Not Diana Ross’ girl group, but the nine black-robed justices sitting in Washington, the ones who decided the 2000 election and currently have a decidely conservative, pro-business tilt.
It was easy to do — forget the Supremes, I mean — in the wake of the election of Barack Obama and all the discussion over the Minnesota Senate race and the huge electoral shift.
But conservatives still have an oar in this river (race?) in the form of five justices — Roberts, Alito, Scalia, Thomas and Kennedy — as today’s ruling on cost-benefit calculations and the Clean Air Act shows:
In a defeat for environmental groups, the Supreme Court ruled on Wednesday that the Environmental Protection Agency may use cost-benefit calculations to decide whether to require power plants to make changes that could prevent the destruction of billions of aquatic organisms each year.
The decision affects more than 500 power plants that are collectively responsible for more than half of the nation’s electricity-generating capacity. The plants use more than 200 billion gallons of water from nearby waterways each day for cooling, and they kill vast numbers of fish, shellfish and other organisms in the process, squashing them against intake screens or sucking them into cooling systems.
The environmental agency weighed the costs of making changes to the plants’ cooling structures to protect the organisms against their value expressed in dollars. Considering only the 1.8 percent of the affected fish and shellfish that are commercially or recreationally harvested, the agency concluded that the organisms at issue were worth $83 million.
Requiring the plants to convert to closed-cycle cooling systems, which recirculate water, would have saved almost all the organisms but cost $3.5 billion a year, the agency said. Instead, it ordered far cheaper changes that spared fewer organisms.
The question in the case was whether Congress had authorized that cost-benefit approach in the Clean Water Act, which requires cooling water intake structures to “reflect the best technology available for minimizing adverse environmental impact.”
The United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, in New York, ruled that the agency’s approach was not permitted by the law.
Justice Antonin Scalia, writing for himself, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Anthony M. Kennedy, Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr., said the agency’s approach “is certainly a plausible interpretation of the statute” and was thus entitled to deference.
That leaves it up to the Obama administration and EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson to end the cost-benefit practice.
