The EPA had tried three times over the last two decades to control air pollution wafting across state lines, the court said. 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”. 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. 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. The Washington DC court of appeals put the rule on hold in 2012. 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 Samuel Alito recused himself, and justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas dissented. 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.
– 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.”