Posted on April 11, 2017 by Dick Stoll
Bob Sussman is a former high-ranking Obama and Clinton EPA official with a stellar academic and professional background. He recently published in Inside EPA a thought-provoking piece entitled “Trump’s Tortured Maneuvering on Climate Change.”
No matter what your views on climate, Bob’s piece is worth reading. I find much to agree with in Bob’s observations, but would respectfully disagree with one.
Focusing on the president’s March 28 Executive Order (EO), Bob raises the valid question of why Mr. Trump touted it on job-saving, energy independence grounds. Bob makes a strong case (as if he really needed to) that coal mining jobs are dwindling due to market forces and that the U.S. energy outlook is just fine.
Bob posits that Trump’s job-energy independence focus reveals a divide and major discomfort within the Administration on whether and how much to deny that humans are involved with climate change. He notes that the March 28 Order side-steps any position on both the “Endangerment Finding” and the Paris Accords.
So far so good. My respectful disagreement relates to Bob’s argument that the Trump EPA would have a difficult time sustaining major cutbacks to the Obama Clean Power Plan (CPP) on judicial review. He speculates that a new Trump CPP might simply retain “building block 1” (plant efficiency improvements) from the 3-block “beyond-the-fenceline” Obama CPP. He argues that “the courts may well balk at this approach as a contrived effort to duck the challenge of climate change by taking refuge in narrow legal arguments.”
Here is why I disagree:
a. Following the 2007 Supreme Court Massachusetts ruling and EPA’s subsequent Endangerment Finding, EPA is not required by the Clean Air Act (CAA) to issue GHG rules with any particular degree of stringency – EPA must just issue rules.
b. The “beyond-the-fenceline” features of the Obama CPP are based upon truly adventurous interpretations of the words of the CAA. There is certainly nothing in the CAA that requires those interpretations. (Recall the U.S. Supreme Court has taken the unprecedented step of staying the Obama CPP throughout the entire judicial review process.) Even if the D.C. Circuit were to uphold these interpretations, it would only be upholding the Obama EPA’s discretion to adopt them; the Court could not rule that such interpretations were mandated by the CAA.
c. The Supreme Court and D.C. Circuit case law are clear on the following points:
i. A new administration is free to reverse rules issued by a prior administration based entirely upon policy preferences, even where there are no new facts or information, so long as the new administration adequately explains the basis for the reversal;
ii. There is no heightened standard of judicial review when an agency reverses course; and an agency need not convince the court that the reasons for the new policy are better than the reasons for the rejected one.
See my recent ACOEL blog for the citations to the cases.
d. Because the statutory interpretations supporting beyond-the-fenceline requirements are so adventurous (and stayed by the Supreme Court), it should be easy for the Trump EPA to defend a new CPP as a matter of policy based on CAA interpretations that are far less adventurous.
e. If and when the new CPP reaches the Supreme Court, it is difficult to see the Court departing from the precedents of the cases cited in my ACOEL blog, particularly with Justice Gorsuch filling Justice Scalia’s seat.
Tags: Clean Power Plan, March 28 2017 Executive Order, Energy Independence, Standard of Judicial Review
Air | Clean Air Act | Energy | Environmental Protection Agency | Judicial Review