Coal Companies Take Legal Action Against Obama Environmental Measure

Several coal companies are already battling against Obama's
new carbon emissions regulations.
Image:  Shutterstock

President Obama’s in-the-works regulations on curbing carbon emissions from coal-fired power plants are already receiving backlash from coal companies.  This past Thursday, a panel of federal judges heard the first legal challenge from lawyers for two of the nation’s largest coal companies.

The new regulations would require all states to draft plans to restructure their energy sectors and transition to cleaner forms of energy, which would likely lead to the shutting down of hundreds of coal plants.

The plaintiffs in the two cases currently before the court are the Murray Energy Corporation and West Viriginia, who argue that even though the new regulations haven’t gone into effect yet, they are already wrecking havoc on the states’ economies.  They also argue that the EPA does not have the legal authority to create such laws.

The unusual element in the cases is that they have been brought before a court before the new law has actually been finalized.

Two of the three judges on the panel, Thomas B. Griffith and Brett M. Kavanaugh, expressed skepticism of the companies’ arguments this early in the game, given that there is no legal precedent.

One of the lawyers hired by the coal companies, Laurence H. Tribe, is a well-known Harvard scholar of constitutional law who was also a mentor to Obama in law school.  Tribe has also stated his clients’ case on The Wall Street Journal’s op ed page as well as in court.  He has been on the industry’s side in past cases fighting pollution controls, including when General Electric and American Trucking challenged the Clean Air Act.  Both of these previous cases were unsuccessful—the Supreme Court disagreed 9-0.

There may be some merit to the concern about the Clean Air Act, however.  When the original law was passed, slightly different versions existed in the House and the Senate, making it difficult to determine how much legal power the EPA has in these current cases.