Louisiana v. Biden

In a single-sentence order, the U.S. Supreme Court denied an application by Louisiana and nine other states to vacate the Fifth Circuit’s stay of a district court’s preliminary injunction barring federal agencies from using the work product of the Interagency Working Group on Social Cost of Greenhouse Gases and from using any social cost of greenhouse gases estimates based on the global effects of greenhouse gases. The district court also ordered the federal defendants to return to using 2003 guidance. Briefing on the merits of the preliminary injunction appeal is underway in the Fifth Circuit, with Louisiana and the other nine states’ brief due on June 16, 2022.

The states submitted an application to vacate the stay to Justice Alito. They argued that the Fifth Circuit’s stay order allowed “an agency created out of whole cloth issue what might be the most significant rule in American history” without statutory authority, adherence to notice-and-comment rulemaking procedures, or pre-enforcement judicial review, and the states would suffer irreparable harm because use of the IWG’s SC-GHG estimates would “increase States’ energy costs, decrease their tax revenues, compound their burdens in cooperative federalism programs, threaten their coastline restoration and protection projects, divest them of administrative process and consultation rights, and impose economic harms on their citizens that States have a parens patriae right to protect.” Justice Alito requested that the federal government respond to the application by May 9.