Supreme Court weighs where 'good neighbor' pollution lawsuits go

Michael Macagnone, CQ-Roll Call on Mar 25, 2025

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WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court appeared ready Tuesday to allow challenges to EPA rules on air pollution in local courts across the country, pushing back on an effort from the Trump administration to concentrate the cases in Washington.

The oral arguments are connected to the yearslong fight over a Biden administration effort to create a nationwide “good neighbor” plan for state-to-state air pollution under the Clean Air Act.

That involved individual state plans across the country, including Utah and Oklahoma, who sought to challenge those denials but were stymied by a ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit telling them the cases should be filed in Washington.

The justices and the parties said the cases turn on a provision of the law that governs where lawsuits should be brought; local and regional cases go to the local appellate courts while national ones go to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.

At several points during arguments in the states’ cases, along with another case about a similar ruling on the EPA’s denial of waivers for refineries, the justices raised concerns about whether Congress intended for many such cases to be brought in Washington.

Mithun Mansinghani, arguing for Oklahoma, said the state disapprovals are “quintessential” issues that should be heard by local circuit courts as they can involve specific local conditions in individual states.

Justice Neil M. Gorsuch pushed back on the state’s argument.

“We’re talking here about clean air obligations of states and the downwind impact of any state on others,” Gorsuch said. “Gosh, if anything is nationwide impact it has got to be air pollution because it travels.”

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson at one point said that the statute explicitly references the state plans as being regional issues, indicating that they should not be resolved in Washington.

“Regardless of whether air pollution is national, Congress was putting it in a local or regional bucket,” Jackson said.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wondered whether states would be “more at home in your local circuit and less likely to be lost in the shuffle in Washington.”

Last year, a majority of the court paused enforcement of the nationwide good neighbor plan while litigation was ongoing.

After President Donald Trump’s inauguration, the Trump administration sought to delay the arguments in Tuesday’s cases but was denied by the Supreme Court.

The justices are expected to issue a decision in Tuesday’s cases by the conclusion of the court’s term at the end of June. The cases are Oklahoma et al. v. Environmental Protection Agency et al. and Pacificorp et al. v. Environmental Protection Agency et al.