CHARLESTON — West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey and two other AGs have filed an application at the U.S. Supreme Court seeking a stay of the administrative action related to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s ‘Good Neighbor Plan’ for the 2015 Ozone Ambient Air Quality.
“Our power grid is already stressed as it is and now this administration has added more regulation that’s going to stress the grid even more,” Morrisey said, joining in writing in the application that the plan “is likely to cause electric-grid emergencies as power suppliers strain to adjust to the federal plan’s terms.”
Morrisey says the plan takes away the ability of states to monitor and control air quality standards in favor of a broad federal plan that empowers a massive and unresponsive federal agency in Washington, D.C. to establish unprecedented regulatory control of emissions. He says the plan also requires many states to implement draconian emissions cuts to meet the standards set forth in the EPA’s plan.
“Again, the EPA, an agency comprised of unelected bureaucrats, has circumvented Congress,” Morrisey said. “The Supreme Court clearly stated the EPA must regulate within the express boundaries of the statute that Congress passed.”
Morrisey, along with the AGs from Ohio and Indiana, is asking the Supreme Court to stay the EPA plan while a challenge is underway in the D.C. Circuit.
Earlier this year, Morrisey secured a temporary stay from the Fourth Circuit of the EPA’s disapproval of West Virginia’s related state implementation plan.
The Clean Air Act allows each state to develop a plan to prevent emissions within its borders from significantly affecting other states’ air quality. According to the application, the EPA then reviews each state’s plan, but that review is deferential, meaning if a state’s plan meets statutory requirements, the EPA “shall approve” it, regardless of whether the EPA has a better idea for how to accomplish the act’s goals.
“The EPA’s rulemaking ignored obvious problems with its attempt to twist the Clean Air Act into a system of top-down regulation instead of the system of cooperative federalism that Congress intended,” according to the application.
The EPA in 2022 announced “Good Neighbor” to reject the air quality plans of roughly half of the country’s states, and reveled its own federal plan, which the agency finalized in June despite numerous objections.
Because of litigation and interim rulemaking, about a dozen of those states already are exempt from the plan. That includes West Virginia). But the EPA insists its federal plan should still apply to the remaining states.