The environmental fight that played out inside the Supreme Court on Wednesday was unusual in many ways: It featured poop, a whopping $10 billion fine and one of the nation’s greenest cities — San Francisco — battling the Environmental Protection Agency over water pollution rules in a case that could reverberate beyond the Bay Area.

Lawyers for San Francisco told the court it was "unfair and unworkable" to hold the city potentially liable for huge fines because of polluted water along Pacific beaches near the

Liberal Supreme Court justices on Wednesday strongly criticized San Francisco‘s challenge to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency‘s authority to set generic limitations for wastewater discharges under the Clean Water Act.