Republican-led states are urging the nation’s highest bench to strike down the Biden administration’s method of justifying costly climate regulations.
Their efforts may fall flat — even before a conservative-dominated Supreme Court.
Missouri’s plea for the justices to scrap the Biden administration’s social cost of greenhouse gases — a metric that calculates the financial harm of emitting climate pollution and that is used to defend the cost of robust environmental rules — follows the high court’s June decision in a separate case that said GOP-led states didn’t have the power to sue over an immigration enforcement policy.
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The immigration decision, United States v. Texas, cast doubt on the court’s landmark 2007 environmental ruling, Massachusetts v. EPA, which said states enjoy special legal standing to protect their interests.
Robert Percival, director of the environmental law program at the University of Maryland, said the court’s decision in United States v. Texas appears “problematic” for Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey and other Republican state officials seeking to quash the Biden team’s interim climate metric.
Missouri’s Supreme Court petition “is another example of red states trying to turn an ideological disagreement into a litigable issue,” Percival said.
He said he suspects the states involved in Missouri v. Biden are “counting on the conservative majority’s well-demonstrated antipathy toward environmental regulation and its willingness to reach out and decide cases that don’t need to be decided.”
The Supreme Court grants only a tiny fraction of cases that come its way. While the justices have in recent years shown increased interest in conservative-backed environmental challenges, they turned away an earlier emergency request from Louisiana to stop the Biden administration from using the social cost metric.
“Jurisdictionally, it’s a weak case,” Jonathan Adler, founding director of the environmental law center at Case Western Reserve University, said of Missouri’s effort to overturn the White House climate metric.
The formula was developed by a working group established by President Joe Biden’s 2021 climate executive order and has become a political flashpoint for conservatives critical of the administration’s efforts to limit greenhouse gas emissions.