Monday, July 1, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) violated the law by imposing regulations on mercury emissions from power plants without first doing thorough benefit/cost estimates.

Nearly four years ago the Cornwall Alliance published a study by environmental regulatory economics Dr. Timothy Terrell, The Cost of Good Intentions: The Ethics and Economics of the War on Conventional Energy, that made that very point.

Dr. Terrell comments on the Supreme Court’s decision in his latest post on Cornwall Alliance’s blog, “Supreme Court Gets One Right: Strikes Down EPA’s Mercury Regulation.”

Perhaps the EPA could have had success in Michigan v. EPA had it been willing to consider costs and benefits up front as part of its “appropriate and necessary” determination. That would have allowed the EPA to add the weight of its estimates—however suspect—of the secondary benefits of the particulate and sulfur dioxide reductions. Perhaps this would have alleviated Scalia’s concerns about the 1,600 to 1 relationship between costs and benefits.

But the EPA evidently wishes to free itself from such constraints. Regulation that is part of a political and philosophical agenda—one might even say a religious crusade—cannot be impeded by base considerations like cost. If a regulation drives up costs for a politically unpopular industry, so be it. And the coal industry has been in the Obama Administration’s sights for years.

To the EPA, it matters not one whit that coal provides a larger fraction of our electric power than any other single source, or that coal-fired power can be produced whether or not the sun is shining or the wind is blowing. The target has been acquired, and regulation has become the weapon of destruction.

A victory in this case could have given the EPA the legal precedent to promulgate all kinds of regulations—on coal and other industries—that cause more harm than good. Unfortunately, the mercury rule that has just been declared illegal was in effect for over three years. While objections made their way through the courts, electric utilities were forced to make expensive and probably needless changes to their facilities. We can only hope that in the future, the EPA’s bureaucratic overreach will be slowed by this case.

Read the whole article to grasp the full significance of the case. In essence, the Supreme Court has told the EPA that statutory law requires it to credibly estimate not only the benefits but also the costs of its proposed regulations—something the EPA has been loath to do and that goes against the grain of Green ideology, which calls for “protecting the environment” regardless of costs. (One leading Leftwing environmental ethicist, Michael Northcott, actually claimed in a debate with me at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary several years ago that cost/benefit calculation is inherently evil.)

Some “creation care” advocates, especially the Evangelical Environmental Network, have claimed that supporting the EPA’s mercury regulations was “pro-life” and called Members of Congress who did so “sensitive to pro-life concerns” (even if they had 100 percent pro-abortion voting records) while criticizing Members who didn’t as insensitive to pro-life concerns (even if they had 100 percent pro-life voting records). The Cornwall Alliance pointed out the factual and moral errors in EEN’s “Mercury and the Unborn” campaign in several articles:

• “Is the Campaign for New Mercury Regulations Really Pro-Life?”
• “EEN’s Machiavellian Mercury Campaign Threatens Pro-Life Movement”
• “Are Mercury Emissions as Evil as Abortion? Somebody Wants Voters to Think So”

At the time, 30 of the nation’s pro-life leaders joined us in criticizing EEN’s campaign by issuing a joint statement, “Protecting the Unborn and the Pro-Life Movement from a Misleading Environmentalist Tactic,” saying the campaign obscured the meaning of pro-life, divided the pro-life movement, and hindered election of pro-life candidates.

More recently, EEN has added the claim that support for regulations to reduce global warming is also a pro-life cause. That claim, too, is both factually and morally wrong, as we pointed out in “Evangelical Environmentalists Undermine Pro-Life Movement, Again.” Like the earlier campaign, that claim, too, threatens the pro-life movement and, by doing so, threatens the unborn.

Monday’s Supreme Court decision vindicates Cornwall Alliance’s opposition to the mercury emission regulations as unjustified by benefit/cost analysis. By doing so, it implicitly vindicates our critique of the claim that support for EPA’s mercury regulations was a pro-life cause by pointing out the EPA’s failure to do benefit/cost analysis, which would have required it to accurately quantify the risks to the unborn—which, as Dr. Terrell pointed out in The Cost of Good Intentions, was essentially zero.