The case, brought by Republican-led states and coal companies, could frustrate the Biden administration’s efforts to address climate change.
The Supreme Court agreed on Friday to hear appeals from Republican-led states and coal companies asking it to limit the Environmental Protection Agency’s power to regulate carbon emissions under the Clean Air Act. “This is the equivalent of an earthquake around the country for those who care deeply about the climate issue,” said Richard J. Lazarus, a law professor at Harvard. The court’s decision to take the case came days before President Biden is to attend a global climate summit in Scotland where he seeks to reassure other nations that the United States will continue to pursue aggressive policies to combat global warming. In January, on the last full day of Donald J. Trump’s presidency, a federal appeals court in Washington struck down his administration’s plan to relax restrictions on greenhouse gas emissions from power plants. The move cleared the way for the Biden administration to issue stronger restrictions. A divided three-judge panel of the court, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, ruled that the Trump administration’s plan, called the Affordable Clean Energy Rule, was based on a “fundamental misconstruction” of the relevant law, prompted by a “tortured series of misreadings.
