Email, Lyle Denniston, reporter, SCOTUS Blog, July 3, 2014

11:42 a.m.

Texas's AG filed a brief in these cases on behalf of his state and 11 others.  I don't know, of course, what the AG may have had in mind about the scope of the victory he claimed for his office.  The brief the states filed paralleled arguments made by the business firms' lawyers, in their written and oral arguments, on the argument -- which did prevail -- that EPA could not bootstrap its regulation of greenhouse gases from motor vehicle exhausts into a broad regime of regulating greenhouse gases from industrial plants.

But Texas and the other states would have been able to claim complete victory if the Court had ruled that EPA had no authority to regulate greenhouse gases, at all, on emissions from power plants and other stationary sources.  The Court did not go that far.  Instead, it ruled that EPA could regulate greenhouse gases from sources that already were obliged to curb their air pollution.  And that, the Court said, would allow EPA to regulate 83 percent of greenhouse gas sources, instead of 86 percent that would have come under EPA regulatory authority if the EPA's broadest argument had prevailed.

So, if one understands the Texas position to be that EPA should have no authority to regulate greenhouse gases from any source other than auto exhausts, they did not win on that point.

The state AGs' amicus brief in fact just piggybacked on the load carried by lawyers for the industry.  The states won as much as the business lawyers did, but not on their own independent advocacy.