Ruling hands greens a setback

The Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that federal environmental regulators can use cost-benefit analysis techniques when deciding how to upgrade equipment at power plants, a defeat for green groups who want the impact on the environment to be the chief or only consideration.

The 6-3 ruling strikes down a victory for the Riverkeepers environmental group, which had persuaded the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that cost should not matter in its bid to require companies to spend hundreds of millions of dollars in system upgrades to meet what it claimed were Environmental Protection Agency regulations.

Justice Antonin Scalia wrote for the majority in the 6-3 decision that the EPA is permitted to weigh cost when ordering electrical plants to upgrade their cooling systems.

"While not conclusive, it surely tends to show that the EPA's current practice is a reasonable and hence legitimate exercise of its discretion to weigh benefits against costs that the agency has been proceeding in essentially this fashion for over 30 years,"

Justice Scalia wrote.

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