Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/22pdf/22-58_i425.pdf
Page Number: 57.0

Cite as:  599 U. S. ____ (2023) 

15 

ALITO, J., dissenting 

A 
Prior  to  today’s  decision,  it  was  established  law  that 
plaintiffs who suffer a traditional injury resulting from an 
agency “decision not to proceed” with an enforcement action
have  Article  III  standing.    Federal  Election  Comm’n  v. 
Akins, 524 U. S. 11, 19 (1998).  The obvious parallel to the 
case  before  us  is  Massachusetts  v.  EPA,  549  U. S.  497 
(2007), which has been called “the most important environ-
mental  law  case  ever  decided  by  the  Court.”   R.  Lazarus, 
The Rule of Five: Making Climate History at the Supreme 
Court  1  (2020).  In  that  prior  case,  Massachusetts  chal-
lenged  the  Environmental  Protection  Agency’s  failure  to 
use its civil enforcement powers to regulate greenhouse gas 
emissions that allegedly injured the Commonwealth.  Mas-
sachusetts argued that it was harmed because the accumu-
lation  of  greenhouse  gases  would  lead  to  higher  tempera-
tures; higher temperatures would cause the oceans to rise;
and  rising  sea  levels  would  cause  the  Commonwealth  to 
lose some of its dry land.  The Court noted that Massachu-
setts had a “quasi-sovereign interes[t]” in avoiding the loss 
of territory and that our federalist system had stripped the 
Commonwealth  of  “certain  sovereign  prerogatives”  that  it
could have otherwise employed to defend its interests.  Mas-
sachusetts, 549 U. S., at 519–520.  Proclaiming that Massa-
chusetts’ standing claim was entitled to “special solicitude,”
the Court held that the Commonwealth had standing.  Id., 
at 520. 

The  reasoning  in  that  case  applies  with  at  least  equal 
force  in  the  case  at  hand.  In  Massachusetts  v.  EPA,  the 
Court suggested that allowing Massachusetts to protect its
sovereign  interests  through  litigation  compensated  for  its
inability to protect those interests by the means that would 
have been available had it not entered the Union.  In the 
present case, Texas’s entry into the Union stripped it of the
power that it undoubtedly enjoyed as a sovereign nation to