Page:Michigan v. EPA.pdf/30

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MICHIGAN v. EPA KAGAN, J., dissenting

acted reasonably in structuring its regulatory process in that way—in making its “appropriate and necessary finding” based on pollution’s harmful effects and channeling cost considerations to phases of the rulemaking in which emission levels are actually set. Said otherwise, the question is not whether EPA can reasonably find it “appropriate” to regulate without thinking about costs, full stop. It cannot, and it did not. Rather, the question is whether EPA can reasonably find it “appropriate” to trigger the regulatory process based on harms (and technological feasibility) alone, given that costs will come into play, in multiple ways and at multiple stages, before any emission limit goes into effect. In considering that question, the very nature of the word “appropriate” matters. “[T]he word ‘appropriate,’ ” this Court has recognized, “is inherently contextdependent”: Giving it content requires paying attention to the surrounding circumstances. Sossamon v. Texas, 563 U. S. 277, ___ (2011) (slip op., at 7). (That is true, too, of the word “necessary,” although the majority spends less time on it. See Armour & Co. v. Wantock, 323 U. S. 126, 129–130 (1944) (“[T]he word ‘necessary’. . . has always been recognized as a word to be harmonized with its context”).) And here that means considering the place of the “appropriate and necessary” finding in the broader regulatory scheme—as a triggering mechanism that gets a complex rulemaking going. The interpretive task is thus at odds with the majority’s insistence on staring fixedly “at this stage.” Ante, at 11 (emphasis in original). The task instead demands taking account of the entire regulatory process in thinking about what is “appropriate” in its first phase. The statutory language, in other words, is a directive to remove one’s blinders and view things whole—to consider what it is fitting to do at the threshold stage given what will happen at every other. And that instruction is primarily given to EPA, not to