There was never any doubt that Massachusetts v. Environmental Protection Agency (“Mass. v. EPA”) would be a closely watched and hotly contested case. Nor was there much question that Justice Anthony Kennedy would provide the pivotal swing vote. On many of the issues before the Court, the remaining justices were sure to be evenly divided. Justice Kennedy has shown an uncanny ability to find himself in the majority in close cases—environmental cases in particular —and this would be no exception.
The surprise in Mass. v. EPA is the facility and ease with which the Court dispatched opposing arguments and redefined prior precedents. Not content to widen doctrines on the margins, Justice Stevens’s majority opinion blazed a new path through the law of standing and unearthed newfound regulatory authority for the EPA. Under the Court’s new interpretation, the Clean Air Act (“CAA” or “the Act”) provides EPA with roving authority, if not responsibility, to regulate any substance capable of causing or contributing to environmental harm in the atmosphere.
The federal government did much to facilitate this course. At least since Clinton EPA General Counsel Jonathan Cannon first suggested EPA’s preexisting regulatory authority could reach greenhouse gases, various agencies laid the groundwork for the eventual regulation of greenhouse gases. Even during the second Bush Administration, EPA has been anything but a reluctant regulator, and as such the present administration was not the most compelling advocate for its own cause.
Now that EPA has authority to regulate greenhouse gases, regulatory controls on motor vehicles (as well as on other sources of greenhouse gases, including utilities and industrial facilities) are sure to follow. In time, however, Mass. v. EPA may come to stand for more than the simple proposition that Congress delegated authority to regulate greenhouse gases under the CAA. It may herald in a new era of state-sponsored litigation, environmental standing, and statutory interpretation—and yet still do little to cool down a warming planet.
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