Will the Supreme Court ruling in the Chevron case affect environmental regulations?

According to an article published in Grist, “The Supreme Court on Friday threw the future of climate and environmental regulation in the United States into question, eliminating decades of legal precedent that gave federal agencies the freedom to interpret regulations according to their expertise and scientific evidence.” Legal experts say the decision, which overturns Chevron’s “deference,” could lead to a surge in legal challenges to federal agency regulations that keep our land, water and air clean and mitigate climate change.

Grist reporters Jake Bittle and Zoya Teirstein write, “Federal courts have long deferred to federal agencies to interpret laws that are unclear and need further clarification. In 1984, an understaffed Supreme Court unanimously ruled that federal agencies have the final say on ambiguous policies, giving those agencies broad authority to make decisions without fear of a court overturning them.” A recent Supreme Court decision reverses that authority, instead leaving the decisions to judges who lack the financial, scientific, and security expertise that federal agencies have.

Grist’s article delves into the Court’s opinions, but overall, the Court’s majority opinion (6-3) found that Chevron’s deference stripped the courts of judicial authority and allowed the executive branch excessive powers, while the dissenting justices argued that the authority was crucial to protecting the executive branch’s environment, public health, and the economy, and that without it, the Supreme Court would now function as the country’s “administrative czar.”

“What is at stake (in this decision) is whether courts will defer to agency interpretations of statutes, or whether they will stop doing so and more often interpret statutes themselves, even if they are ambiguous, which means they may be able to make more decisions political,” Michael Burger, director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University, said in an interview with Grist.