The U.S. Supreme Court's decision to limit the powers of the nation’s top environmental regulator to curb carbon emissions will force the administration of U.S. President Joe Biden to take more creative measures in order to reach its ambitious goals on combating climate change.
The conservative court's 6-3 ruling restricted the Environmental Protection Agency's authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from existing coal- and gas-fired power plants under the Clean Air Act anti-pollution law.
That is bad news for Biden, a Democrat, who came into office with the aim of slashing power sector emissions to net zero by 2035, using the EPA as his key tool in doing so. The EPA had been working on a proposal to advance the decarbonization goal.