Pennsylvania high court to consider plan to make power plants pay for greenhouse gas emissions

Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court will take its first crack at whether a governor can force power plant owners to pay for their planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions, or whether he first needed approval from a Legislature that refused to go along with the plan.

Hanging in the balance is Pennsylvania’s effort to become the first major fossil fuel-producing state to adopt carbon pricing.

On Wednesday, the state’s highest court will hear arguments on whether a lower court was right to halt Pennsylvania’s participation in a multistate consortium that imposes a price and declining cap on carbon dioxide emissions from power plants.

The way the justices react could give hints as to how they might ultimately rule on whether Pennsylvania’s participation — without legislative approval — is constitutional.

It is no small amount of money: Pennsylvania would have raised more than $1 billion had it begun participating in 2022 when former Gov. Tom Wolf intended, according to calculations by the Natural Resources Defense Council, a nonprofit environmental advocacy group.

It became the central plank in Wolf’s plan to fight global warming.

Republican lawmakers, fossil fuel interests, industrial power users and trade unions oppose it, saying it will hurt the state’s energy industry and drive up electric bills.

The case is a political minefield for Gov. Josh Shapiro, Wolf’s successor and a fellow Democrat who was endorsed by some of the labor unions that fought Wolf’s effort to join the consortium.

Shapiro has maintained that he does not support entering the consortium, the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, on Wolf’s terms. But he continues to fight for it in court and his top environmental protection appointee told lawmakers in March that joining the consortium is “a vehicle” that could help meet Shapiro’s “strong and very aspirational goals” to help the environment.

Meanwhile, Shapiro has assembled a task force to try to come up with something better — a task force that meets in secret and includes opponents from organized labor and executives from companies invested in fossil fuels, as well as supporters of carbon pricing.