West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey on Wednesday issued a statement following U.S. Supreme Court arguments on a potential stay of the administrative action related to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s ‘Good Neighbor Plan’ for the 2015 Ozone Ambient Air Quality—a plan for regulating downwind emissions.
West Virginia, along with Indiana and Ohio, filed the stay application. They argue 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. The plan also requires many states to implement draconian emissions cuts to meet the standards set forth in the EPA’s plan.
“It is common knowledge that the country’s 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,” Attorney General Morrisey said. “The EPA will keep trying to legislate and bypass Congress’s authority—and it has been settled by the Supreme Court: the EPA must regulate within the express boundaries of the statute that Congress passed.
The three states also argued: the EPA’s plan “is likely to cause electric-grid emergencies as power suppliers strain to adjust to the federal plan’s terms.”
The Clean Air Act allows each state to develop a plan to prevent emissions within its borders from significantly affecting other states’ air quality. 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 in 2022 announced it was rejecting the “Good Neighbor” air quality plans for ozone of roughly half of the country’s states, and revealed its own federal plan, which the agency finalized in June 2023 despite numerous objections.
In January 2024, the Attorney General secured a temporary reprieve from the disapproval of West Virginia’s plan. About a dozen states in total—due to litigation and interim rulemaking—are similarly exempt from the plan for the time being, but the EPA insists its federal plan should still apply to the remaining states immediately.
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