What is the history of the lawsuit?
In 2015, during the Obama administration, the EPA finalized a flagship climate rule, dubbed the Clean Power Plan, which sought to curtail emissions from the electricity sector to at least 30% below 2005 levels by 2030. The plan would have set reductions targets for US states; to meet them, coal- and gas-burning power plants could have upgraded their technology to boost efficiency and decrease emissions, but the bulk of the reductions would have needed to come from electric utilities shifting towards more renewable energy sources, such as wind and solar. The Obama EPA said that this ‘generation shifting’ approach was consistent with the Clean Air Act, a law that requires the agency to consider the best-available technologies when crafting regulations to curb air pollution.
The more industry-friendly Trump administration repealed the Clean Power Plan in 2018 and replaced it with a weaker version dubbed the Affordable Clean Energy plan, which more narrowly interpreted the Clean Air Act. It also limited pollution controls to technologies that could be installed at individual power plants. Critics said it would do little, if anything, to encourage a broader shift towards clean energy.
The situation came to a head on Trump’s final day in office in early 2021, when a federal appeals court in Washington DC dismissed the Trump plan and rejected its repeal of the original Clean Power Plan. The new Supreme Court case, West Virginia vs Environmental Protection Agency, hinges on the fact that the appeals court expressly rejected the Trump administration’s arguments that the Clean Air Act does not authorize the EPA to require generation shifting across the electricity industry.