A three-judge panel last week blocked an injunction barring federal agencies from applying the Biden administration’s more costly formula for estimating the social costs of greenhouse gas emissions (SC-GHG).
The March 16 opinion by a U.S. Fifth District Court of Appeals panel is a setback for the Louisiana Attorney General’s Office, which initially won the preliminary injunction against the administration’s interim climate-change rules in the Western District of Louisiana.
“We strongly disagree with the Fifth Circuit’s opinion that we lack standing in Biden’s latest attempt to inject the federal government into the everyday lives of Americans,” Cory Dennis, press secretary for Attorney General Jeff Landry, told the Louisiana Record in an email. “We will petition for a rehearing en banc and will continue to stand up against this administration’s vast overreach.”
The stay of the injunction will place minimal injury upon the 10 plaintiff states that initially filed the challenge to the federal policy, the three-judge panel said.
“In sum, the plaintiff states’ claims are based on a generalized grievance of the use of interim estimates in cost-benefit analyses of regulations and agency action,” the panel said. “But their claimed injury does not stem from the interim estimates themselves, it stems from any forthcoming, speculative and unknown regulation that may place increased burdens on them and may result from consideration of SC-GHG.”
The court opinion also pointed to the disruptions of federal agencies’ ability to function if the injunction were to remain in place as the litigation advances.
“The government defendants have shown they will be irreparably harmed absent a stay,” the opinion says. “The preliminary injunction halts the president’s directive to agencies in how to make agency decisions, before they even make those decisions. It also orders agencies to comply with a prior administration’s internal guidance document that embodies a certain approach to regulatory analysis, even though that document was not mandated by any regulation or statute in the first place.”
Landry has argued that the administration’s approach to climate change would harm Louisiana’s energy sector, lead to job losses and make the nation more dependent on foreign energy sources.