Pennsylvania’s fossil fuel power plants began having to comply with Gov. Tom Wolf’s hallmark climate rule on Friday, one day after a U.S. Supreme Court decision restricted federal regulators’ tools for cutting greenhouse gas pollution across the power sector nationwide.
Pennsylvania’s coal and natural gas-fired power plants will pay for each ton of carbon dioxide they release as of July 1 as a Wolf administration rule to rein in climate warming pollution from power plants started tracking and capping emissions.
The U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling shifted attention to state and local climate action, which is unaffected by the high court decision because it is authorized under state laws and constitutions.
In Pennsylvania, the Supreme Court ruling raised the stakes for the new carbon cap-and-trade rule, which is being challenged in the state’s Commonwealth Court by Republican legislators as well as coal-fired power plants and unions representing their workers.
The judge in the state case has indicated he will rule soon on whether to grant petitions to temporarily block the regulation while the Commonwealth Court considers the full case.
The Republican-led General Assembly has tried several times to derail or diminish the rule, and it has been discussed during bargaining over the state’s now overdue budget.
The rule written by the state Department of Environmental Protection makes Pennsylvania the nation’s largest electricity producer to put a price and gradually declining cap on carbon emissions from its power plants. It also links Pennsylvania with 11 other states in the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, or RGGI, which runs a shared market for the allowances that the plants must buy for their emissions.
“Pennsylvania’s authority to curb greenhouse gas emissions has not changed,” Mr. Wolf, a Democrat, tweeted on Thursday. “Nor has my commitment to making our commonwealth a leader in the fight against climate change. As long as I'm governor, Pennsylvania will address this crisis.”
Robert Routh, an attorney for the Clean Air Council, a statewide environmental group, said the Supreme Court decision “does not have any effect on the RGGI regulation, Pennsylvania DEP’s authority, Pennsylvania law whatsoever and should not bear on the pending request still before the Commonwealth Court to enjoin the RGGI regulation.” But he said it does make it more important for states and communities with the authority to limit the causes and effects of climate change to do so.
“We need climate leadership on the state level and RGGI can absolutely deliver that in Pennsylvania,” he said.
Kevin Sunday, director of government affairs for the Pennsylvania Chamber of Business and Industry, disagreed and said the Supreme Court’s ruling “is relevant to the debate” over the legality of the Wolf administration’s decision to join the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative through regulation, without the Legislature’s approval.
The majority opinion by Chief Justice John Roberts “leaves open the door for trading programs as a pathway to compliance, but agencies cannot enact these trading programs on their own,” Mr. Sunday said. “This is why the legislatures of every other state in RGGI have passed bills authorizing or directing these states to participate in the program.”
Robert McKinstry, an environmental attorney who is petitioning Pennsylvania regulators to craft a whole-economy greenhouse gas cap-and-trade program, said the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency retains several powerful tools to curb carbon emissions and it intends to use them.
Pennsylvania’s carbon rule for power plants sets the state on a path toward complying with those federal rules when they are eventually published and creates a framework for decarbonizing other sectors of the state economy, he said.
“We have to act,” he said. “It is a first step and it really facilitates the move into the broader approach.”
If Pennsylvania’s carbon rule survives the court challenges, it will be up to the next governor to decide whether to keep the policy or scrap it.
Democratic nominee Josh Shapiro has expressed concerns about RGGI, but tweeted Friday that the Supreme Court’s ruling “proved once again that our future will be up to the states, and up to governors. I will be a governor who protects our planet and invests in clean energy.”
Republican nominee Doug Mastriano has introduced legislation in the state Senate purporting to exempt Pennsylvania coal and coal-fired power plants from federal environmental regulation. He has said he would remove Pennsylvania from the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative “on day one.”
Laura Legere: llegere@post-gazette.com.
First Published: July 3, 2022, 10:00 a.m.
Updated: July 3, 2022, 12:16 p.m.
