In recent years, U.S. Supreme Court decisions have undercut federal agencies’ ability to curb pollution and fight climate change. Several cases decided in 2024 continued this trend, systematically shifting the power to make and enforce environmental regulations over to the judicial branch.
Though it will likely take years to know the full consequences of this year’s rulings, legal experts say they have profound implications as to how federal agencies can respond to the threat of climate change. Congress passed the majority of the laws that protect our lands and waters decades ago, and with an increasingly polarized political environment, legislators have passed few new environmental regulations since. In the past few decades, Congress has in effect tasked federal agencies with adapting existing laws to our new climate reality, said Chris Winter, executive director of the University of Colorado Law School’s Getches-Wilkinson Center for Natural Resources, Energy, and the Environment. But with an increasingly conservative Supreme Court in place, these laws have come under increased scrutiny, including in several of the court’s 2024 landmark decisions.
Perhaps the most significant was Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, which overturned the 1984 Chevron doctrine, a powerful legal tool that gave federal agencies the ability to interpret and enforce ambiguous or unclear laws. For decades, the courts have largely deferred to agency experts in crafting and enforcing regulations, since those agencies typically have greater expertise in their subject areas than judges do. By eliminating Chevron, the court transferred the authority to clarify the meaning of a written law to the judicial system.
Loper Bright has already raised “a lot of uncertainty” about whether or how agencies should create and enforce environmental regulations, according to Winter. The last few years have signaled a structural change in the balance of power between courts and federal agencies, he said, with courts now working hard to rein in federal regulators.
Meanwhile, industry groups eager to roll back regulations have filed lawsuits in conservative states with business-friendly judges. In federal courts in Wyoming, Utah and Montana, for example, groups representing farmers, ranchers and the fossil fuel industry have cited Loper Bright as a precedent for suing the Biden administration to overturn the 2024 Public Lands Rule, which designated conservation as a legitimate “use” for public lands in line with extractive uses like mining, grazing and logging. As of Sept. 6, Loper Bright has been cited in 110 federal cases, according to the advocacy group Democracy Forward. “These days, it doesn’t feel like you can really think deeply about the law. It is simply a political battle,” said Erik Schlenker-Goodrich, executive director of the Western Environmental Law Center, a nonprofit public-interest environmental law firm. Altogether, the body of law emerging from the court has “prioritized politically oriented property rights and economic rights,” Schlenker-Goodrich said. “In other words, corporate rights and corporate power.”
Other Supreme Court decisions this year further hamstrung agencies’ ability to enforce environmental regulations. In Ohio v. Environmental Protection Agency, the court halted the Clean Air Act’s “good neighbor” rule, which gave the agency the authority to protect downwind states from air pollution that emanates from their upwind neighbors. This decision could affect public health by preventing the EPA from limiting pollution that wafts across state boundaries. It is also significant because it shows that the Supreme Court is willing to weigh in on individual agency regulations, something that had not previously been the case, Winter said.
The court also exposed long-standing federal regulations to legal attacks following its decision on Corner Post v. Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. The case, which was brought by a North Dakota convenience store over debit card fees, was backed by the Cato Institute, a Koch-funded libertarian think tank. It ended the existing six-year statute of limitations on suing federal agencies for harm, enabling parties to challenge agency regulations even if a company does so decades after it was allegedly harmed by the rule in question. In her dissenting opinion, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote that this ruling, combined with the court’s decision to overturn Chevron, could open the floodgates to a “tsunami of lawsuits” that are likely to handcuff federal regulators.
Other recent decisions, such as West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency in 2022, which limited the EPA’s power to regulate carbon emissions, have stripped federal agencies of their ability to respond to climate change more broadly. The West Virginia case, in particular, established a new legal principle, the so-called “major questions” doctrine, which limits agencies’ authority to make decisions with significant political or economic implications without explicit congressional approval. “All of these cases are creating ripple effects in ongoing litigation,” Schlenker-Goodrich said.
And this trend could continue into 2025. On Dec. 10, the justices heard arguments on Seven County Infrastructure Coalition v. Eagle County, Colorado, a dispute over a planned oil railway in Utah that could change how government agencies evaluate the environmental and climate impacts of energy infrastructure projects. The case could potentially limit the scope of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) — a bedrock environmental law that requires federal agencies to evaluate environmental impacts before making decisions — for years to come. “NEPA has provided one of the best ways to force a rational look at what it means for agencies to make decisions on things like fossil fuel projects and fossil fuel extraction,” Winter said. Another case, Food and Drug Administration v. Wages and White Lion Investments, could have implications for the Administrative Procedures Act, which governs all federal rulemaking, safeguarding against “arbitrary and capricious” federal actions.
“The Supreme Court has shown that it is much less likely to defer to or uphold agency decisions,” Winter said, and lower courts have rapidly followed suit. “Overall, we’re seeing a rightward shift in the courts,” Winter said.
Legislators in some Western states have taken proactive steps to prevent air and water pollution and mitigate the worst effects of climate change. New Mexico and Colorado, for example, have passed landmark laws protecting wetlands and streams, while Washington has passed the Climate Commitment Act, which places a cap on greenhouse gas pollution.
These state-level measures are merely stopgaps, Schlenker-Goodrich said, but with the incoming Trump administration likely to keep rolling back regulations, they’re critically important to fill the gaps created by the courts. “Between the Supreme Court and the incoming Trump administration, extractive interests like the fossil fuel industry, especially oil and gas, will be able to run with a lot of ideas that otherwise would have held no merit even just five years ago,” he said.
“We can’t let the Supreme Court and Trump administration roll over us,” Schlenker-Goodrich said. “We can hold the line for a better day.”
This article first appeared on High Country News and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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