By Charles Kennedy of OilPrice.com
The Biden Administration’s new strict tailpipe emission standards have just become particularly vulnerable after the Supreme Court overturned last week a 40-year-old landmark ruling, known as the ‘Chevron deference’, which granted federal agencies the authority to interpret ambiguous laws.
The precedent, set in 1984 in a case involving the oil giant, gave federal agencies more power to interpret ambiguous laws. But last Friday’s Supreme Court ruling will strip federal agencies, including the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), from the power of interpreting laws, such as the Clean Air Act, and how to apply them.
The U.S. top court ruling will have wide-reaching implications for the oil and gas industry because it will make it more difficult for federal agencies to regulate the environment and public health, based on their interpretation of ambiguous laws.
The tailpipe emissions limits, which the EPA finalized just a few weeks ago, look especially vulnerable in light of the Supreme Court ruling, environmental law attorneys have told Reuters.
In March, the EPA announced the finalization of new tailpipe emission standards. The agency boasted that these were the strictest standards ever, adding that they would save money, create jobs, and eliminate billions of tons of CO2 emissions.
The ruling adds to already heated debates about whether the EPA has authority to regulate emissions from vehicles, they said.
“There have been longstanding debates about whether and to what extent the (U.S. Environmental Protection Agency) has the authority to regulate emissions from mobile sources,” Sherry Jackman, an environmental litigator and compliance counselor at Greenberg Glusker in Los Angeles, told Reuters.
Even before the Supreme Court ruling last week, the American Petroleum Institute (API) challenged the new tailpipe emissions rules in court.
API sued the EPA over the vehicle emission standards, with Senior Vice President and General Counsel Ryan Meyers saying that “EPA has exceeded its congressional authority with this regulation that will eliminate most new gas cars and traditional hybrids from the U.S. market in less than a decade.”