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With birthright citizenship, transgender athletes, and the independence of the Federal Reserve dominating the end of June’s wall-to-wall Supreme Court coverage, you’d be forgiven for missing the big environmental decision that snuck out with them.
I’ll spoil it. The chemical company won, 7-2. In dissent was Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson and… wait for it… Justice Neil Gorsuch.
The company? Monsanto, the infamous manufacturer of the herbicide Roundup.
Their argument? That the Environmental Protection Agency should have more authority over how Roundup is regulated.
What?!
Regular news viewers might find this bizarre right out the gate. There’s liberals and conservatives in the majority, and the dissent. Liberal Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan sided with Monsanto. Conservative Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas sided with the EPA. And that whole group is on the same side.
The case itself, called Monsanto v. Durnell, was not asking whether Monsanto is the heart of all evil. Rather, it concerned the question of whether a state court in Missouri is allowed to find Monsanto liable for not putting a cancer warning label on Roundup if the federal EPA approved a label without one and did not find Roundup to be carcinogenic. Seven said it is not. Two said it is.
Both views are completely understandable, in theory and in practice. If the federal EPA approves a warning label, it makes sense that state courts should not fine or punish a company for using that approved label, as the seven felt. It would be quite burdensome to abide by contradictory state and federal regulations, and federal beats state. On the flip side, one could argue — actually, two could argue — Congress made it illegal for companies to misbrand the dangers of their pesticides, and the EPA’s safety judgment is not the be-all and end-all. If a state jury hears a case and rules differently, that’s their prerogative. Either interpretation of the law is fair, and neither is “pro-environment” or “anti-environment.”
But the court’s strange split is far from the juiciest part of the story. In 1985, the EPA classified glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup, as a possible carcinogen; but reversed course in 1991, classifying it as having “evidence of non-carcinogenicity for humans.” Many of the studies the EPA relied on were conducted by Monsanto and not in peer-reviewed journals or available to the public, and multiple EPA scientists refused to sign the 1991 report. That decision has been shrouded in decades of scandals, from a laboratory contributing studies for Monsanto getting exposed for fraud with multiple executives criminally convicted to a major 2000 scientific paper getting retracted last year due to Monsanto’s undisclosed involvement.
In 2015, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) classified glyphosate as “probably carcinogenic to humans.” Monsanto led a multi-million dollar campaign to discredit IARC.
The list goes on.
In 2018, a San Francisco jury ordered Monsanto to pay $289 million to a former school groundskeeper who was dying of cancer and argued Roundup contributed to his disease. His attorney? Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Just in case the scrambled political coalitions weren’t confusing enough.
Periodically, the EPA is required to reevaluate the pesticides they regulate under the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act (FIFRA), including glyphosate. Their next deadline is October 1, 2026. And because of this new Supreme Court ruling, if the EPA continues to defy the findings of countless toxicologists and deem glyphosate non-carcinogenic, states won’t be able to require Monsanto put a warning label anyway, making the specific EPA classification more consequential than before. That’s not a critique of the court. It’s a demand for the EPA to take this reevaluation seriously.