Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/21pdf/20-1530_n758.pdf
Page Number: 78.0

22 

WEST VIRGINIA v. EPA 

KAGAN, J., dissenting 

energy from low-cost providers before high-cost ones.  Con-
sider an example: Suppose EPA requires coal-fired plants
to  use  carbon-capture  technology.    That  action  increases 
those plants’ costs, and automatically (by virtue of the way 
the grid operates) reduces their share of the electricity mar-
ket.  So EPA is always controlling the mix of energy sources.
In that sense (though the term has taken on a more special-
ized  meaning),  everything  EPA  does  is  “generation  shift-
ing.”  The majority’s idea that EPA has no warrant to direct
such a shift just indicates that courts sometimes do not re-
ally get regulation.5 

Why, then, be “skeptic[al]” of EPA’s exercise of authority? 
Ante, at 28.  When there is no misfit, of the kind apparent
in our precedents, between the regulation, the agency, and
the statutory design?  Although the majority offers a flurry
of complaints, they come down in the end to this: The Clean
Power Plan is a big new thing, issued under a minor statu-
tory  provision.  See  ante,  at  20,  24,  26  (labeling  the  Plan
“transformative”  and  “unprecedented”  and  calling  Section 
111(d)  an  “ancillary”  “backwater”).    I  have  already  ad-
dressed  the  back  half  of  that  argument:  In  fact,  there  is 

—————— 

5 The majority’s only response to the argument above similarly reveals 
a misperception as to the practical impact of different regulatory tech-
niques.  According  to  the  majority,  there is  an  “obvious  difference”  be-
tween changing the energy mix by conventional technological regulation
and doing so by measures like cap and trade.  Ante, at 27, n. 4.  But in 
fact there is not.  As I’ll detail later, generation shifting can effect a sig-
nificant—or instead an insignificant—change in the energy mix; and the 
same is true of technological regulations.  See infra, at 24–25.  It all de-
pends on the specifics: There is no necessary connection (in either direc-
tion) between the kind of regulation and the magnitude of its effect.  For 
example,  a  rule  requiring  the  use  of  carbon-capture  technology  would 
have shifted far more electricity production from coal-fired plants than
the Clean Power Plan would have.  See ibid.  In suggesting that cap-and-
trade programs are somehow more suspect, the majority merely serves 
to disadvantage what is often the smartest kind of regulation: market-
based programs that achieve the biggest bang for the buck.  That is why
so many power companies are on EPA’s side in this litigation.