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The U.S. has entered a new era of legal uncertainty, ushered in by the Supreme Court's decision Friday to overturn long-held precedent protecting the constitutional right to obtain an abortion in the United States.
The Court's decision in the abortion case, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, indicates the court is willing to throw out precedent, and that could mean trouble for environmental regulations, like those governing what the Environmental Protection Agency can and can't do.
The Supreme Court is expected to hand down a decision as soon as this week in West Virginia v. EPA, a case with major implications for climate change. The case was brought by several states, including West Virginia, that are seeking to preemptively block the Biden administration from setting clean air standards that could force coal plants to shut down while incentivizing the use of cleaner energy sources.
The EPA derives its ability to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from a 2007 case called Massachusetts v. EPA, which gives the agency the ability to regulate GHG emissions as air pollutants. But the court's apparent willingness to completely gut established precedent like Roe has some environmental lawyers worried.
“When we get the West Virginia decision next week, we may learn whether the court will take a similarly radical approach to weaken our nation’s most treasured environmental laws,” Robert Percival, director of the University of Maryland’s environmental law program, wrote to E&E News.
“(Chief Justice John) Roberts apparently does not command enough respect to temper the ideological impulses of the extreme right wing that now controls the court,” Vermont Law School professor Pat Parenteau added, also in an email to E&E News. “No environmental precedent is safe.”
Arctic decision looms
The Biden administration is also preparing a major environmental decision on a massive oil development, ConocoPhillips' Willow project on Alaska's North Slope. The $6 billion project would create hundreds of miles of roads and pipelines as well as a major processing facility in the middle of pristine Arctic public land.
The Washington Post reports that the administration is nearing completion of a new environmental review, ordered by the courts after the Trump administration failed to consider the climate impacts of the project. The Bureau of Land Management estimated the project could produce 586 million barrels of oil, but ConocoPhillips told investors last year that Willow could ultimately unlock 3 billion barrels of oil.
“This is the single biggest oil and gas proposal on federal lands. It’s just a massive carbon threat, a massive development project in an area that’s already being ravaged by climate change,” Kristen Miller, conservation director of the Alaska Wilderness League, told the Post. “It’s really sort of an existential crisis.”
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We think of these lands as pristine. But we need to think of them as a place that people lived, managed and stewarded for more than 30,000 years... For Indigenous people, these are places we live in. These are not places that are separate from us.”
