Many conservation groups say U.S. Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch is too conservative and too much like the man he would replace, the late Justice Antonin Scalia, to be a friend of the environment.
But when it comes to Gorsuch’s judicial record on issues like pollution and environmental regulation, he can’t be painted as someone who always finds in favor of businesses, according to an Associated Press review of his rulings.
“I’m willing to, for now, stipulate, as we like to say, that he’s going to come at these things neutral and if he doesn’t think an agency’s interpretation is credible he’s going to say so,” said Pat Parenteau, a professor at Vermont Law School. “Sometimes that’s going to cut in favor of the environment and sometimes it’s going to cut against the environment and I don’t know how much of that concern actually weighs into his decision making.”
As a judge for the Denver-based 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, Gorsuch has ruled both for and against environmental causes.
He voted in 2015 to uphold a Colorado law that requires 20 percent of electricity sold to consumers in the state come from renewable sources.
In 2010, Gorsuch sided with the Environmental Protection Agency when a magnesium company challenged the EPA’s new interpretation of a rule regulating byproducts created by mining in Utah. The company said the byproducts were exempt under a previous interpretation, but Gorsuch said that interpretation was “at best” tentative, so the agency was free to issue a new one.
But Gorsuch has also ruled against the EPA, as in a 2010 case in which the court found that the agency was wrong to classify land in New Mexico as Indian country when a company sought to obtain a mining permit. If the land, which was not on a reservation, were classified as Indian country, the company would have needed to obtain a permit from the EPA rather than the state.