There’s another big decision out this morning from the U.S. Supreme Court on climate change, and you can expect to see some West Virginia officials touting it as more proof for their argument that the federal Environmental Protection Agency is out of control … but before you buy that, it’s worth actually paying attention to what the decision says and what some of the media coverage of it is explaining.

Sure, as some of the headlines are saying, the Supreme Court limited EPA’s authority in writing rules to restrict carbon pollution. But read on, for as this story from Bloomberg explains:

The U.S. Supreme Court partially upheld one of President Barack Obama’s early efforts against climate change, saying the Environmental Protection Agency had authority to impose new permitting requirements on some power plants and factories.

The permitting rules apply when facilities are built or expanded. They are separate from the administration’s more comprehensive climate-change regulations, including the plan released June 2 to cut carbon emissions from existing plants by as much as 25 percent over 15 years.

The Supreme Court gave the EPA a preliminary victory in October, refusing to consider arguments that would have barred the agency from addressing climate change at all. That left states and business groups fighting the permit rules, which they said may ultimately affect millions of facilities, including bakeries and apartment complexes.

Today’s ruling, which splintered the court, may head off that possibility, limiting the rules to a few hundred facilities that already have to get permits for other pollutants. The justices said greenhouse-gas emissions by themselves can’t serve as the trigger for a permit requirement.

Or, as The Washington Post pointed out:

Justice Antonin Scalia, writing for the court, said “EPA is getting almost everything it wanted in this case.” Scalia said the agency wanted to regulate 86 percent of all greenhouse gases emitted from plants nationwide. The agency will be able to regulate 83 percent of the emissions under the ruling, Scalia said.

Some readers may recall that West Virginia Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin and Attorney General Patrick Morrisey made quite a big deal about their filing of a “friend of the court” brief in the case.  But this ruling is hardly the kind of major defeat for EPA that those politicians are looking for. Here’s the New York Times:

The Supreme Court on Monday handed President Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency a victory in its efforts to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from stationary sources like power plants … States and industry groups challenged the regulations on many grounds, with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce calling them “the most burdensome, costly, far-reaching program ever adopted by a United States regulatory agency.” The Supreme Court limited the issue it would consider to whether the agency “permissibly determined that its regulation of greenhouse gas emissions from new motor vehicles triggered permitting requirements under the Clean Air Act for stationary sources that emit greenhouses gases.”