https://www.wsj.com/articles/epa-environmental-protection-supreme-court-regulation-unconstitutional-climate-change-administrative-state-biden-42f31ce3?mod=opinion_lead_pos5
In politics, inadvertently telling the truth is called a “gaffe.” Last year Michael Regan, administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, made a remark in passing that gave away the Biden administration’s plans for enforcing its climate agenda through a “suite of rules” imposed under programs lacking any credible connection to climate. A few months later, a Supreme Court opinion transformed Mr. Regan’s indiscretion into justification for wholesale judicial repudiation of the Biden administration’s climate regulatory blitz.
Mr. Regan’s comment came on March 10, 2022, when he addressed the press following his keynote address to CERAWeek, a climate conference in Houston. A reporter asked about vulnerabilities of the EPA’s approach to installing climate regulation through the Obama-Biden Clean Power Plan, which was then awaiting judgment by the court. Mr. Regan replied that the agency had abandoned the idea of relying on any specific grant of regulatory authority. Instead it was in the process of tightening rules under numerous and varied regulatory programs all at once, pressuring disfavored operations to close and compelling investment consistent with the EPA’s desires.
Mr. Regan went on to cite rules to tighten regulation of mercury, ozone, soot, hazardous air pollutants, water effluent and coal ash under acknowledged congressional grants of authority. But he also called the “expedited retirement” of power plants “the best tool for reducing greenhouse-gas emissions” and opined that the “industry gets to take a look at this suite of rules all at once and say, ‘Is it worth doubling down on investments in this current facility or operation, or should we look at the cost and say no, it’s time to pivot and invest in a clean-energy future?’ ”
This already reflected something of a scofflaw position. Congress never approved what Mr. Regan described. It became a serious problem when the justices struck down the Clean Power Plan in June. West Virginia v. EPA held that the agency didn’t have the authority it claimed to force power-plant closures by setting unmeetable emission standards and thus dictate, as the court had put it, “how Americans get their energy.”
Chief Justice John Roberts noted for the 6-3 majority that after Congress had repeatedly considered and rejected providing the agency authority to regulate power-sector greenhouse gases, the EPA claimed “to discover an unheralded power” that represented a “transformative expansion in [its] regulatory authority” to force “generation shifting.”