Corporate Climate Change, Expose Series-Intro: Leaked memos show Supreme Court ignored climate dangers in Obama regs fight P4
- Shidonna Raven
- 2 hours ago
- 2 min read
By Alex Guillén
04/20/2026 06:48 AM EDT
Source: E & E News by Politico
Photo / Image Source: Unsplash,
Jody Freeman, director of Harvard’s Environmental and Energy Law Program, called it “especially galling” for energy and environmental experts to read the justices’ conclusions about complex issues such as compliance cost estimates and how the power grid works based on relatively thin briefs.
“There are technical analyses, economic analyses. They need time to go over them, to digest them, and think about whether their initial inclination is right,” said Freeman. “Well, if you just decide you know the answer before you read any of that stuff, you sort of have prejudged the answer.”
One liberal justice pushed back against Roberts’ cost figures. Justice Sonia Sotomayor countered that EPA had estimated that the economic costs would be “significantly lower” than the estimate Roberts shared.
However, neither she nor any other justice in the released memos cites the climate or public health benefits of the rule in trying to parse the irreparable harm.
Doniger suggested that the liberal justices avoided discussing the threats of climate change because they were trying to appeal to Roberts’ institutional sensibilities.
They “were trying to basically tell the chief justice, ‘Even if you’ve got these concerns, this isn’t the right way to proceed,’ and not sort of ‘both sides’ it by saying, ‘Yeah, but there’s big climate stakes,’” Doniger said. “And obviously it didn’t work.”
Conservative legal scholar Jonathan Adler said he wasn’t surprised to see the costs of climate change omitted from the justices’ internal discussions about what was to be — in theory — a temporary stay.
“The climate costs of delaying the Clean Power Plan by months when the deadlines were years in the future would be very small,” said Adler, a professor at William & Mary Law School.
In reality, however, the Supreme Court’s stay of the Clean Power Plan meant the rule never went into effect. Donald Trump was elected president later in 2016, and he replaced the rule with a far less restrictive regulation for coal-fired power plants.
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