Pirate's Cove

I wonder if the peasant level Warmists realize that they’re supporting Government and the Elites controlling their lives, for which the peasants will have no say. By the time they realize this it will already be too late

Opinion: The Supreme Court dealt a huge blow to our ability to fight climate change

The Supreme Court’s decision on Friday to discard the 40-year-old precedent established by Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council is a truly harsh blow against environmental protection and climate justice.

By overruling the Chevron doctrine that required courts to defer to federal agencies when it came to implementing broadly written laws, the Supreme Court will make it much more difficult for the federal government to regulate pollution — including, but by no means limited to greenhouse gas emissions — among many other issues related to health, labor, consumer welfare, taxation, and on and on.

I am profoundly upset at the damage that this decision will almost certainly inflict on our environment and the fight against climate change. But more philosophically, this decision is also upsetting because it represents a demotion of science and expertise in government.

In the federal government, agencies are where detailed knowledge about specific, complex issues reside; in a healthy society, they would have some authority to manage those issues. In other words, the agencies are the ones that know stuff, and if government is to be effective, they should be able to do stuff.

In our Constitutional Republic, the duly elected Legislative Branch passes laws that are specific and within Constitutional boundaries. The Executive Branch carries those laws out, and doesn’t go looking for minuscule phrases to expand their power. The Executive cannot simply make up their own power. They cannot take it. What’s been happening doesn’t just smack of authoritarianism, it is.

Politicians by themselves lack the expertise to deal with the rapid-fire onslaught of new problems we face in our technologically advanced society. Think of artificial intelligence, as a particularly hot example. Congress does not have the expertise, capacity or flexibility to write laws that can anticipate all the wrinkles that will come up.

Except, they can seek the opinions of experts in crafting laws. And, if you look at the Constitution, none of it matters: elected federal Congress members have the power. That’s it. Period.

Not only has the Supreme Court just hamstrung the experts in our federal agencies, but also the reality of our dysfunctional Congress means that it’s nearly impossible to pass any meaningful legislation. The Republican Party has opposed almost all environmental legislation since 1990. The ruling against Chevron will not be followed by new environmental laws meeting a higher standard of specificity, but by none at all. Instead, countless existing agency rules will be challenged in the courts — whose judges are no more democratically elected than agency staff members are, where technical expertise is no more present than in Congress and where many rules will eventually likely be shot down by the same justices who made this ruling.

Again, it doesn’t matter. But, Warmists want the Executive Branch to be dictators. They should remember that Democrats aren’t always in power.

The probable outcome will simply be much less regulation. Yet regulation is how government balances the interest of the public to be free of pollution against that of corporations that would benefit from greater freedom to pollute. It is the primary defense we have to protect public health, the environment, and other public goods.

It’s regulation for power’s sake. Power that they were not specifically granted. They do not care. If you won’t comply you will be forced to comply.