Environmental activists in Wyoming are asking the state’s Environmental Quality Council (EQC) to reconsider its decision to permit construction of a new coal-fired power plant, arguing the Council did not consider the plant’s CO2 emissions in its permitting process.

The environmental groups base their request on this summer’s landmark ruling by a Georgia state court in Longleaf Energy v. Friends of the Caloosahatchee, which indefinitely halted construction of a major coal-fired power plant because its developers failed to limit greenhouse gas emissions. The Court cited the Supreme Court’s ruling in Massachusetts v. EPA that greenhouse gases are pollutants subject to the Clean Air Act, and ruled that the developers must therefore conduct a best available control technology (BACT) assessment of its CO2 emissions before going forward.

Word of the Supreme Court’s April 2007 ruling seems not to have reached regulators in (fittingly) the Cowboy State:

In Wyoming, the state’s Environmental Quality Council (EQC), a governor-appointed citizen board, Aug. 21 dismissed “all carbon dioxide, greenhouse gas and global warming claims” from a protest filed in November 2007 against the approval of a Basin Electric Power Cooperative permit.

In the EQC’s dismissal of Basin Electric Power Cooperative’s Dry Fork Station unit, the board found that “no legal duties are currently imposed on DEQ to regulate CO2 and other greenhouse gases and make a BACT determination” because “CO2 and other greenhouse gases are not currently regulated pollutants (or subject to regulation) pursuant to the Federal Clean Air Act and corresponding EPA regulations, the Wyoming Environmental Quality Act or Wyoming’s Air Quality Standards and Regulations.”

The environmentalists will now argue they have legal precedence on their side. Complicating matters, the Georgia Court of Appeals agreed last month to re-examine the trial court’s ruling in the Georgia case.

The cases are significant, because if the Georgia ruling stands and successfully serves as precedent in a coal-mining state like Wyoming, it could delay or prevent construction of hundreds of greenhouse gas-emitting power plants in the future.