That is precisely what they did. It was called the Clean Air Act, and Congress passed it in 1963.
SCOTUS's reasoning here is hinky, to use an official legal term: it's clear that Congress has empowered the EPA here, but that SCOTUS finds it easier to claim that they never truly did rather than that they oughtn't to have.
Clearly Congress itself thought there was a law needed - that the EPA didn't have the authority to do what it went on to try and do.
Since Congress only considered the law and didn't actually pass it, I would say that they did not think there was a law needed.
* Congress's priorities are not my priorities, your priorities, or even particularly reasonable.
* Congress's ability to efficiently pass laws (at least ones that don't involve funding the military or lowering taxes) has consistently declined over the last 30 years. The last 15 years, in particular, have seen incredibly ugly political brinkmanship over basic legislative responsibilities. In other words: there may be abstract votes in favor of new EPA laws but they're difficult (impossible?) to materialize.
* Congress may feel it has no particular input to provide to the EPA's administrative interpretation of the law. This is the explanation that strikes me as most salient (even if all others happen to be correct): it's entirely possible that a majority of Congress sees no particular problem with the EPA's policies, and would much prefer to pass the buck and play political games around the EPA rather than actually changing legislation.
The bill is clearly not intended to “shut down” anything. It empowers the EPA to protect the quality of the air that we all breathe, and that’s how it was applied. If coal power plants need to externalize their pollution to be financially viable, that says more about our failures to preempt the situation than some kind of bloodthirsty plot on the EPA’s part.
Given that the danger of CO2 was completely unknown in 1963 and green energy technologies almost didn't exist. I'm not sure how you can claim that.
This is a bizarre claim!
From https://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/
> In 1896, a seminal paper by Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius first predicted that changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels could substantially alter the surface temperature through the greenhouse effect. In 1938, Guy Callendar connected carbon dioxide increases in Earth's atmosphere to global warming.
Also read: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_climate_change_sc...
Rediscovering old previously discredited scientific papers from the late 19th and early 20th century doesn't make it date all the way back to then.
The CAA empowers the EPA to identify pollutants, and that's what the EPA has (correctly!) done. Whether or not the scientific consensus from the 1960s agrees is immaterial.
Don’t want to talk guns, but want to illustrate the challenges of making such claims
If laws can’t be interpreted to account for new circumstances, then it must be legal to pay to have someone killed as long as you use Bitcoin — after all the law didn’t specifically ban the use of Bitcoin.
Section 202(a)(1) is pretty explicit that the law does not limit the pollutants under the low to those known to the legislative body[1]:
> The Administrator shall by regulation prescribe (and from time to time revise) in accordance with the provisions of this section, standards applicable to the emission of any air pollutant from any class or classes of new motor vehicles or new motor vehicle engines, which in his judgment cause, or contribute to, air pollution which may reasonably be anticipated to endanger public health or welfare.
Edit: In other words: even if we could show that Congress was unaware of CO2's effect on the environment, it simply doesn't matter. The Act empowers the EPA to identify and address the pollutants.