Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/21pdf/20-1530_n758.pdf
Page Number: 66.0

10 

WEST VIRGINIA v. EPA 

KAGAN, J., dissenting 

through 

the  application  of 

There is also a flipside point: Congress declined to include 
in Section 111 the restrictions on EPA’s authority contained 
in other Clean Air Act provisions.  Most relevant here, quite
a  number  of  statutory  sections  confine  EPA’s  emissions-
reduction  efforts  to  technological  controls—essentially, 
equipment or processes that can be put into place at a par-
ticular  facility.    See  ante,  at  4  (describing  those  controls). 
So,  for  example,  one  provision  tells  EPA  to  set  standards 
“reflect[ing]  the  greatest  degree  of  emission  reduction 
technology.” 
achievable 
§7521(a)(3)(A)(i).  Others direct the use of the “best availa-
ble retrofit technology,” or the “best available control tech-
nology,”  or  the  “maximum  achievable  control  technology.”
§§7491(b)(2)(A),  (g)(2),  7475(a)(4),  7479(3),  7412(g)(2).
There  are  still  more.
  See,  e.g.,  §§7411(h),  7511a(c)(7), 
7651f(b)(2).  None of those provisions would allow EPA to 
set  emissions  limits  based  on  generation  shifting,  as  the
Agency acknowledges.  See Brief for United States 32–33. 
But  nothing  like  the  language  of  those  provisions  is  in-
cluded in Section 111.  That matters under normal rules of 
statutory interpretation.  As Justice Scalia once wrote for 
the  Court:  “We  do  not  lightly  assume  that  Congress  has
omitted from its adopted text requirements that it nonethe-
less  intends  to  apply,  and  our  reluctance  is  even  greater 
when  Congress  has  shown  elsewhere  in  the  same  statute
that it knows how to make such a requirement manifest.” 
Jama v. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, 543 U. S. 
335, 341 (2005).

Statutory  history  serves  only  to  pile  on:  It  shows  that  
Congress  has  specifically  declined  to  restrict  EPA  to 
technology-based controls in its regulation of existing sta-
tionary sources.  The key moment came in 1977, when Con-
gress  amended  Section  111  to  distinguish  between  new
sources and existing ones.  For new sources, EPA could se-
lect only the “best technological system of continuous emis-
sion reduction.”  Clean Air Act Amendments, §109(c)(1)(A),