The Supreme Court ruled Tuesday against Indiana and other states that challenged a federal plan to reduce pollutants from power plants that contribute to harmful levels of smog and soot in downwind states.

The court ruled 6-2 that states in the Midwest and South whose polluted air flows north and east must comply with a federally imposed solution.

The decision, written by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, was a boon for the Obama administration and its environmental regulators, who have proposed a rule requiring some 28 upwind states to slash ozone and fine particle emissions by varying amounts because of their downwind effects. Most of those states have rebelled against the one-size-fits-all solution.

Indiana, however, is both a contributor to other states’ pollution levels as well as a recipient of cross-state pollution.

Reducing smog and soot from cross-state pollution would prevent heart attacks, bronchitis and asthma attacks, the government says. EPA estimates the rule also would prevent 1,400 premature deaths in Indiana each year and provide health benefits worth $4.5 billion to $11 billion per year.

A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit struck down the rule last year, ruling that EPA didn’t give states enough time to devise their own emissions reduction plans. It also said the agency did not limit the fix to each state’s “significant contribution” to the overall problem.

At the time, former Gov. Mitch Daniels had called the rejection “great news for Hoosier ratepayers and job seekers.”

But the Supreme Court’s majority ruled that with air pollution blowing in the wind, it would be nearly impossible to apportion blame precisely, making a federal solution based on costs and other factors more palatable.

The EPA’s solution — which it devised after a federal appeals court rejected in 2008 the approach proposed by the George W. Bush administration — was to determine which states are significant contributors to cross-state pollution and then assign reductions based on where the biggest changes could be made for the least cost.

That actually benefits Indiana, according to the Environmental Defense Fund. It calculated that Indiana would have to make much bigger reductions if the EPA could only consider Indiana’s maximum downwind contribution to another state.

Ginsburg was joined in the decision by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Stephen Breyer, Anthony Kennedy, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan. Justices Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia dissented, and Justice Samuel Alito recused himself.

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