"The Supreme Court on Thursday limited the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to regulate carbon emissions from power plants..."

"... dealing a blow to the Biden administration’s efforts to address climate change. The vote was 6 to 3, with the court’s three liberal justices in dissent, saying that the majority had stripped the E.P.A. of 'the power to respond to the most pressing environmental challenge of our time.'...  The implications of the ruling could extend well beyond environmental policy and further signal that the court’s newly expanded conservative majority is deeply skeptical of the power of administrative agencies to address major issues facing the nation and the planet."

Writes Adam Liptak in the NYT.

The question before the justices in the new case, West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency, No. 20-1530, was whether the Clean Air Act allowed the E.P.A. to issue sweeping regulations across the power sector. More broadly, the court was asked to address whether Congress must “speak with particular clarity when it authorizes executive agencies to address major political and economic questions.["] The court has called this inquiry the “major questions doctrine.” 

From the majority opinion, written by the Chief Justice (citations omitted):

The dissent criticizes us for “announc[ing] the arrival” of this major questions doctrine, and argues that [the cited precedents] simply followed our “ordinary method” of “normal statutory interpretation.” But in what the dissent calls the “key case” in this area, Brown & Williamson, the Court could not have been clearer: “In extraordinary cases . . . there may be reason to hesitate” before accepting a reading of a statute that would, under more “ordinary” circumstances, be upheld. Or, as we put it more recently, we “typically greet” assertions of “extravagant statutory power over the national economy” with “skepticism.” The dissent attempts to fit the analysis in these cases within routine statutory interpretation, but the bottom line—a requirement of “clear congressional authorization” —confirms that the approach under the major questions doctrine is distinct. 

As for the major questions doctrine “label[],” it took hold because it refers to an identifiable body of law that has developed over a series of significant cases all addressing a particular and recurring problem: agencies asserting highly consequential power beyond what Congress could reasonably be understood to have granted. Scholars and jurists have recognized the common threads between those decisions. So have we. 

Under our precedents, this is a major questions case....