Quoting from the Bible — not the usual source of legal wisdom — the Supreme Court on Tuesday upheld a government rule that will parcel out the duty to stop or at least reduce dirty air from blowing from one state into another. The decision split the Court, mainly along the lines of whether big government is getting out of control. 
 
 It took nearly a half-hour for the authors of the majority and dissenting opinions to orally proclaim in the courtroom their differences, in the six-to-two ruling in Environmental Protection Agency v. EME Homer City Generation. It was a clear victory for EPA, with the only blemish on its name the complaint of the dissenters that the result was a “textbook example of . . . government by the bureaucracy” instead of “by the people.” The EPA, already beleaguered by critics of its actions, may well draw new protests and attempts in Congress to curb its authority. 
 
 Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, writing for the majority, described the basic weather-pattern problem that EPA sought to solve in this dispute. She did so by quoting the King James Version of the Bible: “The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth.” 
 
 In her own words, Ginsburg said this was the problem: “In crafting a solution to the problem of interstate air pollution, regulators [the EPA] must account for the vagaries of the wind.” Pollution, it appears, rises from various industrial sources, like power plants and factories, and wafts with the wind currents from place to place, sometimes over hundreds of miles, and even changes its chemical nature, creating hazards to health in its ultimate destinations — mainly, but not entirely, in downwind states. 
 
 At issue in the case was how the Court would interpret a so-called “good neighbor policy,” mandated by Congress in 1977. Aware that “upwind states” were sending foul air to “downwind states,” the policy ordered states to develop plans to keep polluters within their borders from sending into other state winds that would keep those neighbors from satisfying federal clean-air requirements. 
 
 Finding that the approach adopted in 1977 did not deal adequately with the problem because it was too limited in scope, Congress in 1990 told the states to prohibit any source inside their borders from adding “significantly” to neighbors’ ability to maintain clean air. 
 
 EPA has tried various regulatory rules to carry out that mandate. The latest approach, the one upheld by the Court on Tuesday, is a complex rule adopted in 2011 that took into account nearly 2500 wind flow patterns between upwind and downwind states. In view of that complexity, EPA opted not to calculate each upwind state’s share of the blame for transporting pollution to a neighboring state. 
 
 Instead, it selected the states whose pollution migration had more than a minuscule impact on neighbors, with the scope of its pollution-reducing duty defined mainly by the cost of doing so. These cost formulas did not have the direct effect of assigning to each state its actual proportion of the reduction in air quality downwind. EPA figured it couldn’t allocate the blame that precisely. Its cost-based formulas were the option it chose. 
 
 That approach, however, was struck down by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, which ruled that EPA was supposed to apportion the blame state by state on the basis of their share of downwind impairment of air quality. The court of appeals also ruled that EPA should not have stepped in to craft a pollution-control plan of its own for the upwind states, but rather should have held off until those states were given a chance to adopt control methods on their own. 
 
 In Tuesday’s ruling, the Court overturned the D.C. Circuit on both points. It declared that the courts were obliged to defer to EPA’s expertise on how to fashion an explicit “good neighbor policy” that dealt with “the vagaries of the wind.” 
 
 The Court also ruled that EPA had no duty to give the affected states a new opportunity to fashion their own pollution-control strategies to protect their neighbors, before EPA stepped in to develop its own approach. 
 
 Justice Ginsburg’s opinion was joined by Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., and Justices Stephen G. Breyer, Elena Kagan, Anthony M. Kennedy, and Sonia Sotomayor. Justice Samuel A. Alito, Jr., took no part in the ruling; no reason was given for his recusal. 
 
 Justice Antonin Scalia, in a dissent for himself and Justice Clarence Thomas, argued that the ruling implicated “the major problem that many citizens have with the federal government these days: that they are governed not so much by their elected representatives as by an unelected bureaucracy operating under vague statutory standards.” 
 
 Congress, the dissenters said, “did it right” by ordering each state to shoulder its own share of sending polluted air downwind. Instead, the dissenting opinion said, EPA opted to develop a plan “to make each state eliminate those contributions to downwind pollution that are inexpensive to eliminate.” 
 
 Click for vote alignment by ideology 
 
 Recommended Citation: Lyle Denniston, Opinion analysis: Paying for blocking ill winds, SCOTUSblog (Apr. 29, 2014, 4:28 PM), http://www.scotusblog.com/2014/04/opinion-analysis-paying-for-blocking-ill-winds/ ||||| The US supreme court endorsed the Environmental Protection Agency's efforts to deal with air pollution blowing across state lines on Tuesday, in an important victory for the Obama administration as well as downwind states. 
 
 The court's 6-2 decision unblocks a 2011 rule requiring 28 eastern states to reduce power-plant emissions that carry smog and soot particles across state lines, hurting the air quality in downwind states. 
 
 
 
 Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, writing the court's majority opinion, said the EPA's formula for dealing with cross-state air pollution was “permissable, workable and equitable”. 
 
 
 
 Justice Samuel Alito recused himself, and justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas dissented. 
 
 
 
 The decision delivers an important victory to the EPA which has wrestled for years with trying to regulate air pollution as it moves beyond smokestacks and tailpipes. It is also a win for states such as Connecticut, where 93% of air pollution is from out-of-state sources. 
 
 
 
 Major power companies, such as Southern Company and American Electric Power Company, and states such as Texas, Michigan and Ohio had sued to block the rule. The Washington DC court of appeals put the rule on hold in 2012. 
 
 
 
 The reversal of that ruling now means that about 1,000 power plants, mainly in the eastern half of the country, will have to adopt new pollution controls to limit emissions of nitrogen oxide and sulfur dioxide. 
 
 
 
 Air pollution remains a growing problem in America despite decades of environmental protection –and Ginsburg acknowledged the complexities of putting a regulatory regime in place. 
 
 “Pollutants do not emerge from the smokestacks of an upwind state and uniformly migrate downwind. Some pollutants stay with­ in upwind states’ borders, the wind carries others to downwind states, and some subset of that group drifts to states without air quality problems,” Ginsburg wrote, going on to quote a phrase from the Bible. “In craft­ing a solution to the problem of interstate air pollution, regulators must account for the vagaries of the wind.” 
 
 Regulators also had to take into account that emissions are transformed into different pollutants as they travel downwind, Ginsburg wrote. 
 
 Under the EPA rule, each upwind state was allocated a budget for total amount of pollution they could produce in a year. The dissenting states had argued they should be allowed to create their own plans to cut emissions to solve the problem. 
 
 
 
 However, the supreme court disagreed, arguing that would lead to “costly over-regulation”. 
 
 
 
 “[The] EPA’s cost-effective allocation of emission reductions among upwind States, we hold, is a permissible, workable, and equitable interpretation of the Good Neighbor Provision,” the court said. 
 
 Justice Scalia in his Dissent said the EPA rule was an "undemocratic revision" of the clean air act. "Today's decision feeds the uncontrolled growth of the administrative state at the expense of government by the people," he said in a statement read from the bench. 
 
 The EPA had tried three times over the last two decades to control air pollution wafting across state lines, the court said. Congress has also weighed in dozens of times. 
 
 The EPA argued when the rule was originally adopted in 2011 smog and particle pollution from power plants caused 34,000 premature deaths every year, and triggered more than 400,000 asthma attacks. 
 
 
 
 Environmental groups cheered the decision. 
 
 The EPA administrator, Gina McCarthy, said the decision was "a resounding victory for public health." 
 
 The American Lung Association, which had joined the lawsuit, said on Tuesday the court decision was a “life-saving standard”. “The people in these 28 states needed the EPA to enforce the law and protect them from pollution,” it said in a statement. 
 
 
 
 Opponents said the decision departed from the intent of the clean air act – that the EPA and states work together to cut pollution. 
 
 "The Supreme Court majority has refused to allow the states to have any voice in the practicalities of determining the impact of their emissions on neighboring states," said Richard Faulk, director of the energy and law centre at George Mason University and a partner in a corporate law firm. ||||| “Today’s Supreme Court decision is a resounding victory for public health and a key component of E.P.A.’s efforts to make sure all Americans have clean air to breathe,” Gina McCarthy, the E.P.A. administrator, said in a statement. She added that “the court’s finding also underscores the importance of basing the agency’s efforts on strong legal foundations and sound science.” 
 
 The interstate air pollution regulation, also known as the “good neighbor” rule, has pitted Rust Belt and Appalachian states like Ohio, Michigan and Kentucky against East Coast states like New York and Connecticut. 
 
 In its arguments before the court, the E.P.A. said the rules were necessary to protect the health and the environment of downwind states. East Coast states in particular are vulnerable to pollution blown by the prevailing west-to-east winds of the United States. The soot and smog produced by coal plants are linked to asthma, lung disease and premature death. 
 
 In her decision, Justice Ginsburg noted that in reining in interstate pollution, regulators must account for the vagaries of the wind. “Some pollutants stay within upwind states’ borders, the wind carries others to downwind states, and some subset of that group drifts to states without air quality problems,” she wrote, adding a biblical quotation from the Book of John: “The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth.” 
 
 In a dissent, Justice Antonin Scalia, joined by Justice Clarence Thomas, said the regulation was unwieldy and suggested it was Marxist. As written, the regulation will require upwind polluting states to cut pollution in relation to the amounts of pollution each state produces, but also as a proportion of how affordably a state can make the cuts. In other words, states that are able to more cost-effectively reduce pollution will be required to cut more of it. 
 
 “I fully acknowledge that the proportional-reduction approach will demand some complicated computations where one upwind state is linked to multiple downwind states and vice versa,” Justice Scalia wrote. 
 
 “I am confident, however, that E.P.A.’s skilled number-crunchers can adhere to the statute’s quantitative (rather than efficiency) mandate by crafting quantitative solutions. Indeed, those calculations can be performed at the desk, whereas the ‘from each according to its ability’ approach requires the unwieldy field examination of many pollution-producing sources with many sorts of equipment,” he said, paraphrasing Karl Marx.
– A Bible verse is getting heavy quotation today in a Supreme Court decision seen as a big victory for the EPA and the White House on air pollution. In her majority opinion, Ruth Bader Ginsburg cited the Gospel according to John, notes the Washington Post: “The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth.” In this case, she was talking about the wind that bloweth air pollution from coal-fired plants across state lines, and her ruling upheld the EPA's authority to regulate it. The New York Times calls it "a major environmental victory for the Obama administration," and SCOTUSblog agrees that it's a "clear victory for the EPA." The result is that about 1,000 power plants will have to put into place new pollution controls to limit nitrogen and sulfur emissions, reports the Guardian. The problem of air pollution blowing from coal-burning states into states downwind—think Ohio and Kentucky vs. Connecticut and New York—is a complex one, Ginsburg wrote, and the EPA must have the leeway to deal with the "vagaries of the wind." She thinks the EPA got it right with its current formula, though Antonin Scalia disagreed in his dissent. The case, he wrote, underscores "the major problem that many citizens have with the federal government these days: that they are governed not so much by their elected representatives as by an unelected bureaucracy operating under vague statutory standards.”