On Sept. 3, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia sided with industry groups, ruling that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) improperly classified industrial boilers under more stringent pollution standards. Fordham Law Professor Aaron Saiger was quoted in a National Catholic Reporter article discussing how the end of Chevron has environmental lawyers and Catholic advocates concerned that now non-expert judges will make crucial decisions about regulations and that weakened federal regulatory powers could have a significant human as well as environmental impact.
Yet Aaron Saiger, a law professor at Fordham University School of Law in New York, said when the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act were first passed in the 1970s, “climate change wasn’t on our radar.”
If agencies cannot read the vagueness of the statutes to authorize the EPA to act, “then what you’re saying is that the EPA cannot respond to the great environmental crisis of our moment,” Saiger said.
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“Congress could solve the EPA problems if it wrote environmental laws that explicitly gave the EPA power to regulate, especially for climate,” said Saiger. “The odds of that happening seem low in our current political configuration.”
