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| There ain't no such thing as clean coal |
~ From CNN:
The Supreme Court's Conservative Majority Is A Threat To The World
Updated 12:02 AM ET, Fri July 1, 2022
" The Supreme Court spent recent weeks triggering political and legal earthquakes across America. But its latest audacious blow could affect the entire planet.
After advancing the Republican Party's agenda
by overturning the federal right to an abortion and loosening gun laws,
the conservative court majority built by former President Donald Trump
on Thursday limited the government's capacity to fight climate change.
In
a 6-3 ruling, the justices held that US law did not give the
Environmental Protection Agency the authority to set caps on
planet-warming emissions from power plants. Given that President Joe Biden's
$500 billion energy and climate plan is stuck in the Senate, the move
dealt a significant blow to US global leadership on the issue.
The
decision came down at a moment when scientists are warning of the
disastrous impacts of accelerating climate change and as raging
wildfires and parching droughts in the US show that the crisis is
already here. And it was especially dismaying to the White House since
it threatened to weaken Biden's authority on the global stage just as he
was wrapping up a successful trip to Europe. The President collected several big wins, including solidifying NATO's front against Russia, by brokering the entry of two new members -- Sweden and Finland --
and by orienting the alliance to further another key priority: building
a front of international democracies to counter China.
But
his credibility on combating climate change -- another key foreign
policy priority -- was dented by the Supreme Court ruling, even if
administration lawyers will seek alternative ways to cut emissions and
global market forces continue to make coal-fired power stations
unprofitable or obsolete.
Global
climate action depends on a collective effort. Smaller countries won't
cut their emissions if the biggest polluters, like the US, won't. The
tough political choices required to cut emissions are impossible for all
to make if some nations avoid them. And other powers will constrain
their own climate targets if they fear losing a competitive advantage to
rivals that don't change their economies to lower reliance on fossil
fuels. If Biden's capacity to reach ambitious US climate goals is
compromised, he will be unable to lead by example and an already creaky
plan to avert catastrophic warming across the globe could be in
jeopardy.
The
United Nations was quick to warn Thursday that the Supreme Court's
decision threatened to disrupt efforts to keep the rise in global
temperatures below 2% while pursuing efforts to maintain a 1.5%
threshold.
"Decisions
like today's in the US, or any other major emitting economy, make it
harder to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement, for a healthy, livable
planet, especially as we need to accelerate the phase out of coal and
the transition to renewable energies," said Stéphane Dujarric, the
spokesman for UN Secretary-General António Guterres.
"But
we also need to remember that an emergency as global in nature as
climate change requires a global response, and the actions of a single
nation should not and cannot make or break whether we reach our climate
objectives."
US climate change leadership has often been erratic
The world is used to US gyrations on climate change.
President Barack Obama, for example, helped negotiate the Paris climate accord,
which came into force in 2016. But his successor, President Donald
Trump, who had previously declared climate change to be a Chinese hoax,
walked out on the deal. Declaring "America is back," Biden took steps to
rejoin the agreement within hours of being sworn in as president last
year.
The Supreme Court's move throws a wrench in Biden's ambitious plans to halve US greenhouse gas emissions from 2005 levels by 2030 and to create a net-zero emissions economy by 2050.
"This
has certainly made it much, much more difficult without a doubt," Carol
Browner, who served as EPA administrator in the Clinton administration,
told CNN on Thursday after the Supreme Court opinion was released.
In
essence, the court ruled that the Clean Air Act did not give the EPA
the authority to regulate the carbon emissions from power plants that
contribute to climate change. Because the law was enacted in 1970, it
did not contain detailed instructions for the agency to combat climate
change, which, at the time, was not a widespread global concern.
Chief Justice John Roberts
argued in his majority opinion that the act could not be used by the
government as authority to introduce curbs to combat climate change.
"Capping
carbon dioxide emissions at a level that will force a nationwide
transition away from the use of coal to generate electricity may be a
sensible 'solution to the crisis of the day,'" Roberts wrote in his
majority opinion. "But it is not plausible that Congress gave EPA the
authority to adopt on its own such a regulatory scheme."
This is just the latest case when the Supreme Court's narrow, literal reading
of the Constitution and US law has appeared to pay little attention to
conditions in the modern world and how the majority's decisions would
impact them.
Last week's overturning of the constitutional right to an abortion, for instance, has created chaotic aftereffects and a patchwork of laws across the nation. An earlier decision to strike down a law in New York state
that placed limits on the right of Americans to carry guns outside the
home came as crime is rising in a nation already awash with guns.
In
her dissent to the Roberts opinion, Justice Elena Kagan, who was
nominated by Obama, described a dire picture of a warming world with
intense hurricanes, drought, the destruction of ecosystems and floods
that consume large swathes of the eastern seaboard. And she argued that
the Congress had already granted the EPA the authority to mitigate
"catastrophic harms."
"Whatever
else this Court may know about, it does not have a clue about how to
address climate change," she wrote, accusing the conservative justices
of making themselves the "decision maker on climate policy."
"I cannot think of many things more frightening," Kagan concluded.
Republicans welcome the court's reining in of bureaucracy
Leading
conservative politicians immediately welcomed the decision, heralding
it as a win for constraining government overreach in Washington by
unelected bureaucrats.
"We
are pleased this case returned the power to decide one of the major
environmental issues of the day to the right place to decide it: the US
Congress, comprised of those elected by the people to serve the people,"
said Patrick Morrisey, the Republican attorney general of West
Virginia, a major coal-producing state.
"This is about maintaining the separation of powers, not climate change," Morrisey said.
The
problem, however, with the Supreme Court returning issues to Congress
is lawmakers' difficulty in getting anything significant done. The
country's polarization and the Senate filibuster rules have made
advancing major bills on key issues -- like voting rights and gun
regulation -- a challenge in a narrowly divided Senate. The recently
passed gun legislation, for example, fell well short of the substantial
overhauls many Democrats would have liked to have seen. But they had to
pass something that could get 10 GOP votes, even though Democrats
nominally have a monopoly on political power in Washington.
And
there is no appetite among Republicans to tackle climate change. The
court's right-wing majority is therefore playing an important role in
asserting a conservative political agenda to thwart any change a
Democratic Congress and President could enact.
That's
hard for foreigners to understand when it comes to an issue as urgent
as climate change. But it ensures that any efforts to commit the United
States to the global climate fight will inevitably lead to years of
political battles in Washington. And it is yet another example of how
the country's polarization is threatening its global leadership role."
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Have a nice weekend y'all. ...
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