DENVER (Legal Newsline) - A law requiring Colorado regulators to promulgate rules designed to allow the state to meet its emission reduction goals didn’t set a firm deadline for anything more than collecting data, an appeals court ruled, rejecting challenges from environmental groups.
Colorado Gov. Jared Polis signed House Bill 19-1261 and Senate Bill 19-096 in 2019, setting greenhouse-gas emissions goals from 2025 to 2050 and requiring the Colorado Air Quality Control Commission to promulgate rules and regulations to achieve those goals. SB 19-096 also required the commission to propose rules that “would cost effectively allow the state to meet its emission reduction goals” by July 1, 2020.
Soon after that deadline expired, WildEarth Guardians and the Environmental Defense Fund sued the state, seeking an injunction requiring the Commission to promulgate those rules. The state conceded it had not come up with the required regulations and the plaintiffs moved for summary judgment, claiming a clear violation of the law. The state also moved for summary judgment, however, arguing the law was ambiguous and given the large scope of the regulatory scheme only required it to take “first steps” toward meeting emissions goals.
A trial court dismissed the case, and the Colorado Court of Appeals upheld the dismissal in a Nov. 3 decision. The law only requires regulators to set up a scheme for collecting data on emissions, the court said, not a rigid deadline for promulgating rules that would affect every facet of the state economy.
“According to Plaintiffs, rules that `allow the state to meet’ its GHG reduction goals inexorably means the same thing to any reasonable reader,” the court said. “We think otherwise.”
While the wording appears clear, the court said, the environmentalists’ interpretation would lead to “absurd results.” The law requires regulators to meet with stakeholders including minority communities and the public at large, for example, impossible to accomplish in the 13 months between the signing of the bill and the July deadline. The law also required utilities to submit their emissions-reduction plans by the end of 2021, meaning the Commission would have to come up with its own rules before it heard from some of the state’s largest GHG emitters.
The ambiguity of the law “is evident in plaintiffs’ own shifting interpretation,” the court went on. The environmental groups first argued the law required rules that are “sufficient” to meet GHG goals. Then on appeal they shifted that to “make it possible.” Both are reasonable interpretations of the phrase “allow it to meet,” the court ruled, but that just confirms the phrase is ambiguous.
“Nothing in the statute prevents the Commission from approaching the state’s GHG emission challenge in stages,” the court concluded.