Obama 'tool' EPA to be challenged at SCOTUS over climate change.

Obama 'tool' EPA to be challenged at SCOTUS over climate change.(Reuters).By Lawrence Hurley.

WASHINGTON – In a blow to the Obama administration, the Supreme Court on Tuesday agreed to hear a challenge to part of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s first wave of regulations aimed at tackling climate change.

By agreeing to hear a single question of the many presented by nine different petitioners, the court set up its biggest environmental dispute since 2007.

That question is whether the EPA correctly determined that its decision to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from motor vehicles necessarily required it also to regulate emissions from stationary sources.

The EPA regulations are among President Barack Obama’s most significant measures to address climate change. The U.S. Senate in 2010 scuttled his effort to pass a federal law that would, among other things, have set a cap on greenhouse gas emissions.

By agreeing to hear a consolidated challenge from states and business groups, the court could be getting set to limit the reach of its groundbreaking 2007 ruling, Massachusetts v. EPA, in which it held on a 5-4 vote that carbon was a pollutant that could potentially be regulated under the Clean Air Act.

The court rejected outright three of the nine petitions that sought Supreme Court review, including one filed by Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, a Republican, that questioned whether the EPA appropriately weighed climate change science.

The legal question, crafted by the court itself from those raised in the six petitions it agreed to review, indicates the court does not plan to revisit the underlying reasoning behind Massachusetts v. EPA but will weigh whether the EPA went further than allowed under the act.

The American Petroleum Institute, a lobbying group that along with manufacturing interests filed one of the petitions, said the fact that EPA regulations for cars automatically triggered further regulation of other sources of greenhouse gas emissions was an "overstep" of the agency's authority under the Clean Air Act.

"The EPA is seeking to regulate U.S. manufacturing in a way that Congress never planned and never intended," said Harry Ng, American Petroleum Institute vice president and general counsel.

Whatever the court eventually decides, the EPA's ability to use the Clean Air Act to regulate emissions from power plants and other stationary sources is not under threat, environmental lawyers say.

Even if the court ruled for petitioners, most power plants and refineries would still be required to install best available control technology to limit greenhouse gases, said Sean Donahue, a lawyer representing environmental groups at Donahue and Goldberg.Read the full story here.