Conservative fifth circuit overturns EPA’s ban prohibiting Inhance from using manufacturing process creating toxic compound
Archived version: https://archive.ph/xuz0R
Conservative fifth circuit is the headline, Grauniad. Don’t bury it.
Imagine working for Inhance and high-fiving your coworkers because a court said it’s legal for you to continue contaminating humans and the environment with a harmful chemical.
What kind of sick motherfucker sleeps well after that?
Just another day in America.
To be fair if you actually read it the EPA invoked the wrong legislation, it should be banned but they didn’t ban in a legal manner
Not really. The argument came down to the Section 5 definition of “new”, since other arguments were ignored as moot. It was a typical pro business decision that argued on semantics instead of law.
The court even signaled that they would reject it under Section 6 if EPA were to use it due to the need “to weigh the costs to businesses and the overall economy before shutting down an ongoing manufacturing process”.
If they have had this process for decades it’s not new though, the information about the harms is new. You could argue the EPA doesn’t have enough power when something is provably toxic but this ruling isn’t surprising, especially when it would create significant case law
The Section 5 states that it has to be “new chemical substance or significant new uses of a chemical substance”. But since neither “new” or “significant new use” is defined, the court chosen the definition that suited their preferred outcome.
Inhance asserts that “new” means “having recently come into existence,” or “not previously existing.”
By contrast, the EPA offers a different definition of “new,” as meaning “not previously known” or “known but a short time although perhaps existing before.”
All of these definitions are valid. So if the court wanted to avoid creating significant case law, they should have rejected the first argument as not significant and moved to the other arguments. It was a typical decision where the count had an outcome they wanted and then looked for the reasons to justify it instead of looking at the case blindly as they should.
