350 Humboldt wants to make sure you know what the Supreme Court just did to our quest to keep global warming to a 1.5°C increase. (See the Guardian article below on the court decision.) The US has contributed 20% of all greenhouse gas emissions and is still the second largest emitter (China is larger). We are also the second largest emitter per capita (next to Australia; China emits half of what we do per capita). The rogue Supreme Court has just made it almost impossible for us to meet our climate obligations and goals. (To say nothing of eliminating the constitutional right for women to control their own bodies.) The only way for us to overcome this ruling and the resistance of Republicans and fossil-based corporations who support them, is by mobilizing voters.
Join 350 members as we send postcards and letters to voters on Sunday evenings at 7pm on Zoom: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86943045708?pwd=clVqWVJZNEFQSVl0QWd6VCtOZGtWZz09
Here are two groups mobilizing in the wake of this ruling. The Environmental Voter Project has lots of phone opportunities: https://www.environmentalvoter.org/get-involved
NRDC is another group that just issued a call to action.
“With your support, the NRDC Action Fund is launching our most aggressive midterm election plan yet to:
- Defend the seats of climate champions in Congress who stood up to the fossil fuel industry and supported action on climate change and clean energy. Sign up to volunteer >>
- Mobilize volunteers and reach more pro-environment voters in swing states and districts using data-driven strategies via texts, calls, social media, and even postcards to energize voters and get them to show up at the polls. Sign up to volunteer >>
- Push Congress to stand up to the fossil fuel industry and pass clean energy legislation that will slash climate-warming pollution, create high-quality clean energy jobs, and reduce our dependence on fossil fuels. Sign up to volunteer >>
And don’t forget to RSVP to join our video town hall on West Virginia v. EPA on Wednesday, July 6.“
We hope you will increase your efforts as we are at a critical point right now. What was so hopeful when Biden was elected on a climate platform has turned to ashes. Our only option is to do more.
350 Humboldt Steering Committee
Below is a Guardian article on what the no-longer supreme court did today.
COURT SIDES WITH REPUBLICAN STATES AS RULING REPRESENTS LANDMARK MOMENT IN RIGHTWING EFFORT TO DISMANTLE ‘REGULATORY STATE’
The US supreme court has sided with Republican-led states to in effect hobble the federal government’s ability to tackle the climate crisis, in a ruling that will have profound implications for the government’s overall regulatory power.
In a 6-3 decision that will seriously hinder America’s ability to stave off disastrous global heating, the supreme court, which became dominated by rightwing justices under the Trump administration, has opted to support a case brought by West Virginia that demands the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) be limited in how it regulates planet-heating gases from the energy sector.
The case, which was backed by a host of other Republican-led states including Texas and Kentucky, was highly unusual in that it was based upon the Clean Power Plan, an Obama-era strategy to cut emissions from coal-fired power plants that never came into effect. The Biden administration sought to have the case dismissed as baseless given the plan was dropped and has not been resurrected.
Not only was this case about a regulation that does not exist, that never took effect, and which would have imposed obligations on the energy sector that it would have met regardless. It also involves two legal doctrines that are not mentioned in the constitution, and that most scholars agree have no basis in any federal statute.
However, the supreme court has sided with West Virginia, a major coal mining state, which argued that “unelected bureaucrats” at the EPA should not be allowed to reshape its economy by limiting pollution – even though emissions from coal are helping cause worsening flooding, heatwaves and droughts around the world, as well as killing millions of people through toxic air.
“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’,” wrote Chief Justice John Roberts in the opinion. “But it is not plausible that Congress gave EPA the authority to adopt on its own such a regulatory scheme in Section 111(d). A decision of such magnitude and consequence rests with Congress itself, or an agency acting pursuant to a clear delegation from that representative body.”
Roberts was joined by the conservative justices Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett. The three liberal justices, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Stephen Breyer dissented. It is the most important climate change case to come before the supreme court in more than a decade.
But the ruling could also have sweeping consequences for the federal government’s ability to set standards and regulate in other areas, such as clean air and water, consumer protections, banking, workplace safety and public health. It may prove a landmark moment in conservative ambitions to dismantle the “regulatory state”, stripping away protections from Americans across a wide range of areas.
It could fundamentally change what the federal government is and what it does. And, as justice Elena Kagan pointed out in her dissent, it could leave technical decisions to a political body that may not understand them.
“First, members of Congress often don’t know enough – and know they don’t know enough – to regulate sensibly on an issue. Of course, members can and do provide overall direction. But then they rely, as all of us rely in our daily lives, on people with greater expertise and experience. Those people are found in agencies,” she wrote.
Several conservatives on the court have criticized what they see as the unchecked power of federal agencies, concerns evident in orders throwing out two Biden policies aimed at reducing the spread of Covid-19.
Last summer, the six-to-three conservative majority ended a pandemic-related pause on evictions over unpaid rent. In January, the same six justices blocked a requirement that workers at large employers be vaccinated or test regularly for the coronavirus and wear a mask on the job.
The Biden administration was supported in the EPA court case by New York and more than a dozen other Democratic-led states, along with prominent businesses such as Apple, Amazon and Google that have called for a swift transition to renewable energy.
The administration has vowed to cut US emissions in half by the end of this decade but has floundered in its attempts to legislate this outcome, with a sweeping climate bill sunk by the opposition of Republican senators and Joe Manchin, the centrist Democratic senator from West Virginia.
The federal government also had the power of administrative regulations in order to force reductions in emissions but the supreme court ruling will now imperil this ability.