The US Supreme Court seems to have appointed itself as a rogue Environmental Protection Agency, seeking to protect polluters rather than the public.

The latest evidence comes in the arguments the court heard last month in the challenge by Ohio, Indiana and West Virginia to the Biden administration’s “good neighbor” plan. The plan cuts power plant and industrial ozone pollution that wafts from central parts of the nation into eastern states.

According to the American Lung Association, nearly 120 million people in the nation—one of every three—lives with unhealthy levels of particle and ozone pollution. The White House says its plan would decrease asthma symptoms for millions of people and prevent up to 1,300 premature deaths per year. The plan would also provide “a broad range of unquantified benefits, including improving visibility in national and state parks and increasing protection for sensitive ecosystems, coastal waters and estuaries, and forests.”

Science leaves little doubt that the plan protects people. Globally, fine particulate pollution and ozone are tied to more than 8 million deaths each year according to a 2023 study in the British Medical Journal. That includes 5 million deaths linked to breathing in the emissions of fossil fuels. In the United States, a 2022 study by researchers at the University of Wisconsin found that more than 50,000 lives per year would be saved by eliminating those emissions.

But in the rogue EPA that is the Supreme Court, packed to an ultra-conservative majority by presidents with little or no concern for the environment, science and the fatal toll of pollution seem to take a back seat to concerns about the unfettered freedom of polluters to profit regardless of their harmful business practices. In a prime example during the “good neighbor” arguments, Chief Justice John Roberts told lawyers for the EPA he was worried the agency will not assess the impact of the ozone rule “until after the hundreds of millions of dollars of costs are incurred.”

The majority also seems utterly disinterested in the fact that a solid majority of people in this country want action on climate change and pollution. A CNN poll in December found that 73 percent of respondents in the United States say the federal government has some level of responsibility to curb climate change. In a Pew poll last summer, two-thirds of respondents said the federal government is not doing enough to protect air and water quality.

Nonetheless, decision by eviscerating decision, the court is rendering the EPA a shadow of what it was intended to be. Considering the rulings the court has already made and rulings it is expected to make this term, there is hardly any aspect of air, water or land that is not losing protection. The implications for human life are direct and deadly.

The court’s 2022 decision in West Virginia v EPA limited the EPA’s ability to cut carbon emissions from power plants, effectively ending efforts launched by the Obama administration. The proposed rules would have saved up to 3,600 lives a year and avoided 90,000 asthma attacks, 1,700 heart attacks and 300,000 missed school and workdays.

Then there is the 2023 ruling in Sackett v EPA. It removed wetlands and ephemeral streams from federal protection unless they were indistinguishably connected to larger lakes and rivers at the surface. The decision blatantly ignored decades of hydrology showing how wetlands have invisible underground connections to larger bodies of water and serve a critical role as nurseries for many creatures.

The court’s conservative majority went so far as to ignore EPA science conducted during the conservative George W. Bush administration. The EPA back then discerned that the drinking water for one of every three people came at least in part from streams that did not run all the time. Thus, the EPA said seasonal streams “should not be examined in isolation.”

And despite the sympathetic ears conservative justices give to the profit concerns of big business, they ignored how clean water is its own economic engine, contributing mightily to the national outdoor recreation economy. The Bureau of Economic Analysis last year estimated that recreation economy was worth $564 billion in 2022, providing nearly 5 million jobs.

The rulings to come may defang the EPA even more. In addition to the “good neighbor” ozone case, is one that may end up being the most important of them all. A 40-year-old Supreme Court ruling(Chevron v. National Resources Defense Council)compels judges to defer to federal agency scientists and experts in disputes over how ambiguously written laws should be implemented. But in........

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