The Return of Natural Resources Today

After a long hiatus, Natural Resources Today is returning to regular coverage of developments in the world of environmental law and policy. You can expect updates once or twice each week.

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Advocacy Group and U.S. Government’s Wildlife Killers Reach Settlement to Limit Lethal Practices in Montana

The gray wolf is among the species impacted by Wildlife Services’ extensive efforts to kill Montana animals. Image courtesy Wikimedia.

A little-known federal agency that kills more than a million native animals every year, including cougars, eagles, grizzly bears, and wolves, will sharply limit its activities in Montana under a lawsuit settlement announced Thursday.

Wildlife Services, which is part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, agreed to forego all operations in the state’s federally designated wilderness, wild and scenic river corridors, and Areas of Critical Environmental Concern.

The agency also agreed to cease the killing of black bears and coyotes on federal public lands throughout the state, to stop using poisons or gas cartridges to kill denning animals and their young on all public lands in Montana, and to forego statewide the use of sodium cyanide bombs as a tool of wildlife destruction.

WildEarth Guardians sued Wildlife Services last November, arguing that the agency has violated the National Environmental Policy Act by continuing to rely on a study of environmental consequences that is more than two decades old.

NEPA requires an agency to give a “hard look” to the environmental consequences of its actions even if it previously did so. The federal appeals court with jurisdiction over cases from Montana has explained that the existence of “significant new circumstances or information” triggers a requirement to prepare a new environmental impact statement or environmental assessment.

WildEarth Guardians argued that Wildlife Services has not met this requirement. It asked the U.S. District Court for the District of Montana to order the agency to prepare an environmental impact statement after considering studies from the past several decades suggesting that predator control is an ineffective method of managing wildlife populations. 

The United States government intentionally destroys a large number of animals each year. During Fiscal Year 2018, Wildlife Services personnel killed at least 22,655 beavers, 338 black bears, 1,002 bobcats, 68,186 coyotes plus an unknown number of coyote pups in dens, 3,349 foxes plus an unknown number of fox pups killed in dens, 357 gray wolves, 375 mountain lions, 515,915 red-winged blackbirds, 710 river otters, and 7,264 white-tailed deer.

The obscure agency also unintentionally kills many more thousands of other animals. In FY 2018, they included at least 2,700 bears, bobcats, foxes, marmots, muskrats, porcupines, raccoons, and turtles.

Wildlife Services’ annual kill also takes the lives of many birds, including numerous chickadees, cardinals, crows, doves, ducks, eagles, egrets, falcons, geese, grackles, gulls, hawks, herons, larks, meadowlarks, owls, pelicans, ravens, robins, sparrows, starlings, swallows, swans, turkeys, and vultures.

 

 

 

 

House passes bill to protect more than one million acres of wilderness

The U.S. House of Representatives has passed a bill that would add more than a million acres of land to the National Wilderness Preservation System. The Protecting America’s Wilderness Act would extend preservation to public land in California, Colorado, and Washington.

The bill would designate more wilderness than any other bill passed by the House in more than a decade. “We have been working on this legislation for more than 20 years,” Rep. Diana DeGette, D-Colo., and the bill’s sponsor, said. “The areas that will be protected under this bill are some of the most beautiful and pristine landscapes that our country has to offer.”

Among the public lands that would be added to the nation’s inventory of designated wilderness are:

• 660,000 acres in 36 areas across Colorado, including  the Handies Peak, Dolores River Canyon, Little Book Cliffs, Diamond Breaks, Papoose Canyon, North Ponderosa Gorge, and South Ponderosa Gorge areas;
• 312,500 acres in Northwest California, by means of expanding nine existing wilderness areas and creating eight new ones;
• 30,700 acres of newly-designated wilderness in Southern California; and
• 126,544 acres of newly-designated wilderness on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula.

H.R. 2546 would also add nearly 1,300 river miles in the three states to the National Wild and Scenic River System.

The bill was approved on a 231-183 vote. It is not expected to receive consideration in the Republican-controlled Senate this year.

National monument designations, 2009-2017

National Monument	Date Established or Enlarged	Land or Marine?	State, Territory, or Ocean	Size (acres)	Notes	Link to Proclamation
Basin and Range	7/10/2015	Land	Nevada	704,000		https://tinyurl.com/jfqgpyy
Bears Ears	12/28/2016	Land	Utah	1,350,000		https://tinyurl.com/j5rfg4h
Belmont-Paul Women’s Equality	4/12/2016	Land	Washington, D.C.	<1		https://tinyurl.com/zn73ju3
Berryessa Snow Mountain	7/10/2015	Land	California	330,380		https://tinyurl.com/j7ujohj
Browns Canyon	2/1/2015	Land	Colorado	21,586		https://tinyurl.com/jndlox3
Castle Mountains	2/12/2016	Land	California	30,920		https://tinyurl.com/hkd4c83
Cesar Estrada Chavez	10/8/2012	Land	California	11		https://tinyurl.com/hfbamyr
Charles Young Buffalo Soldiers	3/25/2013	Land	Ohio	60		https://tinyurl.com/h6vztnb
Chimney Rock	9/21/2012	Land	Colorado	4,722		https://tinyurl.com/zna8345
First State Historical Park	3/25/2013	Land	Delaware	1,108		https://tinyurl.com/z9gmybq
Fort Monroe	11/1/2011	Land	Virginia	325		https://tinyurl.com/h8wz4rt
Fort Ord	4/20/2012	Land	California	14,651		https://tinyurl.com/j5oae3s
Gold Butte	12/28/2016	Land	Nevada	300,000		https://tinyurl.com/jrdstc7
Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad	3/25/2013	Land	Maryland	11,750		https://tinyurl.com/hrvfhvr
Honouliuliu	2/9/2015	Land	Hawaii	123		https://tinyurl.com/gq4t6j3
Katahdin Woods and Waters	8/24/2016	Land	Maine	87,563		https://tinyurl.com/jjp3fbf
Mojave Trails	2/12/2016	Land	California	1,600,000		https://tinyurl.com/gm7ykkn
Northeast Canyons and Seamounts	9/15/2016	Marine	Massachusetts – Atlantic	4,913		https://tinyurl.com/zhssztt
Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks	5/21/2014	Land	New Mexico	496,330		https://tinyurl.com/zvt9owo
Pacific Remote Islands	9/25/2014	Marine	Guam – Pacific		enlarged from 86,888 to 408,301 sq. mi.	https://tinyurl.com/zxlwtdm
Papahānaumokuākea	8/26/2016	Marine	Hawaii – Pacific		enlarged from 140,000 to 582,578 sq. mi.	https://tinyurl.com/z5bvc2o
Point Arena-Stornetta Public Lands	3/11/2014	Land	California	1,665	enlargement of California Coastal National Monument	https://tinyurl.com/jafyea2
Prehistoric Trackways	3/30/2009	Land	New Mexico	5,255	legislation
Pullman	2/19/2015	Land	Illinois	203		https://tinyurl.com/hr2uleo
Rio Grande del Norte	3/25/2013	Land	New Mexico	242,555		https://tinyurl.com/h6ordoo
San Gabriel Mountains	10/10/2014	Land	California	346,177		https://tinyurl.com/z3harl7
San Juan Islands	10/8/2012	Land	Washington	970		https://tinyurl.com/zaeeqky
Sand to Snow	2/12/2016	Land	California	154,000		https://tinyurl.com/gqkgeb6
Stonewall	6/24/2016	Land	New York	8		https://tinyurl.com/jne54kz
Tule Springs Fossil Beds	12/19/2014	Land	Nevada	22,650	legislation
Waco Mammoth	7/10/2015	Land	Texas	7		https://tinyurl.com/j9o3qca

Obama to commemorate Park Service anniversary at two preserves

Yosemite National Park is known for its meadows, valleys, and waterfalls. Image courtesy Wikimedia.

President Barack Obama will visit two national parks this month as he leads a celebration of the National Park Service’s 100th birthday.

The White House announced the trip to New Mexico’s Carlsbad Caverns National Park and California’s Yosemite National Park in a video released Thursday.

“I want to make sure that the whole world is able to pass on to future generations the God-given beauty of this planet,” Obama said in the video.

President John F. Kennedy was the last sitting chief executive to visit Yosemite National Park. President Benjamin Harrison signed legislation establishing that national park in 1890.

Carlsbad Caverns National Park, which is known for its many species of bats and the more than 100 caves it features, was created in 1930.

President Woodrow Wilson signed the National Park Service Organic Act into law on Aug. 25, 1916.

The Organic Act created the National Park Service and established its mission to “promote and regulate the use of the Federal areas known as national parks, monuments, and reservations” and “conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wild life therein and to provide for the enjoyment of the same in such manner and by such means as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.”

 

 

 

Justices will not hear dispute over Tongass exemption to national forest roadless area protection

This photo shows a portion of the Tongass National Forest. Image courtesy USDA Forest Service.

The U.S. Supreme Court will not take up a long-running dispute over preserving large areas of Alaska’s Tongass National Forest from logging.

The justices declined Monday to grant a petition for certiorari in the case, which involves an exemption from the landmark 2001 Roadless Area Conservation Rule, and allowed a lower court decision that bans regulatory changes based solely on political considerations to stand.

“Today’s court order is great news for southeast Alaska and for all those who visit this spectacular place,” Tom Waldo, an attorney at Earthjustice who represented environmental groups in the case, said.

Encompassing nearly 17 million acres, the Tongass is the world’s largest intact temperate rainforest. It extends along the coast of southeast Alaska for about 500 miles, with a variety of bays, coves, fjords, and glaciers within the national forest boundaries, and constitutes about seven percent of Alaska’s land. Wildlife found in the forest include salmon, wolves, brown and black bears, bald eagles, and the Arctic tern.

RACR was adopted by the administration of President William J. Clinton in January 2001, just days before the inauguration of a new President.  It did not initially exempt the Tongass. The U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service decided, during the process leading to RACR’s establishment, that the “long-term ecological benefits to the nation of conserving these inventoried roadless areas outweigh the potential economic loss to [southeast Alaska] communities.”

In 2003 the agency reversed itself. The agency, which had come under the leadership of President George W. Bush’s appointees, reached a conclusion exactly opposite to the one it had in 2001. This time, USDA Forest Service decided that “the social and economic hardships to Southeast Alaska outweigh the potential long-term ecological benefits” of RACR.

The Bush administration granted the RACR exemption to the Tongass as part of a settlement of a legal challenge to RACR filed by Alaska.

Environmental groups, an Alaskan native village, and a non-profit boat touring company challenged the exemption under the federal law that governs agency rulemaking. A divided panel of 11 judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled in July 2015 that the agency had not adequately explained its change of mind.

Alaska asked the justices to review that decision on grounds that the San Francisco-based appeals court had read a 2009 opinion of the Supreme Court too broadly by assuming that it forbids changes in policy that are dictated by ideology.

That 2009 decision held that agencies must demonstrate “good reasons” for a change in policy direction indicated by a final regulation and that an explanation of that change has to include a “reasoned explanation . . . for disregarding the facts and circumstances that underlay or were engendered by the prior policy.”

USDA Forest Service is considering changes to the existing management plan for the Tongass that would permit continued old-growth logging for another 15 years. The agency released its proposed amendment to the Tongass National Forest Management Plan in Nov. 2015; it is likely to be adopted late this year.

President Barack Obama’s secretary of agriculture,  Tom Vilsack, directed the Forest Service in 2013 to shift timber production on the Tongass away from old-growth stands and toward young trees.

The case in which the Supreme Court declined to grant review is Alaska v. Organized Village of Kake, No. 15-467.

Reuters reports that U.S. will sign Paris accord even in face of Clean Power Plan stay

Todd D. Stern is the Obama administration’s leading diplomat on climate change issues. Photo courtesy U.S. Department of State.

The United States will sign the Paris climate accord despite the stay order entered against the Obama administration’s signature greenhouse gas emission reduction program.

Reuters reported Wednesday that Todd D. Stern, the Department of State’s special envoy for climate change, told reporters that the administration would proceed with the multi-national agreement reached in December.

“We’re going to go ahead and sign the agreement this year,” he is quoted as saying in the Reuters article.

American negotiators agreed, as part of the Paris Agreement, to reduce U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by 26-28 percent below 2005 levels by 2025.

Because fossil fuel combustion for electricity generation is the single largest contributor to the country’s greenhouse gas emissions, the administration’s regulations – called the Clean Power Plan – aimed at forcing new and existing coal-fired power plants to reduce carbon dioxide pollution is a critical component of the U.S. Intended Nationally Determined Contribution (INDC) under the Paris Agreement.

The Supreme Court, on a 5-4 vote last Tuesday, blocked the Clean Power Plan from going into effect while litigation challenging it proceeds.

One of the justices that voted for the stay, Antonin Scalia, died on Saturday, but there has been no indication that the administration will ask the surviving eight members of the high court to reconsider the Feb. 9 order.

The Paris Agreement opens for signature on April 22. Parties will have one year in which to formally acknowledge their commitment to its terms.

What does Justice Scalia’s passing mean for environmental cases at Supreme Court?

The death Saturday of Justice Antonin Scalia at age 79 is likely to have a significant impact on the environmental law docket at the U.S. Supreme Court.

First, the significance of the stay against the part of the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan that deals with existing coal-fired electric plants, issued by a 5-4 vote that had Scalia supporting the request by utilities and a coalition of anti-regulation states to block the rule, is reduced. With a presumed 4-4 tie on the question whether the Clean Power Plan is consistent with the Clean Air Act and the Administrative Procedure Act (and the U.S. Constitution, to the extent a Tenth Amendment argument is mounted by challengers), any decision in the litigation by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit is likely to be affirmed. The D.C. Circuit has to be assumed inclined to uphold the carbon dioxide rules; a significant majority of the judges on that bench were appointed by Democratic Presidents and the assigned panel previously rejected the stay application.

Should President Obama obtain Senate confirmation of a nominee to replace Scalia before his term expires next January, it’s at least somewhat likely that appointee would uphold the rule. Should the Republican-dominated Senate succeed in blocking any replacement until after the next President’s term starts, as the chamber’s majority leader has said the GOP will try to do, the outcome would likely depend on the party affiliation of the election winner. A Republican President would likely withdraw the Clean Power Plan, or settle the litigation on terms favorable to the states and industrial interests contesting it in the D.C. Circuit, even before the litigation challenging it arrived at the Supreme Court. Failing that, a Republican-appointed justice could be expected to take a skeptical perspective on the Clean Power Plan.

Two other significant environmental cases await the Supreme Court’s decision on whether to grant petitions for certiorari. The question whether to accept both is probably impacted by the vacancy created by Scalia’s death.

Scalia, early in his career as a Supreme Court justice, defended the iconic Chevron rule that requires courts to defer to agency interpretations of ambiguous language in statutes. But that willingness to defer to agencies seems to have lessened as the justice’s time on the bench proceeded. As Professor Dan Farber wrote Feb. 15 on Legal Planet:

“There are only three cases in which the Supreme Court has ever held that a statute’s interpretation of an ambiguous statute was unreasonable, all three written by Scalia: Whitman v. American Trucking, UARG v. EPA, and Michigan v. EPA.  In all three cases, the ‘unreasonable’ agency was EPA.”

Scalia was the author of all three.

Moreover, Scalia had shown a willingness to look harshly on law that tended to favor environmental protection. He wrote several opinions that reduced the ability of environmental groups to file lawsuits challenging federal policy, for example, and he also was the author of a plurality opinion in a 2006 decision that would have, absent a moderating concurrence by his colleague Anthony Kennedy, drastically reduced the U.S. government’s regulatory power over wetlands and streams.

It seems plausible, then, to suppose that Scalia had developed a greater willingness to reject the ways in which agencies, especially those tasked with enforcing environmental laws, read federal statutes. In the two cases that are now subjects of cert petitions, that perspective may have made a difference in whether the court grants review and in the outcome.

Chesapeake Bay is shown in this image obtained by the LANDSAT satellite.

The first of these two cases involves efforts to clean up the  64,299 square-mile large Chesapeake Bay drainage basin. In a July 2015 decision the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit rejected attacks on the Total Maximum Daily Load designations for the bay. The Obama administration issued the pollution limits in 2010 under an agreement with environmental organizations who had sued the agency for failure to finalize them.

The TMDLs, which apply to nitrogen, phosphorus, and sediment loading into the beleaguered bay, are a tool made available by the Clean Water Act. They are imposed by EPA as a supplement to point source emission limits after the agency approves water quality standards created by a state for an affected water body or, if it rejects the state-based pollution limit, imposes its own.

On Nov. 6 the American Farm Bureau Federation and several other agriculture organizations asked the Supreme Court to hear the dispute. In their cert petition the groups argued that EPA’s decision to issue the TMDLs for Chesapeake Bay sets a precedent that could allow expanded federal power over land use all over the country. The groups base this assault on the TMDLs on a claim that EPA’s interpretation of the Clean Water Act is inconsistent with Congress’ intent. In particular, the agriculture groups argue that EPA cannot allocate responsibility to comply with the TMDLs for nitrogen, phosphorus, and sediment among multiple sources of those pollutants and must, instead, limit itself to specifying the maximum amount of those pollutants that can enter the bay.

As a member of the Supreme Court’s politically conservative bloc and as a jurist who has shown a willingness to rigorously scrutinize EPA’s reading of environmental laws, Scalia might have been inclined to find this argument convincing enough throw out the TMDLs. While there may still be four votes to grant the cert petition, his absence probably means there are not five votes to reverse the Third Circuit decision.

The case is American Farm Bureau Federation v. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, No. 15-599.

Tongass National Forest – photo by Mark Brennan

Another dispute, this one involving Alaska’s 16.8 million acre Tongass National Forest, may also be affected by Scalia’s death. There, Alaska has asked the justices to review a decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit that invalidated a George W. Bush administration regulation exempting the Tongass from the Roadless Area Conservation Rule.

RACR is a regulation imposed by the administration of President William Jefferson Clinton that limits development, especially logging and road construction, in wilderness-quality areas of national forests. The Clinton-era U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service decided that the importance of preserving roadless tracts in the Tongass outweighed the economic consequences that followed from selling less timber from that forest in the future.The agency thus foreclosed about 90 percent of future planned timber harvests on the Tongass.

In December 2003, the Forest Service reversed that finding and decided that the economic value of timber in the Tongass exceeded the environmental value of the roadless areas. The Bush administration acted after Alaska had challenged RACR on the merits but before the validity of RACR was ultimately upheld by the federal courts of appeals based in San Francisco and Denver.

The Ninth Circuit decided that the Bush administration’s Forest Service changed its perspective on the relative value of roadless areas in the Tongass without providing a sufficient justification. Relying on the Supreme Court’s decision in a case called Federal Communications Commission v. Fox Television Stations, Inc., in which Scalia wrote the majority opinion, the en banc panel held that the agency had disregarded its earlier factual findings about the importance of roadless area conservation without enough explanation.

Alaska’s cert petition argues that a change in political philosophy that occurs when an administration of a different party assumes power is enough justification for it, a point the Ninth Circuit panel acknowledged, and that no other reason is needed to support a change in a regulation.

Alaska’s attorneys may have hoped that Scalia’s vote, along with that of the other four conservative justices, would be enough to save the Tongass National Forest exemption from RACR. Without Scalia’s vote, it is less likely that five justices will agree that the Ninth Circuit got it wrong and, therefore, possibly less likely that the requisite four justices will vote to grant review.

The case is Alaska v. Organized Village of Kake, No. 15-467.

COMMENTARY: Supreme Court’s Clean Power Plan order is partisan and a betrayal of the law and science

Tuesday’s shocking (and unexplained) decision by the U.S. Supreme Court to block implementation of the Obama administration’s signature program to reduce the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions is more than legally questionable. It indicates that the willingness of the five justices who supported the order to march in lockstep with the party of the Presidents that appointed them is so determined that even the growing evidence that anthropogenic climate change threatens this planet’s ability to support life, and the stability of human civilizations, does not deter them from their partisan, extra-legal loyalties.

It is not easy to get a stay of a challenged government action pending resolution of a lawsuit on its merits. In fact, until yesterday, it was thought by most legal scholars to be darn near impossible to get such an order without a clear showing that the party requesting it had suffered and would continue to suffer harm. U.S. solicitor general Donald Verrilli made this clear in the government’s response to the request for a stay. “Applicants identify no case in which this Court has granted a stay of a generally-applicable regulation pending initial judicial review in the court of appeals,” he wrote.

Texas and the other states that have petulantly objected to the necessary task of reducing reliance on coal for electricity generation have suffered none. The Clean Power Plan requires no actual changes in the make-up of the power mix for several years, at minimum, and the plan does not require states even to adopt a plan. They could choose to defer to the federal government. Nor has the coal or utility industries, since the Clean Power Plan allows the prospect of as much as six years before any changes to the generation mix are mandated and, in any case, the demands of the market are causing a shift from coal.

Apparently, the Supreme Court’s own direction, given in 2007, to regulate carbon dioxide emissions under the Clean Air Act also was thought by ideologues John Roberts, Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel Alito to be irrelevant, even though the Court has previously and frequently held that a party seeking a stay must demonstrate a likelihood that they will win their argument on the merits.

So, too, did the five Republican justices, in thrall to their party’s utter refusal to acknowledge that human combustion of fossil fuels is changing our atmosphere and oceans, ignore the reality that mankind has a limited window in which to reduce and eliminate carbon pollution before the impacts of greenhouse gas accumulations become so potent that society will effectively lose the ability to control the outcome. Thus they twisted or ignored yet another requirement for a stay: that the public interest must be served by one.

Then, too, the Supreme Court’s ill-advised intervention has undermined the most significant achievement of international negotiators in all the years since the phenomenon of climate change has been understood – last December’s Paris accord. How long will it be before China and India, the world’s two other leading emitters, decide that there is no point in their nations undergoing the expense and turmoil associated with transforming the way electricity is produced and transportation is provided if the United States of America cannot keep its word?

So what’s next?

The Obama administration should, first, invoke section 115 of the Clean Air Act and re-issue the Clean Power Plan under the aegis of that provision. As a recent report indicates, section 115 provides a virtually unassailable basis for emission reduction mandates when international agreements dictate them.

Of course, yesterday’s action by the Republican five, unaccompanied by any statement of the reasons that Messrs. Roberts et al. think justify their choice, indicates that not even a clear-cut statutory foundation of a regulation will be enough to sustain it if their partisan ideology and loyalty to the bottom line of oil and coal companies and the ideology of this country’s most politically backward states dictates they stand against it.

The real solution is going to have involve a replacement of at least one of the five Republican justices. Sure, given that Scalia and Kennedy are close to eighty years old, nature may provide an opportunity for that replacement sooner rather than later. But that’s hardly a sure thing and, in any event, even the contempt the Republican five has so richly earned does not impel a wish for personal bad fortune. No, wishing for a vacancy on the Court is not the right response.

Instead, the administration should start to play hard ball.

The U.S. Department of Justice should ask at least one of the Republican justices to recuse themselves from future involvement in the Clean Power Plan litigation on grounds that partisan loyalty and bias precludes them from making a fair decision. If that request is denied, the administration should use whatever legal tools that even remotely offer the prospect of a compelled recusal to force the issue.

Of course, that tactic has only uncertain prospects for success and so the administration should determine to step up the fight in the legislative branch, too. President Obama should explain to the grandees of Congress that none of the GOP’s priorities will be enacted into law, at least with his signature on any bills that reflect them, unless and until both chambers send him a bill that explicitly clarifies that the Clean Air Act authorizes the Clean Power Plan.

And, of course, the administration should be making the case to voters very clearly that the outcome of this fall’s election will, quite plainly, dictate whether humanity acts in response to the plain and overwhelming evidence that our addiction to fossil fuels is endangering our economic and social foundations. Famine, rapid and widespread transmission of tropical disease, and drought are, after all, no picnic. Mr. Obama should not hesitate to mention – often – the risks to Earth’s biodiversity and ability to sustain life.

As for the people of this country, they should take note. The future quite literally depends on their choice this autumn. If ever there was a time to learn about climate change, and to take seriously the most awesome environmental challenge of modern history, that time is now.

States, industry ask chief justice Roberts to stay Clean Power Plan

Opponents of the Obama administration’s effort to drive reductions in carbon dioxide pollution by power plants want the U.S. Supreme Court to block the Clean Power Plan while an appeals court considers the rules on their merits.

At least three petitions have been filed with chief justice John G. Roberts, Jr., who oversees the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. The first is by 29 states and state agencies and the second is by a coalition of electric utility companies and other entities. A third, by the coal industry, has also been filed.

Roberts can decide by himself whether to grant the stay petition or refer it to the whole court. Under both a provision of the Administrative Procedure Act and a statute called the All Writs Act, agency regulations may be temporarily blocked while a federal court considers challenges to them.

The question whether to grant a stay is not one that Roberts or the entirety of the court can decide on a whim. Instead, there is a specific standard, which the court explained in a 2010 decision:

To obtain a stay pending the filing and disposition of a petition for a writ of certiorari,an applicant must show (1) a reasonable probability that four

Justices will consider the issue sufficiently meritorious to grant certiorari; (2) a fair prospect that a majority of the Court will vote to reverse the judgment below; and (3) a likelihood that irreparable harm will result from the denial of a stay. In close cases the Circuit Justice or the Court will balance the equities and weigh the relative harms to the applicant and to the respondent.

It is the “irreparable harm” part of the standard that prevented acquisition of a stay in the D.C. Circuit. States have six years, considering extensions authorized by the rule, to comply with it and have the option to leave the question of developing a plan specific to the power plants within their borders to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

As for the “equities,” Roberts or the court would likely have to consider the reality that ongoing greenhouse gas emissions from the utility sector, which is the largest source of them in the U.S. economy, will worsen human-driven climate change.

If a stay is granted, the Clean Power Plan would be put on hold until after the D.C. Circuit rules. Even with the expedited briefing and argument schedule that court has ordered, a decision may not come until this autumn or even in 2017. That would likely mean delays past the early 2020s in reducing greenhouse gas emissions from power plants, even if the Clean Power Plan is ultimately upheld.

Roberts ordered EPA to respond to the petitions for a stay of the Clean Power Plan by Feb. 4.

The U.S. Supreme Court file number is 15-A-773.