USA – TEXAS Trends and Developments Contributed by: Gerald J. Pels, Gerald D. Higdon and Elizabeth Corey, Troutman Pepper Locke
Troutman Pepper Locke JPMorgan Chase Tower 600 Travis Street; Suite 2800 Houston, TX 77002 USA Tel: +1 713 226 1200 Email: Gerry.Pels@Troutman.com Web: www.Troutman.com
Who decides? The Court’s reallocation of interpretive authority At the heart of an issue with far-reaching policy impli- cations for the energy industry lies a fundamental question: when a statute is silent, ambiguous, or stretched to address a problem its drafters never named, who decides how that statute is applied? The Court’s evolving jurisprudence provides the answer. Skidmore v Swift & Co . (1944) is the natural start- ing point, even though it is a wage-and-hour case rather than an energy or environmental one. Decided four decades before Chevron later rewired the field, Skidmore held that an agency’s interpretation earns respect in proportion to its “power to persuade”, namely its thoroughness, the soundness of its rea- soning and its consistency over time. That respect, however, was never binding. A court remained free to disagree with the agency interpretation before it. Skid- more matters now, as recent decisions have worked their way back toward its premise. Forty years later, Chevron U . S . A . Inc . v Natural Resources Defense Council (1984), a Clean Air Act (CAA) case, supplied the framework that eclipsed Skidmore . Chevron implemented a two-step analysis: (i) whether Congress had directly addressed within the statute the precise question at hand and (ii) if the stat- ute was silent or ambiguous, the court asked whether the agency’s interpretation was a “permissible” or rea- sonable one, deferring to the agency’s interpretation if it was. As a result, statutory ambiguity operated as implicit agency delegation. Chevron became one of the most-cited US decisions, but created tension between agencies and the courts by routinely hand-
The Intersection of Environmental Law and Energy Development: New Supreme Court Decisions, New Regulatory Approaches and New Energy Development Opportunities On 12 February 2026, EPA removed the legal cor- nerstone of federal climate regulation, rescinding its own 2009 Greenhouse Gas Endangerment Find- ing (“Endangerment Finding”). What made the move possible was not a new statute, but the US Supreme Court’s steady shift over the past three years in its stance toward agency power. A series of the Court’s decisions have returned the reading of statutes to judges, and EPA reached for that very reasoning to rescind a rule it had once defended. For the energy sector, a once-academic dispute over administrative authority now carries direct consequences for invest- ment and projects on the ground. This article follows that development in three move- ments. The first sets out the line of US Supreme Court (“Court”) decisions, ranging from Skidmore and Chev- ron to Loper Bright and Seven County , and distils their combined implication: agencies have lost their old grip on what a statute means, even as they main- tain latitude to make the expert, on-the-ground calls a statute entrusts to them. The second shows that teaching in action, dissecting the Endangerment Find- ing rollback (“Rollback”) and the major questions and best-reading rationales EPA built it on. The third turns practical, asking what the new landscape means for energy investment, regulatory predictability, and the contest between federal and state authority, should the Rollback survive review.
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