This week’s Supreme Court ruling in the case of West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) should be interpreted as a warning to federal agencies not to overstep their explicit statutory authority in crafting regulations, according to legal and energy experts.

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At the heart of the case was whether EPA had legal authority under section 111(d) of the Clean Air Act (CAA) to implement the Clean Power Plan (CPP), the Obama-era rulemaking from 2015 that sought to aggressively curb greenhouse gas emissions from the power sector. Before it could be implemented, the CPP was stayed by the Supreme Court in 2016, then repealed and replaced by the Trump administration in 2019 with the much narrower in scope Affordable Clean Energy (ACE) rule. A federal appeals court struck down ACE...