Finally, a check on the over-zealous Environmental Protection Agency.
The U.S. Supreme Court, in a 5-4 ruling Monday, struck down the agency’s Mercury and Air Toxics Standards Rule (MATS), providing a badly needed break for the coal industry, coal-fired power plants and rate payers, while sending a message to the Obama Administration that it cannot simply invent law.
The agency imposed the MATS rule in 2012 to reduce emissions of mercury and other toxins from coal and oil-fired power plants. The EPA said it was taking “appropriate and necessary” action allowed under the Clean Air Act. The EPA also said it did not have to consider the cost before deciding to impose the rules. More than two dozen states, including West Virginia, the National Mining Association and others sued the EPA claiming the agency had exceeded its authority.
The high court agreed that the EPA went too far. Writing for the majority, Justice Antonin Scalia said, “The EPA refused to consider whether the costs of its decision outweighed the benefits. The agency gave no consideration at all, because it considered cost irrelevant to its initial decision to regulate.”
And those costs are considerable—$9.6 billion a year with quantifiable benefits of only $4 to $6 million. That’s a ratio of between 1,600 and 2,400 to one. Scalia said cost consideration reflects a reasonable understanding that regulators must consider advantages and disadvantages to agency decisions.
“One would say that it is not rational, keep in mind appropriate, to impose billions of dollars in costs in return for a few dollars in health and environmental benefits.”
Supporters of the MATS rule point to what they contend are the significant health benefits from limiting the emissions, but those numbers are highly suspect. They come primarily from “co-benefits” from air quality levels that the EPA says are already safe and protection from alleged health risks of mercury exposure to pregnant women who eat more than 300 pounds of self-caught fish a year (We’re not kidding).
The EPA’s real intent with the MATS rule has been to make it increasingly more difficult to generate electricity at coal-burning power plants, and according to UMWA president Cecil Roberts, the agency has accomplished that, even though it lost in court yesterday.
“Unfortunately, the ruling comes too late for dozens of now-closed coal-fired power plants and the jobs that were associated with them,” Roberts said. “This decision will not bring those plants back on line.”
The Obama administration and the EPA have continually invoked a “we know best” approach when it comes to the environment, demonstrating an arrogant disregard for the process of determining public policy. This Supreme Court decision is an important bulkhead against executive excess, even though much of the damage from the MATS rule is already done.