. Croix County, Wisconsin - Solar opponents in this county see themselves as the front line in the fight over Trump’s “Big Beautiful” law and its repeal of Inflation Reduction Act tax credits.
2. Barren County, Kentucky - How much wood could a Wood Duck solar farm chuck if it didn’t get approved in the first place? We may be about to find out.
3. Iberia Parish, Louisiana - Another potential proxy battle over IRA tax credits is going down in Louisiana, where residents are calling to extend a solar moratorium that is about to expire so projects can’t start construction.
4. Baltimore County, Maryland – The fight over a transmission line in Maryland could have lasting impacts for renewable energy across the country.
5. Worcester County, Maryland – Elsewhere in Maryland, the MarWin offshore wind project appears to have landed in the crosshairs of Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency.
6. Clark County, Ohio - Consider me wishing Invenergy good luck getting a new solar farm permitted in Ohio.
7. Searcy County, Arkansas - An anti-wind state legislator has gone and posted a slide deck that RWE provided to county officials, ginning up fresh uproar against potential wind development.
Talking local development moratoria with Heatmap’s own Charlie Clynes.
This week’s conversation is special: I chatted with Charlie Clynes, Heatmap Pro®’s very own in-house researcher. Charlie just released a herculean project tracking all of the nation’s county-level moratoria and restrictive ordinances attacking renewable energy. The conclusion? Essentially a fifth of the country is now either closed off to solar and wind entirely or much harder to build. I decided to chat with him about the work so you could hear about why it’s an important report you should most definitely read.
The following chat was lightly edited for clarity. Let’s dive in.
Tell me about the project you embarked on here.
Heatmap’s research team set out last June to call every county in the United States that had zoning authority, and we asked them if they’ve passed ordinances to restrict renewable energy, or if they have renewable energy projects in their communities that have been opposed. There’s specific criteria we’ve used to determine if an ordinance is restrictive, but by and large, it’s pretty easy to tell once a county sends you an ordinance if it is going to restrict development or not.
The vast majority of counties responded, and this has been a process that’s allowed us to gather an extraordinary amount of data about whether counties have been restricting wind, solar and other renewables. The topline conclusion is that restrictions are much worse than previously accounted for. I mean, 605 counties now have some type of restriction on renewable energy — setbacks that make it really hard to build wind or solar, moratoriums that outright ban wind and solar. Then there’s 182 municipality laws where counties don’t have zoning jurisdiction.
We’re seeing this pretty much everywhere throughout the country. No place is safe except for states who put in laws preventing jurisdictions from passing restrictions — and even then, renewable energy companies are facing uphill battles in getting to a point in the process where the state will step in and overrule a county restriction. It’s bad.
Getting into the nitty-gritty, what has changed in the past few years? We’ve known these numbers were increasing, but what do you think accounts for the status we’re in now?
One is we’re seeing a high number of renewables coming into communities. But I think attitudes started changing too, especially in places that have been fairly saturated with renewable energy like Virginia, where solar’s been a presence for more than a decade now. There have been enough projects where people have bad experiences that color their opinion of the industry as a whole.
There’s also a few narratives that have taken shape. One is this idea solar is eating up prime farmland, or that it’ll erode the rural character of that area. Another big one is the environment, especially with wind on bird deaths, even though the number of birds killed by wind sounds big until you compare it to other sources.
There are so many developers and so many projects in so many places of the world that there are examples where either something goes wrong with a project or a developer doesn’t follow best practices. I think those have a lot more staying power in the public perception of renewable energy than the many successful projects that go without a hiccup and don’t bother people.
Are people saying no outright to renewable energy? Or is this saying yes with some form of reasonable restrictions?
It depends on where you look and how much solar there is in a community.
One thing I’ve seen in Virginia, for example, is counties setting caps on the total acreage solar can occupy, and those will be only 20 acres above the solar already built, so it’s effectively blocking solar. In places that are more sparsely populated, you tend to see restrictive setbacks that have the effect of outright banning wind — mile-long setbacks are often insurmountable for developers. Or there’ll be regulations to constrict the scale of a project quite a bit but don’t ban the technologies outright.
What in your research gives you hope?
States that have administrations determined to build out renewables have started to override these local restrictions: Michigan, Illinois, Washington, California, a few others. This is almost certainly going to have an impact.
I think the other thing is there are places in red states that have had very good experiences with renewable energy by and large. Texas, despite having the most wind generation in the nation, has not seen nearly as much opposition to wind, solar, and battery storage. It’s owing to the fact people in Texas generally are inclined to support energy projects in general and have seen wind and solar bring money into these small communities that otherwise wouldn’t get a lot of attention.