The Louisiana Attorney General’s Office has lost its bid to overturn an appeals court ruling allowing the Biden administration to apply its climate-change rules for calculating the social costs of greenhouse gas emissions (SC-GHG).
The U.S. Supreme Court last week declined to overturn previous rulings by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals dealing with what is called the Interagency Working Group on Social Cost of Greenhouse Gases. Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry and officials in nine other states had argued that the working group’s actions should be subject to judicial review.
“In the respondents’ view,” Landry’s office said in its application to the U.S. Supreme Court, “there’s nothing noteworthy about the executive branch’s creating an agency with the stroke of a pen – and without a hint of statutory authority – and vesting it with power to issue one of the most significant legislative rules in American history.”
Officials in Louisiana and other energy-producing states have expressed concerns that the administration’s new climate-change approach would put the brakes on oil and gas leasing programs and slow economic growth in those states. But a Fifth Circuit panel earlier this year found the grievances speculative.
“The administration’s efforts to reorder the American economy using these made-up metrics underscores the truth of the one economist’s statement that this ‘is the most important number you never heard of,’ ” Louisiana’s solicitor general, Elizabeth Murrill, said in an email to the Louisiana Record.
The Supreme Court's decision not to vacate the Fifth Circuit’s stay of a lower court’s ruling is a disappointment, according to Murrill, but the Attorney General’s Office will continue to litigate the issue.
“We are confident that we will be successful in reinstating the injunction after this matter is heard on the merits at the Fifth Circuit,” she said. “Briefing is under way. In the meantime, we will continue to flag the government’s use of these numbers.”
The Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), however, characterized the administration’s climate change approach as based on up-to-date science.
“The Supreme Court’s decision (May 26) not to reinstate an injunction on the use of that science – an injunction that was the result of a profoundly flawed decision by a lower court – allows the Biden administration to rely on the best available science and economics to address the climate crisis …” the EDF’s director of methane and clean air policy, Rosalie Winn, said in a prepared statement.