Genuine question, what is lobbying if not legalized bribery? It’s hard to think it’s anything else when things like this happen - https://youtu.be/CARiB_eYwys
The politicians have no access to the PAC campaign donations other than directing them to spend it for the purposes of the campaign. A politician can't use their PAC to buy themselves a house or a fancy car.
You are stunningly naive. It's completely legal for companies to donate to a politician's campaign. This obviously influences the way they vote. I don't understand how you can so confidently claim things while misunderstanding them so completely.
lol. they just flat out lied about Roe and "settled law" during their interviews and you're standing up for them? Come on. They absolutely sold their soul to get on the bench, there's not a single doubt there. Except Thomas, he is just a plain old evil grumpy old man.
Legitimate question: How can US measures stop climate change if many other countries are planning to construct and operate hundreds of coal plants for electric generation?
That's never gonna work. If we figure out how to get to net zero electricity then we have to put pressure on other countries to do the same and show them how or it won't happen. It's possible China will surpass us in 10 or 20 years though and make that irrelevant.
The US can reduce its own greenhouse gas emissions, which are substantial. Then it can develop and sell renewable generation technology to the rest of the world. The US has extraordinary scientific, engineering, and manufacturing talent and can do it.
I'd certainly love to believe this, but it has most definitely not materialized yet. I'm not sure that self-inflicting economic pain in order to incentivize development of alternative fuels is a good strategy.
To me this is like arguing about getting the rabies vaccine after a bite from a wild animal. It's not going to be pleasant, but it's the path of the least pain, substantially. There will be economic pain one way or another, it's a question of if the planet habitable in the way we've adapted, also.
Simple. Tax carbon and tariff countries that don't.
If you want to be really self-serving and hypocritical about this sort of thing, you can even skip out on doing the first part, and jump straight to the second.
The US taking action puts international pressure on other nations to also take action.
If the US ignored it and does not take action, other countries are less likely to take action, because the U.S. is generally a leader on these things.
It's kind of like asking "If the US stops pooping in the pool, what's to stop another kid from pooping in the pool?" Well those other kids are a hell of a lot more likely to poop in the pool if they see an international leader doing it.
Also, by leading the way and showing how decerbonization is not only cheaper, but also healthier, other countries will be more likely to try to save money similarly.
Most places that are installing coal these days are doing it because of local corruption. It's a lot easier to grift off a huge project than it is off of small distributed energy. Seeing that the US is moving away from coal will mean that corrupt local officials will have less excuse to pick outdated technology that lets them get bribed.
The US has been trending downward in emissions for some time now without the federal government having to mandate anything. Texas of all places is one of the fastest growing locations in the country for wind energy.
Exactly, decarbonization will save us tons of money as individuals and as a society. The probe is that many monied interests don't want to change their businesses to adapt.
This is a separate issue from federal action. We take all sorts of actions with vast political and economic action that don't save money, to reduce pollution.
But by leading the way, we will encourage other countries to not build coal plants, which was the "legitimate" question that was asked.
Is it fast enough to stop a huge economic and biological burden hitting our children? It’s sad how short sighted the majority of people in the US is today. Small sacrifices could lead to hugely greater quality of life for everyone’s grand children but everyone is special and deserve everything they desire right now.
Higher standards in California mean companies default to that standard nation wide because it's easier to have a single product and avoid supply chain issues.
Same reason most all orange juice is Kosher. A small but large enough hard preference controls the market because the rest dont care enough.
Hopefully red states won't put an mpg cap out of spite
This really doesn't seem like a very strong argument to me. How does the US undertaking an expensive effort to use less efficient energy sources in the name of the climate put any pressure on other countries? I don't think our being "generally a leader" is much of an incentive for China or India to voluntarily spend trillions to completely change their energy strategy.
Everyone knows it has to happen, one way or another. If the US can hide behind 'but China isn't reducing emissions' then so can China hide behind the US. etc. etc.
And emissions per capita in China are still much lower than the US and of my native Netherlands, where the same argument is used.
And in my mind emission per capita is only metric that is fair. And it should be calculated to include exports and imports thus transferring the emissions to where the goods produced are actually consumed.
Yep. And given all those 'Made in China' labels, it's a big exporter too, transferring more CO2 to consumers. The picture does not become better looking for (us) Westerners
This is not very true if you look at the numbers. Manufacturing stuff is a pretty tiny proportion of emissions, and even if you shift all of China's manufacturing emissions back to the countries that import, it's barer a blip.
I ran the numbers a few years ago to see what personal actions I could take. (Even though climate change is a collective action problem, not a personal action problem.) In the US, stopping buying so much stuff isn't much of a climate action, at least not nearly as much as switching off driving a gas car, changing your natural gas water heater to electric, ir changing a natural gas furnace to a heat pump.
I don't have a better suggestion, but emissions per Capita isn't necessarily fair. For instance adding another horrifically oppressed person can't mean that the elite of that country "deserve" to be able to emit more CO2. It's somewhat less clear how that should extend to economic inequality, of how it should apply in individual real world cases, but it does seem a flaw of the model.
This is the same U.S. government that got the entire earth to adopt their drug scheduling policies and to buy all oil with their dollar, keep in mind. This country is capable of exerting immense diplomatic pressure.
Perhaps this is good to change things up and see what other solutions are possible to address climate change. EPA does not have the will of the people or Congress, which detracts from its powers and potential impact. EPA may not be geared to address climate change or large energy-economy problems - just look at the current situation - whatever they are doing is not working. They are good at pollution mitigation and rule making. Climate change solutions may not be helped by rules or EPA type measures. Instead they require environments amenable to systematic energy transition: low on regulation, low on entry barriers to innovation, low on rules and policies, financially punishing to old solutions. Climate action is techno-economic challenge the EPA might not be suited for.
This is so outrageously wrong.
Currently, by far the most cost effective way to remove CO2 is to not create it in the first place.
Congress has tried to allocate funding towards all sorts of measures and they are consistently blocked by the GOP.
This ruling is both legally unsound and completely disastrous.
Most emissions (that can be reduced) are done by groups of people who very much have bean counters in the loop. Optimizing ones shipping routes may save rather a lot of CO2 for example
This solution even has some evidence it works in practice and some people still don't always like it because the climate is merely a political tool for them.
Biden's climate change agenda has actually increased CO2 emissions. The thing is, natural gas has twice the energy in it per C atom than coal does. But Biden's regulations have targeted ng, which means that more filthy coal gets burned instead.
The answer is not targeting coal or ng. It's targeting the quantity of C emitted into the air. The very best way to do this is to tax the C in fuels that get burnt.
Then it is not necessary to have all sorts of regulations about what can be burned, etc. Just tax the C. The market will then sort it out.
I used to be a huge fan of carbon taxes, but I think for them to be effective they would have needed to be adopted back in the 90s or early 2000s.
The speed at which the market adapts to small price changes is not fast enough. Additionally, we need to take quick action in ways that have very different costs for different industries.
For example, steel and concrete have large process emissions, and are industries with extremely low margins, high capital costs, and long capital lifetimes. Decarbonization of these industries is unlikely to happen even with high carbon taxes of $200/ton, because not only is the successor tech not yet understood, there's no guarantee that an investment in a potential carbon-less concrete will have a market.
A much better approach is to guarantee the market, at any price, but let it be a competitive market for that carbon-free steel or carbon-free concrete. E.g. a small number of customers that band together and state that they will only buy carbon-free concrete for construction, that needs X million tons in the next 5 years. This will allow entrepeneurs to raise money, because they have a guaranteed market where they only compete with the new tech, rather than having to compete with the general market plus a price. Let those initial businesses get going, iterate, and drive down costs.
Carbon taxes are great if you view the economy as a series of interacting spherical cows, which is how economists are the macro level must envision it in order to get their models to work.
We, as entrepreneurs, can start to de-spherify the cows and see where the models fail, and reality must be substituted.
I'm against carbon taxes which I see it as your typical neoliberal designed to be easily foiled non-solution.
Really this isn't something where the 'free market' and 'magic hand' will magically fix things. Everything that needs to be done is clear as day.
Want to reduce emission from people driving? Implement work from home, not too far from home polices. Provide for buy backs for older fossil fueled cars and steep excise taxes on new ones. Soften the pain for working class people with down payment assistance and grants for electric cars, heat pumps, etc. Pass laws requiring utilities to sunset fossil fuel plants.
None of this is hard it's just willful stupidity and ideology in the way.
Problem is simply taxing CO2 punishes people for decisions they made years ago.
Going to punish some working guy making $20/hr because he bought a used Crown Victoria in 2010? Or offer to buy it back and give them a down payment grant to put them in a newer hybrid/electric?
Lot less blow back in the latter option. It's also what California is doing right now.
It's a fantasy that green energy is not going to punish people, including some working guy. It's already happening. See gas prices, natural gas prices.
With a CO2 tax, the revenue can be used to reduce the sales tax.
There's no way to reduce CO2 emissions without making it more expensive to emit CO2. The current green policy is to fire off a blunderbuss at random at the fossil fuel industry, like trying to choke off bank loans to it, and blocking permits for natural gas.
These silly things are both expensive and actually increase CO2 emissions by making it cheaper to burn filthy coal.
Most voters recognize that carbon taxes are universally a bad deal.
For the low-income people, they mean prices for energy and transportation go up for no directly realizable benefit. Sure, we can say "you'll get a rebate at the end of the year", but that doesn't help when that extra 50 bucks out of pocket means a choice between air conditioning and getting to work on time.
For the middle-income people, they mean industry leaves for countries that don't have carbon taxes. They realize that free trade and (an intentional?) failure to levy carbon taxes on goods produced out of the country mean that all the law does is make domestic manufacturing companies less competitive, and what's worse, the countries that have no environmental production use inefficient processes to produce goods thus increasing emissions beyond what they would have been otherwise.
A tax on imported goods made with dirty industrial processes would solve both of those problems, but doing that would also impact the income brackets currently making money hand over fist in the current regulatory climate- so it won't be done.
The reasoning for "we need to collectively drop our standard of living" needs to be seen to impact everyone for it to have a chance of being accepted as valid and right now it really, really isn't.
WSJ has never been balanced as a newsource when it comes to those topics that hit the readers' bottom line. That article is blaming Biden on the increase in demand from exiting the pandemic and also blaming him on the EPA doing its job and following the law. It's pretty weak sauce. It's acting like OPEC hasn't restricted oil production to staying at pandemic level's or Putin's war of genocide against the Ukrainians or the Russians basically exiting the European market. Lol it's as full of holes as the Swiss cheese on the ham sandwich I just had for lunch.
Yes, they essentially nuked Chevron deference through this decision, an extremely pro-voter and pro-transparency move.
Good.
Edit: I'm contextualizing this opinion through a legal lens, pointing to what it really does. From now on, Congress will have to pass laws (e.g. Do Their Jobs) to pass environmental legislation, instead of relying on the bureaucratic executive branch.
Also expressing that this is good, which is a personal opinion, but I think I'm providing value here.
There is no transparency here. The court elevated the extremely vague made up "major-questions doctrine" which essentially says that the court gets to decide if a regulatory agency's actions are "major" enough that congress has to act. It's the opposite of clarity. There's no principle besides whether the right-wing judge thinks something is major or not.
Something I don't understand about this interpretation: the decision concerns an interpretation of the Clean Air Act, a law passed by Congress. It's a 60 year old act, sure, but it's an act nonetheless (and one that empowers these kinds of statutory interpretations by the executive branch).
Where is the buck being passed, precisely? To me this reads more as a cynical prediction by SCOTUS (that Congress will continue to deadlock, effectively granting victory-by-default to conservative causes). And they probably won't be wrong in that prediction, if the last decade serves as evidence.
> I'm contextualizing this opinion through a legal lens, pointing to what it really does. From now on, Congress will have to pass laws (e.g. Do Their Jobs) to pass environmental legislation
No, it doesn't mean that. The Major Question doctrine only even comes into play on its own terms if (1) Congress has, in fact, passed a law, and (2) the matter addressed by the law is entirely withing Congress Constitutional power, and (3) an executive agency is acting entirely in accord with the law passed by Congress.
People need to not be jumping to conclusions based on the article title and actually look at the details of the case in question and the history of the case. You need to look at the reasoning used, not whether you personally like the ultimate decision or not.
Because this bill was stayed by Supreme Court, removed by Trump, and then replaced by a new interpretation put in place by the Trump EPA, this interpretation in question has basically never been in place in the some 12 years since it was passed.
> The case centers on language of Section 7411(d) of Title 42 of the United States Code[2] authorizing the EPA to regulate emissions from existing power plants, which when amended and signed into law in 1990 mistakenly included contradictory language from both the House and Senate's version of the bill that never was reconciled, leaving the interpretation to the EPA.
> The suit stems from a 2015 Obama administration EPA rule, the Clean Power Plan, based on a statutory interpretation of section § 7411(d) towards meeting the Paris Agreement in carbon dioxide emissions reductions. The Clean Power Plan was challenged by several states and coal industry companies, and stayed by order of the Supreme Court. With the Trump administration, the EPA repealed the Clean Power Plan in favor of the less-aggressive Affordable Clean Power rule in 2019 based on a different interpretation of § 7411(d), and the case against the Clean Power Plan rendered moot. Several other states and health and environmental groups challenged this new rule, and the District of Columbia Circuit Court ruled in January 2021 that the Affordable Clean Power rule was arbitrary and capricious and misinterpreted § 7411(d), vacating this new rule.
> Several of the states that first challenged the Clean Power Plan as well as coal industry-related companies challenged the D.C. Circuit's ruling on their analysis of the § 7411(d) and the EPA's authority granted by it, concerned that the Circuit's ruling would give the EPA far broader powers on emissions regulation. West Virginia v. EPA represents a consolidation of four petitions that the Supreme Court certified to review the D.C. Circuit's decision.
> The court issued its 6-3 opinion on June 30, 2022, ruling that regulation of power plant emissions on a national scale fell within the major questions doctrine, and within that, Congress did not grant the EPA authority to regulate emissions based on generation shifting mechanisms, which would have invalidated the Clean Power Plan. The EPA may still continue to regulate emissions through emissions reduction technologies.
And as for the meaning of that "major questions doctrine".
> The major questions doctrine is a rough analogue to the nondelegation doctrine, where the Supreme Court has held in recent years that in order for them to do so, Congress must have clearly authorized agencies to regulate issues of national significance.[14] When Congress fails to comply with this clear statement rule, the courts infer that Congress did not intend to empower the agency.
I'm not clear exactly how to interpret this personally.
This radical activist court is going to continue delivering major right-wing victories for the foreseeable future and there's absolutely nothing that can be done to stop them. Every right-wing dream will become reality. I'm having a hard time envisioning what this country will look like in say 10 years. The America as it was known in the 20th century certainly won't exist.
I think you should move to Canada. It's implemented liberal policies the US Democrats can only dream of, and it's northerly location will be advantageous as climate change progresses.
Typical vindictive gloating right wing response, basically "it's my country if you don't like it get out". In a way it's true since an aggressive right wing faction has captured the least democratic institution for a generation. Democracy is dead. But what happens when half the country can't affect change for decades no matter how large their electoral victories? A balance has been lost, it feels dangerous to me.
Huh? You don't seem to like the direction the US is headed, and you don't seem to think it's possible to do anything to stop it. Given those beliefs, it seems quite reasonable to abandon ship and move somewhere more friendly.
(Giving you the benefit of the doubt that you're being genuine, even with my apparently fried brain) That's certainly a possible future if the right tightens their grip on society too much, we could experience some brain drain as those with the ability to leave do so, but it would be a tiny minority of people. We saw some signs of that during Trump's tenure, mostly scientists and academics not wanting to study or go to conferences here.
The issue is not polarization. The issue is that pro-democravy groups did not polarized more radically against minority destroying both democracy and country itself.
It is not symmetrical. It is pure power grab by wing who is also trying to dismantle democratic system itself.
> The issue is not polarization. The issue is that pro-democravy groups did not polarized more radically against minority destroying both democracy and country itself.
IMHO, the issue is polarization. In large part, it's prevented the pro-democracy groups from prioritizing their issues to actually successfully defend democracy, and kept them trapped in the same old partisan modes. The result? Stuff like Democrats literally spending tons of money to support extremist election-denier Republicans, because they think they'll be easier to beat later (I suppose like Donald Trump was?).
> the issue is polarization. In large part, it's prevented the pro-democracy groups from prioritizing their issues to actually successfully defend democracy
The issue is that the left was taken over by monied interests who pitted social issues against class issues.
First past the past voting meant voting for the wolf in sheepskin or the leapord
Centrism prevented pro-democracy rallying. Because it insisted making anti-democracy movements being talked about in euphemisms, because it believed in giving anti-democracy side more and more.
> Centrism prevented pro-democracy rallying. Because it insisted making anti-democracy movements being talked about in euphemisms, because it believed in giving anti-democracy side more and more.
Do you mean "centrism" or "bipartisan-ism," because they're different and it's mainly the latter that would have the problem you seem to be describing.
Whatever we have now is basically the partisan equivalent of hoping you can have your cake and eat it too.
Yep, the cleanest country on the planet, where the biggest share of the GDP is flipping the real estate to the Chinese capital, proudly made with no environmental roadblocks in sight. Your kids will never afford a house, but the liberal policies and guilt-tripping in schools will make sure they won't want it in the first place.
> and there's absolutely nothing that can be done to stop them
Congress could pass laws saying that the EPA can regulate greenhouse gas emissions, that states cannot forbid abortions, etc.
If you think that these rulings are not plausible interpretations of the law, Congress can even define the size of the court[0]. They could pack the court with judges who will interpret the law in their favor.
It is my understanding that the Democratic Party that holds the majority in both chambers claims to be in favor of these policies, so why aren't they taking action?
See my answer above. It comes down to the filibuster. That's a procedural rule making it so that the Democrats do not, in fact, currently have control. They have to find 10 Republicans to "come across the aisle" in order to get legislation on the floor for a vote. Getting those Senators to come across the aisle is known as politicking. That's just the way the system works.
Democrats do have the power to change those procedural rules, but there's huge downsides in doing so.
Bottom line - don't look for easy solutions to complex political problems. They're likely to be loaded with unintended consequences.
Senate rules. Having a simple majority in the Senate doesn't mean you can ram-rod through your agenda. You need 60 votes for legislation to reach the floor for and up and down vote. The Democrats theoretically have 51 (including Kamala!), and a couple of them haven't been too reliable. So no, the Democrats can't do "anything they want."
They could end the filibuster - but that would likely backfire. End the filibuster now right before Summer recess and the Fall election cycle where not much gets done? Probably not a wise move, especially if the Republicans regain control of the senate and now you've just handed them the reigns of unbridled power. Probably not a good move. That's why the filibuster stays.
Our problem really isn't so much that our Congress is deadlocked. Heck, I argue that deadlock is actually a preferable state. Otherwise these bozos would be sowing chaos on a daily basis. The game that's changed is using procedural rules to steal supreme court justice nominations from one president and giving them to another. Trump seized that opportunity and to maximize his legacy and influence chose the youngest and most controversial judges he could get through the nominations.
I know many liberals who refused to vote for Hillary Clinton in 2016. I tried to explain to them, to no avail, what would happen with regards to the Supreme Court should Trump win. I was pooh-poohed. Repeatedly told I was over-sensationalizing things. I've since received apologies from many of them but who cares? The damage has been done and will continue for much of the remainder of our lives.
There is a way out of this mess, but right now America is too polarized for that solution to be viable. Supreme Court justices can be impeached and removed from the bench - it's even been done before. But you need 2/3 of the Senate onboard to do it. I don't realistically see that happening any time for the next 20 years, if ever, and by then the damage wrought will be so severe that I'm afraid America will be unrecognizable.
Bottom line - America was already in decline. This Supreme Court is just going to accelerate that decline. If anything they might jolt Democrats out of their complacency and turning their noses up at any candidate they don't think is absolutely perfect. Who knows? Maybe something good will come out of this after all.
Well only if Congress and voters won't do anything. Y'all have to forget about the Supreme Court, they're a lost cause now. Go vote or watch half the country turn into the next Sahara desert in the West. It's in our hands now, SCOTUS is a useless vestigial government branch now as far as getting anything done.
> a decision of such magnitude and consequence rests with Congress itself, or an agency acting pursuant to a clear delegation from that representative body.
Honestly it's hard to see how that position is unreasonable. If Congress wants the EPA to have this power, let them vote to give it. If Congress does not want the EPA to have this power, then the EPA shouldn't attempt to exercise power they don't have. There's really no other solution if we're going to have a representative government.
Congress did vote for EPA to have this power. The Supreme Court decided that they didn't like where that power led, and is now restricting the types of laws that Congress can make.
How do you know what Congress was thinking? You can't read the mind of Congress.
Also, the Supreme Court has always restricted the types of laws that Congress can pass, based on what the Constitution says. However this doesn't involve Constitutionality. Congress can absolutely pass a law giving this exact power to the EPA and the Supreme Court couldn't touch it.
I don't understand why your question could possibly be answered by anything but a yes.
Can you provide any evidence that regulating clean air does not apply to air pollutants?
If a person thinks that CO2 is not air pollution, then the onus is on them to show that it's not. Repealing an entire class of laws in order to stop undesired scientific conclusions is not a good way to set legal precedent.
> The plan will require individual states to meet specific standards with respect to reduction of carbon dioxide emissions.[22] States are free to reduce emissions by various means, and must submit emissions reductions plans by September 2016, or, with an extension approval, by September 2018.[23] If a state has not submitted a plan by then, the EPA will impose its own plan on that state.[23]
It's not commandeering the electricity sector, it's regulating air pollution. This is not carte Blanche, it was laid out in great detail through the executive authority and extensively documented to be within the authority of the EPA.
However, some politicians didn't like this outcome. They didn't have the votes, so they are legislating from the bench.
There's no other way to view this. What you call "commandeering" is exactly the same as all the other regulations, like sulphuric oxide for acid rain. It's just that some people have politics that takes precedence over the possible scientific outcomes.
The Clean Air Act embodies a very specific mechanism. It gives the EPA the power to set emissions limits, but provides that those limits must be based on the capabilities of emissions reduction systems, mainly scrubbers of various sorts. And there’s different levels for new versus preexisting sources. So for a new source, the, EPA can set the limit at a level that can only be achieved with BACT (best available control technology). For an existing source, it can only set the limit at a level achievable by lesser control technology.
The thing about CO2 is that there is no control technology you can install on a plant to scrub out the CO2. That would ordinarily preclude the EPA from setting an emissions limit—because it can only set those limits based on what control technologies can achieve.
So what the EPA did was say that states could meet the emissions targets by switching from coal to renewable sources, and justified setting an emissions limit on the theory that this was an “emissions reduction system” under the statute.
The Clean Air Act doesn’t give the EPA blanket authority to “regulate clean air.” Congress can’t permissibly delegate an entire sector over to an administrative agency under the Constitution, and didn’t. The statute gives the EPA specific approaches that it’s allowed to use.
The EPA was following the statute when it made its carbon ruling. Past actions of the EPA have been similar, though you phrase it as "delegate an entire sector over to an administrative agency," it's exactly what's been done in the past.
The only difference this time is that it's CO2 as the pollutant, and fossil fuel interests are extremely politically powerful, and don't like the science that shows that CO2 is a pollutant. That's it. Remember when the ruling happened, and all sorts of people were like "CO2 can't be a pollutant"? This is the outcome of that thought.
If EPA did not have this authority, by law, then this would have been challenged on much easier grounds far before. In order for the EPA's actions to be overturned, the court had to overturn the very law itself.
This ruling has nothing to do with whether CO2 is a “pollutant.”
Congress cannot delegate a sector to an agency, because agencies are executive branch entities and the executive branch can’t make laws. Executive branch agencies operate under the fiction that they are merely enforcing laws Congress has created. That’s why Congress can’t delegate agencies the power to make rules with the force of law in an entire sector. It has to be more specific, so that the agency is simply “filling in the details.”
And the Clean Air Act is specific. It allows the EPA to fill in the details about pollutants and emissions levels. But it doesn’t give the EPA blanket authority to do whatever is necessary to achieve those targets. It has a detailed menu of measures, such as requiring particular types of emissions control technology on individual plants.
In this case the EPA told the entire energy sector to switch away from coal to renewables. That wasn’t on the list of measures available under the Clean Air Act.
> That wasn’t on the list of measures available under the Clean Air Act.
There's a whole bunch of wrong rolled up here. The regulations were about how to stop CO2 from polluting the atmosphere. From there, you try to play Senator CS to shift this into some sort of weird "delegating an industry" language.
But in the end it was all about regulating CO2.
If the EPA had acted outside its authority, in what you term "delegating an industry," lower courts would have said that.
Instead, in order to stop the EPA's actions, the Supreme Court had to change the scope of the law that was passed.
> There's a whole bunch of wrong rolled up here. The regulations were about how to stop CO2 from polluting the atmosphere. From there, you try to play Senator CS to shift this into some sort of weird "delegating an industry" language.
> But in the end it was all about regulating CO2.
The regulations were about how to stop things OTHER than CO2 from polluting the atmosphere without destroying the US economy. Things like Sulfur Dioxide and fly ash.
CO2 may fall under the language as written, and it may be appropriate for the EPA to regulate it, but that was not the central example of an airborne pollutant back in the 70s when this was written (Or 90s, when it was amended).
> If Congress wants the EPA to have this power, let them vote to give it
That is precisely what they did. It was called the Clean Air Act, and Congress passed it in 1963.
SCOTUS's reasoning here is hinky, to use an official legal term: it's clear that Congress has empowered the EPA here, but that SCOTUS finds it easier to claim that they never truly did rather than that they oughtn't to have.
> In 1896, a seminal paper by Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius first predicted that changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels could substantially alter the surface temperature through the greenhouse effect. In 1938, Guy Callendar connected carbon dioxide increases in Earth's atmosphere to global warming.
Rather than "completely" maybe it would have been more correct to say "widely". The idea of global warming basically started in the late 60s with a very few scientists talking about it.
Rediscovering old previously discredited scientific papers from the late 19th and early 20th century doesn't make it date all the way back to then.
This simply misses the point. Very few laws are restricted to the best science of their day: nearly all allow for administrative interpretation so that the US Government can apply the law without having to relitigate its essential qualities.
The CAA empowers the EPA to identify pollutants, and that's what the EPA has (correctly!) done. Whether or not the scientific consensus from the 1960s agrees is immaterial.
> This simply misses the point. Very few laws are restricted to the best science of their day: nearly all allow for administrative interpretation so that the US Government can apply the law without having to relitigate its essential qualities.
Precisely, if it was the case then arms of the second amendment wouldn’t apply to modern day firearms.
Maybe, or one could argue that the second amendment applies to the most modern and capable arms of the day e.g. the musket of the time = an assault rifle today
Don’t want to talk guns, but want to illustrate the challenges of making such claims
Why would the Second Amendment be interpreted in that way and the CAA not be allowed similar breadth in interpreting what is a pollutant? The latter is actually explicit in this regard; the former has been constructed through judicial interpretation.
No one was talking about CO2 in 1963 other than a few scientists. It didn't reach critical mass until the late 80s. The law was written for known pollutants at the time. Congress is just going to have to add to the powers of the EPA, it's as simple as that.
Did the text of the Clean Air Act explicitly say it applies only to pollutants known in 1963?
If laws can’t be interpreted to account for new circumstances, then it must be legal to pay to have someone killed as long as you use Bitcoin — after all the law didn’t specifically ban the use of Bitcoin.
Our understanding of the greenhouse effect dates back to the 19th century.
Section 202(a)(1) is pretty explicit that the law does not limit the pollutants under the low to those known to the legislative body[1]:
> The Administrator shall by regulation prescribe (and from time to time revise) in accordance with the provisions of this section, standards applicable to the emission of any air pollutant from any class or classes of new motor vehicles or new motor vehicle engines, which in his judgment cause, or contribute to, air pollution which may reasonably be anticipated to endanger public health or welfare.
Edit: In other words: even if we could show that Congress was unaware of CO2's effect on the environment, it simply doesn't matter. The Act empowers the EPA to identify and address the pollutants.
I don’t think an originalist would take this view. To use hyperbole, I don’t think anyone intended the bill to empower the epa to shut down the energy industry.
This is sort of out of scope of originalism: it concerns an Act of Congress that delivers power to the Executive, not the contents of the minds of the Framers of the Constitution. The Framers perhaps didn’t expect a large Federal Government to begin with, but the cat is out of the bag on that one (and is not consistent with SCOTUS’s actual ruling here).
The bill is clearly not intended to “shut down” anything. It empowers the EPA to protect the quality of the air that we all breathe, and that’s how it was applied. If coal power plants need to externalize their pollution to be financially viable, that says more about our failures to preempt the situation than some kind of bloodthirsty plot on the EPA’s part.
Look I’m all for addressing climate change head on. But I guess at the end of the day I just see this as regulatory overreach. Can one squint and see the rationale, definitely. But my simplistic mind sees the original intent of the bill as a way to protect against substances that are physically poisonous/harmful (radon, arsenic, etc). It was not intended to regulate safe emissions (co2) (that creates harm by increasing severe weather events/changing climate). If were to make a hyperbolic argument, it seems you could stop cement making, cattle ranching, and limit population control based on the EPAs interpretation of CO2 as a pollutant.
* Congress's priorities are not my priorities, your priorities, or even particularly reasonable.
* Congress's ability to efficiently pass laws (at least ones that don't involve funding the military or lowering taxes) has consistently declined over the last 30 years. The last 15 years, in particular, have seen incredibly ugly political brinkmanship over basic legislative responsibilities. In other words: there may be abstract votes in favor of new EPA laws but they're difficult (impossible?) to materialize.
* Congress may feel it has no particular input to provide to the EPA's administrative interpretation of the law. This is the explanation that strikes me as most salient (even if all others happen to be correct): it's entirely possible that a majority of Congress sees no particular problem with the EPA's policies, and would much prefer to pass the buck and play political games around the EPA rather than actually changing legislation.
The dissenting justices argue that congress already voted to give EPA the mandate to address air pollution. The majority opinion is that “climate change” is a different issue than “air pollution”.
For my part, I think it’s a bit of a stretch to say that CO2 emissions aren’t covered by the clean air act. And since the decision clearly follows the conservative agenda, it’s hard to not see it as a politically-driven decision.
Firstly, I agree global warming is happening, and that it's caused by humans, and that we should be working to stop it.
However, CO2 emissions are not pollutants in the normal sense of the term. They do not directly harm human health by their existence in the environment.
> They do not directly harm human health by their existence in the environment.
This is "the donkey hung the man, not the executor yoking the donkey" logic. We have overwhelming evidence that CO2 emissions are a primary efficient cause for climate change, which we have overwhelming reason to believe will directly harm the lives and welfare of billions.
It doesn't matter that we won't die of CO2 asphyxiation itself, because neither the CAA nor common sense establishes that standard.
Of course not. But things that come out of tailpipes and smokestacks are frequently pollutants, and it staggers the mind to think of a sense in which CO2 does not meet even the "limited" sense of the word under the CAA (i.e., a sense strictly limited to motor vehicles.)
Unfortunately for the rest of the world climate change doesn't wait to see what a Congress hamstrung by one political party that denies its very existence is going to do. That change has no political reality of coming from that branch, neither now not in any reasonable future that's going to matter.
This decision simply told the EPA that it needs specific authorization to engage in a sweeping restructuring of the country’s power generation mix to address climate change, and can’t rely on its existing authority to tell coal plants to install particulate scrubbers.
This is a huge problem warranting an apoplectic reaction because everyone knows Congress won’t do that. In fact, voters are about to hand Congress back over to the GOP because they’re mad about paying $5/gallon for gas. The vast majority of Americans want to address climate change, but won’t pay even $10/month extra on their electric bill to do so: https://www.cato.org/blog/68-americans-wouldnt-pay-10-month-.... Having Congress vote to raise everyone’s energy costs is a total non-starter.
The unstated subtext to all this is that, to address climate change, we need to bypass democracy and impose sweeping changes through unelected bureaucrats and boring administrative proceedings nobody pays attention to. And it’s quite revealing who thinks that’s a good idea and who thinks it’s a bad idea.
You use “sweeping” twice to describe EPA’s rules, which makes them sound unreasonable and over-reaching.
Yet the only example you give is requiring coal plants to install particulate scrubbers, which… sounds perfectly reasonable coming from an agency tasked to reduce air pollution?
> You use “sweeping” twice to describe EPA’s rules, which makes them sound unreasonable and over-reaching.
This is what the alternative interpretation would allow.
> The plan will require individual states to meet specific standards with respect to reduction of carbon dioxide emissions.[22] States are free to reduce emissions by various means, and must submit emissions reductions plans by September 2016, or, with an extension approval, by September 2018.[23] If a state has not submitted a plan by then, the EPA will impose its own plan on that state.[23]
Sorry, the sentence is ambiguous. That’s exactly what the EPA can do. What I meant to say is the EPA can’t use its authority to tell coal plants to install particulate scrubbers, which it has, to go and tell the whole industry to stop using coal.
> The unstated subtext to all this is that, to address climate change, we need to bypass democracy and impose sweeping changes through unelected bureaucrats and boring administrative proceedings nobody pays attention to.
People pay attention to SCOTUS, but you've otherwise described them to a T. SCOTUS is not elected; the EPA, in contrast, is empowered through an Act of Congress. The people you've described as "unelected bureaucrats" are a mostly well-educated civil service, one you've presented no evidence against to warrant their malignment.
Unpopular opinion: any reasonable policies and restrictions are always compromises between the 2 polar opposite extremes. For example, killing all humans on Earth would completely stop climate change, but the price is unreasonably high. As the opposite extreme, reducing food waste hardly has any disadvantages, but is not sufficient on its own to stop the warming.
Compromises are found iteratively - moving the lever too far creates pressure on the opposing side, and the regulation changes back.
Globalization eliminated the feedback loop. Each time the West hardens environmental standards, a some "dirty" production just moves to less developed countries, along with the jobs, knowledge and culture for achieving things. That CO2 is still emitted overseas, but we conveniently turn a blind eye to it, arguing whether we should have shorter showers or ban plastic straws. Now it's biting us hard, since it turned out those countries have much less political stability, so as the shit finally hit the fan, we suddenly have a shortage of everything.
Maybe, just maybe, having the emissions managed on the state level will let different states explore different potential trade-offs between being green and being dysfunctional, and we can hopefully find a better compromise that takes a more complete picture into consideration.
Letting states choose how they hit their CO2 allotment is totally fine as long as there is a universal per capita CO2 goal for the whole country. If there is no cap then self serving states will simply emit as much as is maximally profitable
That's an interesting argument. My counter for globalization is that it leads to developed countries taking the lead in policy decisions for other countries around the world. One example is the US controlled substances act being copied nearly identically around the world. It's possible that if the US hadn't passed that law, most countries would have had legal pot throughout the 20th century.
I'm afraid that the supreme court stifling the ability of the US to legislate against carbon emissions is going to slow down the entire world who has been looking to the US as an example on what to do.
As noted in the above link, Congress from time to time amends the Act to update the list, which was last done in 1990. That's all it takes: an amendment to the Act, passed by Congress. They can and have done this before, and yes, even with "climate deniers" signing off on it. The sole reason it hasn't been amended since then is because of the increased practice of doing omnibus bills and each group adding unreasonable expenditures and pet projects to otherwise uncontroversial legislation. How that gets stopped I have no idea, since the only legislators I am aware of who oppose that sort of thing get lambasted by hyper partisan media and the voters who gobble up that propaganda.
It's a blow to the whole planet —we're all stuck here— but I've got to wonder how much more of these anti-federal decisions the Union can take.
It's not just bad that another state might harm the same environment you're trying your hardest to protect, they might start to outcompete methods of doing things cleaner, costing local jobs, green mindshare and votes.
A progressive succession seems more likely every day.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 203 ms ] threadYou buy the senators who choose the judges and the presidents who appoint them.
And no, no matter what anyone says, there is no structure in the US such that direct bribery of politicians is legal. Lobbying is not bribery.
Campaign contributions are effectively bribery if they are large enough.
And Citizens United allowed for a lot of dark money to be spread around...
In practice I'm not sure how anyone is going to make a dent without switching to nuclear power.
If you want to be really self-serving and hypocritical about this sort of thing, you can even skip out on doing the first part, and jump straight to the second.
If the US ignored it and does not take action, other countries are less likely to take action, because the U.S. is generally a leader on these things.
It's kind of like asking "If the US stops pooping in the pool, what's to stop another kid from pooping in the pool?" Well those other kids are a hell of a lot more likely to poop in the pool if they see an international leader doing it.
Also, by leading the way and showing how decerbonization is not only cheaper, but also healthier, other countries will be more likely to try to save money similarly.
Most places that are installing coal these days are doing it because of local corruption. It's a lot easier to grift off a huge project than it is off of small distributed energy. Seeing that the US is moving away from coal will mean that corrupt local officials will have less excuse to pick outdated technology that lets them get bribed.
This is a separate issue from federal action. We take all sorts of actions with vast political and economic action that don't save money, to reduce pollution.
But by leading the way, we will encourage other countries to not build coal plants, which was the "legitimate" question that was asked.
Higher standards in California mean companies default to that standard nation wide because it's easier to have a single product and avoid supply chain issues.
Same reason most all orange juice is Kosher. A small but large enough hard preference controls the market because the rest dont care enough.
Hopefully red states won't put an mpg cap out of spite
Also California has it's own specific blend of gasoline and that hasn't been adopted nationwide at all. It's only used in California.
Texas produces around five times as much wind energy as California, and for half the price of California's wind energy.
Unless you can identify a certain thing in California that caused Texas to increase it's wind power I think your argument is pretty vacuous.
I ran the numbers a few years ago to see what personal actions I could take. (Even though climate change is a collective action problem, not a personal action problem.) In the US, stopping buying so much stuff isn't much of a climate action, at least not nearly as much as switching off driving a gas car, changing your natural gas water heater to electric, ir changing a natural gas furnace to a heat pump.
The solution is to tax it.
The free market would do the rest to kill off the petroleum industry.
The answer is not targeting coal or ng. It's targeting the quantity of C emitted into the air. The very best way to do this is to tax the C in fuels that get burnt.
Then it is not necessary to have all sorts of regulations about what can be burned, etc. Just tax the C. The market will then sort it out.
The speed at which the market adapts to small price changes is not fast enough. Additionally, we need to take quick action in ways that have very different costs for different industries.
For example, steel and concrete have large process emissions, and are industries with extremely low margins, high capital costs, and long capital lifetimes. Decarbonization of these industries is unlikely to happen even with high carbon taxes of $200/ton, because not only is the successor tech not yet understood, there's no guarantee that an investment in a potential carbon-less concrete will have a market.
A much better approach is to guarantee the market, at any price, but let it be a competitive market for that carbon-free steel or carbon-free concrete. E.g. a small number of customers that band together and state that they will only buy carbon-free concrete for construction, that needs X million tons in the next 5 years. This will allow entrepeneurs to raise money, because they have a guaranteed market where they only compete with the new tech, rather than having to compete with the general market plus a price. Let those initial businesses get going, iterate, and drive down costs.
Carbon taxes are great if you view the economy as a series of interacting spherical cows, which is how economists are the macro level must envision it in order to get their models to work.
We, as entrepreneurs, can start to de-spherify the cows and see where the models fail, and reality must be substituted.
Really this isn't something where the 'free market' and 'magic hand' will magically fix things. Everything that needs to be done is clear as day.
Want to reduce emission from people driving? Implement work from home, not too far from home polices. Provide for buy backs for older fossil fueled cars and steep excise taxes on new ones. Soften the pain for working class people with down payment assistance and grants for electric cars, heat pumps, etc. Pass laws requiring utilities to sunset fossil fuel plants.
None of this is hard it's just willful stupidity and ideology in the way.
For example, taxing CO2 will immediately spur transitioning coal to natural gas, which emits half the CO2 per joule.
It will also make geothermal home heating systems much more attractive.
Going to punish some working guy making $20/hr because he bought a used Crown Victoria in 2010? Or offer to buy it back and give them a down payment grant to put them in a newer hybrid/electric?
Lot less blow back in the latter option. It's also what California is doing right now.
With a CO2 tax, the revenue can be used to reduce the sales tax.
These silly things are both expensive and actually increase CO2 emissions by making it cheaper to burn filthy coal.
For the low-income people, they mean prices for energy and transportation go up for no directly realizable benefit. Sure, we can say "you'll get a rebate at the end of the year", but that doesn't help when that extra 50 bucks out of pocket means a choice between air conditioning and getting to work on time.
For the middle-income people, they mean industry leaves for countries that don't have carbon taxes. They realize that free trade and (an intentional?) failure to levy carbon taxes on goods produced out of the country mean that all the law does is make domestic manufacturing companies less competitive, and what's worse, the countries that have no environmental production use inefficient processes to produce goods thus increasing emissions beyond what they would have been otherwise.
A tax on imported goods made with dirty industrial processes would solve both of those problems, but doing that would also impact the income brackets currently making money hand over fist in the current regulatory climate- so it won't be done.
The reasoning for "we need to collectively drop our standard of living" needs to be seen to impact everyone for it to have a chance of being accepted as valid and right now it really, really isn't.
Good.
Edit: I'm contextualizing this opinion through a legal lens, pointing to what it really does. From now on, Congress will have to pass laws (e.g. Do Their Jobs) to pass environmental legislation, instead of relying on the bureaucratic executive branch.
Also expressing that this is good, which is a personal opinion, but I think I'm providing value here.
Where is the buck being passed, precisely? To me this reads more as a cynical prediction by SCOTUS (that Congress will continue to deadlock, effectively granting victory-by-default to conservative causes). And they probably won't be wrong in that prediction, if the last decade serves as evidence.
No, it doesn't mean that. The Major Question doctrine only even comes into play on its own terms if (1) Congress has, in fact, passed a law, and (2) the matter addressed by the law is entirely withing Congress Constitutional power, and (3) an executive agency is acting entirely in accord with the law passed by Congress.
Because this bill was stayed by Supreme Court, removed by Trump, and then replaced by a new interpretation put in place by the Trump EPA, this interpretation in question has basically never been in place in the some 12 years since it was passed.
Wikipedia has a good summary of the events leading up to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Virginia_v._EPA
> The case centers on language of Section 7411(d) of Title 42 of the United States Code[2] authorizing the EPA to regulate emissions from existing power plants, which when amended and signed into law in 1990 mistakenly included contradictory language from both the House and Senate's version of the bill that never was reconciled, leaving the interpretation to the EPA.
> The suit stems from a 2015 Obama administration EPA rule, the Clean Power Plan, based on a statutory interpretation of section § 7411(d) towards meeting the Paris Agreement in carbon dioxide emissions reductions. The Clean Power Plan was challenged by several states and coal industry companies, and stayed by order of the Supreme Court. With the Trump administration, the EPA repealed the Clean Power Plan in favor of the less-aggressive Affordable Clean Power rule in 2019 based on a different interpretation of § 7411(d), and the case against the Clean Power Plan rendered moot. Several other states and health and environmental groups challenged this new rule, and the District of Columbia Circuit Court ruled in January 2021 that the Affordable Clean Power rule was arbitrary and capricious and misinterpreted § 7411(d), vacating this new rule.
> Several of the states that first challenged the Clean Power Plan as well as coal industry-related companies challenged the D.C. Circuit's ruling on their analysis of the § 7411(d) and the EPA's authority granted by it, concerned that the Circuit's ruling would give the EPA far broader powers on emissions regulation. West Virginia v. EPA represents a consolidation of four petitions that the Supreme Court certified to review the D.C. Circuit's decision.
> The court issued its 6-3 opinion on June 30, 2022, ruling that regulation of power plant emissions on a national scale fell within the major questions doctrine, and within that, Congress did not grant the EPA authority to regulate emissions based on generation shifting mechanisms, which would have invalidated the Clean Power Plan. The EPA may still continue to regulate emissions through emissions reduction technologies.
And as for the meaning of that "major questions doctrine".
> The major questions doctrine is a rough analogue to the nondelegation doctrine, where the Supreme Court has held in recent years that in order for them to do so, Congress must have clearly authorized agencies to regulate issues of national significance.[14] When Congress fails to comply with this clear statement rule, the courts infer that Congress did not intend to empower the agency.
I'm not clear exactly how to interpret this personally.
Polarization has really fried peoples' brains.
It is not symmetrical. It is pure power grab by wing who is also trying to dismantle democratic system itself.
IMHO, the issue is polarization. In large part, it's prevented the pro-democracy groups from prioritizing their issues to actually successfully defend democracy, and kept them trapped in the same old partisan modes. The result? Stuff like Democrats literally spending tons of money to support extremist election-denier Republicans, because they think they'll be easier to beat later (I suppose like Donald Trump was?).
The issue is that the left was taken over by monied interests who pitted social issues against class issues.
First past the past voting meant voting for the wolf in sheepskin or the leapord
Do you mean "centrism" or "bipartisan-ism," because they're different and it's mainly the latter that would have the problem you seem to be describing.
Whatever we have now is basically the partisan equivalent of hoping you can have your cake and eat it too.
Congress could pass laws saying that the EPA can regulate greenhouse gas emissions, that states cannot forbid abortions, etc.
If you think that these rulings are not plausible interpretations of the law, Congress can even define the size of the court[0]. They could pack the court with judges who will interpret the law in their favor.
It is my understanding that the Democratic Party that holds the majority in both chambers claims to be in favor of these policies, so why aren't they taking action?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judiciary_Act_of_1869
CA senator represents ~10000000
WY senator represents ~200000
So the question remains - why don't they just do what the court has said they should, and pass a law?
Democrats do have the power to change those procedural rules, but there's huge downsides in doing so.
Bottom line - don't look for easy solutions to complex political problems. They're likely to be loaded with unintended consequences.
They could end the filibuster - but that would likely backfire. End the filibuster now right before Summer recess and the Fall election cycle where not much gets done? Probably not a wise move, especially if the Republicans regain control of the senate and now you've just handed them the reigns of unbridled power. Probably not a good move. That's why the filibuster stays.
Our problem really isn't so much that our Congress is deadlocked. Heck, I argue that deadlock is actually a preferable state. Otherwise these bozos would be sowing chaos on a daily basis. The game that's changed is using procedural rules to steal supreme court justice nominations from one president and giving them to another. Trump seized that opportunity and to maximize his legacy and influence chose the youngest and most controversial judges he could get through the nominations.
I know many liberals who refused to vote for Hillary Clinton in 2016. I tried to explain to them, to no avail, what would happen with regards to the Supreme Court should Trump win. I was pooh-poohed. Repeatedly told I was over-sensationalizing things. I've since received apologies from many of them but who cares? The damage has been done and will continue for much of the remainder of our lives.
There is a way out of this mess, but right now America is too polarized for that solution to be viable. Supreme Court justices can be impeached and removed from the bench - it's even been done before. But you need 2/3 of the Senate onboard to do it. I don't realistically see that happening any time for the next 20 years, if ever, and by then the damage wrought will be so severe that I'm afraid America will be unrecognizable.
Bottom line - America was already in decline. This Supreme Court is just going to accelerate that decline. If anything they might jolt Democrats out of their complacency and turning their noses up at any candidate they don't think is absolutely perfect. Who knows? Maybe something good will come out of this after all.
> a decision of such magnitude and consequence rests with Congress itself, or an agency acting pursuant to a clear delegation from that representative body.
Honestly it's hard to see how that position is unreasonable. If Congress wants the EPA to have this power, let them vote to give it. If Congress does not want the EPA to have this power, then the EPA shouldn't attempt to exercise power they don't have. There's really no other solution if we're going to have a representative government.
Also, the Supreme Court has always restricted the types of laws that Congress can pass, based on what the Constitution says. However this doesn't involve Constitutionality. Congress can absolutely pass a law giving this exact power to the EPA and the Supreme Court couldn't touch it.
I think if you asked any of the folks in 1970 whether that was the intent of the Clean Air Act they’d be surprised.
Can you provide any evidence that regulating clean air does not apply to air pollutants?
If a person thinks that CO2 is not air pollution, then the onus is on them to show that it's not. Repealing an entire class of laws in order to stop undesired scientific conclusions is not a good way to set legal precedent.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_Power_Plan
> The plan will require individual states to meet specific standards with respect to reduction of carbon dioxide emissions.[22] States are free to reduce emissions by various means, and must submit emissions reductions plans by September 2016, or, with an extension approval, by September 2018.[23] If a state has not submitted a plan by then, the EPA will impose its own plan on that state.[23]
However, some politicians didn't like this outcome. They didn't have the votes, so they are legislating from the bench.
There's no other way to view this. What you call "commandeering" is exactly the same as all the other regulations, like sulphuric oxide for acid rain. It's just that some people have politics that takes precedence over the possible scientific outcomes.
The thing about CO2 is that there is no control technology you can install on a plant to scrub out the CO2. That would ordinarily preclude the EPA from setting an emissions limit—because it can only set those limits based on what control technologies can achieve.
So what the EPA did was say that states could meet the emissions targets by switching from coal to renewable sources, and justified setting an emissions limit on the theory that this was an “emissions reduction system” under the statute.
The only difference this time is that it's CO2 as the pollutant, and fossil fuel interests are extremely politically powerful, and don't like the science that shows that CO2 is a pollutant. That's it. Remember when the ruling happened, and all sorts of people were like "CO2 can't be a pollutant"? This is the outcome of that thought.
If EPA did not have this authority, by law, then this would have been challenged on much easier grounds far before. In order for the EPA's actions to be overturned, the court had to overturn the very law itself.
Congress cannot delegate a sector to an agency, because agencies are executive branch entities and the executive branch can’t make laws. Executive branch agencies operate under the fiction that they are merely enforcing laws Congress has created. That’s why Congress can’t delegate agencies the power to make rules with the force of law in an entire sector. It has to be more specific, so that the agency is simply “filling in the details.”
And the Clean Air Act is specific. It allows the EPA to fill in the details about pollutants and emissions levels. But it doesn’t give the EPA blanket authority to do whatever is necessary to achieve those targets. It has a detailed menu of measures, such as requiring particular types of emissions control technology on individual plants.
In this case the EPA told the entire energy sector to switch away from coal to renewables. That wasn’t on the list of measures available under the Clean Air Act.
There's a whole bunch of wrong rolled up here. The regulations were about how to stop CO2 from polluting the atmosphere. From there, you try to play Senator CS to shift this into some sort of weird "delegating an industry" language.
But in the end it was all about regulating CO2.
If the EPA had acted outside its authority, in what you term "delegating an industry," lower courts would have said that.
Instead, in order to stop the EPA's actions, the Supreme Court had to change the scope of the law that was passed.
> But in the end it was all about regulating CO2.
The regulations were about how to stop things OTHER than CO2 from polluting the atmosphere without destroying the US economy. Things like Sulfur Dioxide and fly ash.
CO2 may fall under the language as written, and it may be appropriate for the EPA to regulate it, but that was not the central example of an airborne pollutant back in the 70s when this was written (Or 90s, when it was amended).
That is precisely what they did. It was called the Clean Air Act, and Congress passed it in 1963.
SCOTUS's reasoning here is hinky, to use an official legal term: it's clear that Congress has empowered the EPA here, but that SCOTUS finds it easier to claim that they never truly did rather than that they oughtn't to have.
Given that the danger of CO2 was completely unknown in 1963 and green energy technologies almost didn't exist. I'm not sure how you can claim that.
This is a bizarre claim!
From https://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/
> In 1896, a seminal paper by Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius first predicted that changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels could substantially alter the surface temperature through the greenhouse effect. In 1938, Guy Callendar connected carbon dioxide increases in Earth's atmosphere to global warming.
Also read: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_climate_change_sc...
Rediscovering old previously discredited scientific papers from the late 19th and early 20th century doesn't make it date all the way back to then.
The CAA empowers the EPA to identify pollutants, and that's what the EPA has (correctly!) done. Whether or not the scientific consensus from the 1960s agrees is immaterial.
Don’t want to talk guns, but want to illustrate the challenges of making such claims
If laws can’t be interpreted to account for new circumstances, then it must be legal to pay to have someone killed as long as you use Bitcoin — after all the law didn’t specifically ban the use of Bitcoin.
Section 202(a)(1) is pretty explicit that the law does not limit the pollutants under the low to those known to the legislative body[1]:
> The Administrator shall by regulation prescribe (and from time to time revise) in accordance with the provisions of this section, standards applicable to the emission of any air pollutant from any class or classes of new motor vehicles or new motor vehicle engines, which in his judgment cause, or contribute to, air pollution which may reasonably be anticipated to endanger public health or welfare.
Edit: In other words: even if we could show that Congress was unaware of CO2's effect on the environment, it simply doesn't matter. The Act empowers the EPA to identify and address the pollutants.
[1]: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/42/7521
The bill is clearly not intended to “shut down” anything. It empowers the EPA to protect the quality of the air that we all breathe, and that’s how it was applied. If coal power plants need to externalize their pollution to be financially viable, that says more about our failures to preempt the situation than some kind of bloodthirsty plot on the EPA’s part.
Clearly Congress itself thought there was a law needed - that the EPA didn't have the authority to do what it went on to try and do.
Since Congress only considered the law and didn't actually pass it, I would say that they did not think there was a law needed.
* Congress's priorities are not my priorities, your priorities, or even particularly reasonable.
* Congress's ability to efficiently pass laws (at least ones that don't involve funding the military or lowering taxes) has consistently declined over the last 30 years. The last 15 years, in particular, have seen incredibly ugly political brinkmanship over basic legislative responsibilities. In other words: there may be abstract votes in favor of new EPA laws but they're difficult (impossible?) to materialize.
* Congress may feel it has no particular input to provide to the EPA's administrative interpretation of the law. This is the explanation that strikes me as most salient (even if all others happen to be correct): it's entirely possible that a majority of Congress sees no particular problem with the EPA's policies, and would much prefer to pass the buck and play political games around the EPA rather than actually changing legislation.
For my part, I think it’s a bit of a stretch to say that CO2 emissions aren’t covered by the clean air act. And since the decision clearly follows the conservative agenda, it’s hard to not see it as a politically-driven decision.
However, CO2 emissions are not pollutants in the normal sense of the term. They do not directly harm human health by their existence in the environment.
This is "the donkey hung the man, not the executor yoking the donkey" logic. We have overwhelming evidence that CO2 emissions are a primary efficient cause for climate change, which we have overwhelming reason to believe will directly harm the lives and welfare of billions.
It doesn't matter that we won't die of CO2 asphyxiation itself, because neither the CAA nor common sense establishes that standard.
Not everything that leads to harm is pollution.
Of course not. But things that come out of tailpipes and smokestacks are frequently pollutants, and it staggers the mind to think of a sense in which CO2 does not meet even the "limited" sense of the word under the CAA (i.e., a sense strictly limited to motor vehicles.)
This is like saying we shouldn't ban an industrial chemical that is destroying US wheat production but does not directly impact human health.
This is a huge problem warranting an apoplectic reaction because everyone knows Congress won’t do that. In fact, voters are about to hand Congress back over to the GOP because they’re mad about paying $5/gallon for gas. The vast majority of Americans want to address climate change, but won’t pay even $10/month extra on their electric bill to do so: https://www.cato.org/blog/68-americans-wouldnt-pay-10-month-.... Having Congress vote to raise everyone’s energy costs is a total non-starter.
The unstated subtext to all this is that, to address climate change, we need to bypass democracy and impose sweeping changes through unelected bureaucrats and boring administrative proceedings nobody pays attention to. And it’s quite revealing who thinks that’s a good idea and who thinks it’s a bad idea.
Yet the only example you give is requiring coal plants to install particulate scrubbers, which… sounds perfectly reasonable coming from an agency tasked to reduce air pollution?
This is what the alternative interpretation would allow.
> The plan will require individual states to meet specific standards with respect to reduction of carbon dioxide emissions.[22] States are free to reduce emissions by various means, and must submit emissions reductions plans by September 2016, or, with an extension approval, by September 2018.[23] If a state has not submitted a plan by then, the EPA will impose its own plan on that state.[23]
People pay attention to SCOTUS, but you've otherwise described them to a T. SCOTUS is not elected; the EPA, in contrast, is empowered through an Act of Congress. The people you've described as "unelected bureaucrats" are a mostly well-educated civil service, one you've presented no evidence against to warrant their malignment.
Compromises are found iteratively - moving the lever too far creates pressure on the opposing side, and the regulation changes back.
Globalization eliminated the feedback loop. Each time the West hardens environmental standards, a some "dirty" production just moves to less developed countries, along with the jobs, knowledge and culture for achieving things. That CO2 is still emitted overseas, but we conveniently turn a blind eye to it, arguing whether we should have shorter showers or ban plastic straws. Now it's biting us hard, since it turned out those countries have much less political stability, so as the shit finally hit the fan, we suddenly have a shortage of everything.
Maybe, just maybe, having the emissions managed on the state level will let different states explore different potential trade-offs between being green and being dysfunctional, and we can hopefully find a better compromise that takes a more complete picture into consideration.
King Solomon, is that you[1]?
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judgement_of_Solomon
I'm afraid that the supreme court stifling the ability of the US to legislate against carbon emissions is going to slow down the entire world who has been looking to the US as an example on what to do.
As noted in the above link, Congress from time to time amends the Act to update the list, which was last done in 1990. That's all it takes: an amendment to the Act, passed by Congress. They can and have done this before, and yes, even with "climate deniers" signing off on it. The sole reason it hasn't been amended since then is because of the increased practice of doing omnibus bills and each group adding unreasonable expenditures and pet projects to otherwise uncontroversial legislation. How that gets stopped I have no idea, since the only legislators I am aware of who oppose that sort of thing get lambasted by hyper partisan media and the voters who gobble up that propaganda.
It's not just bad that another state might harm the same environment you're trying your hardest to protect, they might start to outcompete methods of doing things cleaner, costing local jobs, green mindshare and votes.
A progressive succession seems more likely every day.