The headlines aren’t entirely wrong. If you look at the conservative majority opinions, you’ll find that indeed, it’s about the relevant legal issues, ie. what the law actually says. On the other hand, if you read liberal dissents, they’re mostly about what they think appropriate policy should be.
In this particular case, the majority opinion starts off by quoting the relevant statute and analyzing its meaning, whereas the dissent starts off by saying (quoting) that “climate change is the most pressing environmental challenge of our time”, and continues with a long litany of how bad it is.
Really, I find the entire thing to be rather crazy: if the Congress wants EPA to regulate emissions the way they tried to do, all it needs to do is to pass a law explicitly instructing it to do so. Of course, it won’t, because there is no political will in Congress to pass this. At the same time, the EPA’s argument in this case was that the Congress has already delegated this to EPA. Considering that the Congress won’t pass a law confirming that yes, it did in fact delegate authority to execute these particular regulations (which, again, would render the entire SCOTUS decision irrelevant), I find the EPA’s argument of rather dubious quality.
In this particular case, the majority opinion starts off by quoting the relevant statute and analyzing its meaning, whereas the dissent starts off by saying (quoting) that “climate change is the most pressing environmental challenge of our time”, and continues with a long litany of how bad it is.
Really, I find the entire thing to be rather crazy: if the Congress wants EPA to regulate emissions the way they tried to do, all it needs to do is to pass a law explicitly instructing it to do so. Of course, it won’t, because there is no political will in Congress to pass this. At the same time, the EPA’s argument in this case was that the Congress has already delegated this to EPA. Considering that the Congress won’t pass a law confirming that yes, it did in fact delegate authority to execute these particular regulations (which, again, would render the entire SCOTUS decision irrelevant), I find the EPA’s argument of rather dubious quality.