This story originally appeared on Slate and is part of Climate Office cooperation.
Environmental law in the U.S. is a relatively up-to-date discipline. The Environmental Protection Agency is just over 50 years aged, and the Neat Air and Neat Water Acts—which we now consider cornerstones of public health and environmental protection—were enacted in 1963 and 1973, respectively. When was this case supposed to become Chevron vs. Natural Resources Defense Council was filed in the early 1980s, when the Environmental Protection Agency was just beginning to develop regulations that had sedate economic consequences for businesses and industry.
In its decision last week annulling Chevron deference — a key legal precedent that gives federal agencies the ability to interpret regulations that would otherwise be unclear or ambiguous — the Supreme Court took the future of countless public health, tidy water and tidy air regulations away from organizations like the EPA and gave it to nonexpert judges who will hear challenges to those regulations in court.
“Anyone who doesn’t like how a federal agency is regulating can now sue,” said Jillian Blanchard, director of Lawyers for Good Government. “It’s terrifying.”
Overturning Chevron is just one piece of a larger plan to dismantle the administrative state and environmental law as we know it — and the ultraconservative forces and fossil fuel advocates like the Koch brothers who are behind it are just getting started.
Ironically, Chevron The decision was initially seen as a victory for the polluting industry. The Neat Air Act requires up-to-date stationary sources of pollution to undergo agency review, but it does not define exactly what a source is. In the early 1980s, Reagan’s EPA — headed by Anne Gorsuch, the mother of current Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch — expanded the definition source to mean an entire plant or intricate. That greatly reduced red tape for polluting industries that previously had to go through government approval processes to add single smokestacks to larger facilities. The National Resources Defense Council sued the EPA and won; Chevron intervened and took the case to the Supreme Court, where the justices ruled 8–0 to overturn the lower court’s decision and hand victory to the oil giant — and the EPA.
The doctrine established by the case was also seen as a good tool for corporate life. Industries rely on consistent federal guidance to build their business models. Taking the details of regulation out of the courts and into the hands of agencies provided stability for companies that had to plan ahead.
“Once the deference doctrine became law, everybody started relying on it,” Blanchard said. “They might not like the agency’s decision on something, but they could rely on the fact that, like, OK, at least we can trust the process.”
Successive administrations have enacted much stricter environmental regulations, using Chevron doctrine as a foundation. The EPA, especially under Democratic presidents, has increasingly come to be viewed as a burdensome, anti-business body by both industry interests and ultraconservative leaders. Even Antonin Scalia, who spent most of his career as a defender of ChevronHe showed signs of Doctrine fatigue in next years.