[✔️] November 5, 2021 - Daily Global Warming News Digest
👀 Richard Pauli
richard at theclimate.vote
Fri Nov 5 11:27:04 EDT 2021
/*November 5, 2021*/
/
//[ 20 min video report COP26 ]/
*Nick Breeze ClimateGENN*
In this episode of Shaping The Future I am inside the COP attending
talks and speaking mainly to scientists but also half listening to the
pledges and commitments being made. What is striking is the sense of
foreboding from people who have followed these negotiations for many years.
Contents:
00:00 Intro by Nick Breeze
01:00 John Kerry speaking to C40 mayors
01:23 Professor Richard Bamba (excerpt)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5GcSxVHAxW0
/[BBC reports]/
*Climate change: Carbon emissions show rapid rebound after Covid dip*
By Paul Rincon - Science editor, BBC News website
Published 11-4-21
The amount of planet-heating gas released in 2020 fell by 5.4% as the
pandemic forced countries to lock down.
But a scientific report by the Global Carbon Project predicts CO2
emissions will rise by 4.9% this year.
It shows the window is closing on our ability to limit temperature rise
to the critical threshold of 1.5C.
This rise in carbon dioxide (CO2) released into the atmosphere
underlines the urgency of action at summits like COP26 in Glasgow,
scientists say.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-59148520
- -
/[ Poignant action, polite speech ]/
THE COP26 SUMMIT
*A 15-year-old girl invented a solar ironing cart that's winning global
respect*
November 3, 2021
SUSHMITA PATHAK
Vinisha Umashankar and her solar ironing cart. She came up with the idea
when she was 12 — then worked with engineers to create a prototype. Now
she's in Glasgow, Scotland, to speak at the COP26 climate change conference.
Vinisha Umashankar was returning to her home in southern India from
school a few years ago when she saw a man throwing away burnt charcoal
on the side of the street.
He was an ironing vendor who pressed people's clothes for a living – and
his main appliance was an old-fashioned iron box, which he filled with
hot charcoal that emitted a cloud of smoke. Umashankar counted at least
six such vendors in her neighborhood in the temple town of
Tiruvannamalai alone. She started thinking about how this was happening
across India, where the ironing vendor is a fixture.
"It made me think about the amount of charcoal burnt every day and the
damage it does to the environment," says the 15-year-old. Producing and
burning charcoal emits particulate matter that pollutes the air and
releases greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, which contributes to
climate change.
So Umashankar came up with an idea. Instead of using charcoal to heat up
the irons, the vendors could use something abundantly available in
India: the power of the sun. Over the span of six months in 2019, when
she was just 12 years old, she designed a cart that had solar panels to
power a steam iron. She pored over college-level physics textbooks to
get an understanding of how solar panels work. Then, she submitted her
concept to the National Innovation Foundation, run by the Indian
government. Engineers there helped her build the full-scale working
prototype and apply for a patent.
And so the Iron-Max was born. It's a blue-painted cart shaped like an
iron box with solar panels fitted on its roof. It's attached to a
bicycle to allow vendors to move through the neighborhood to collect
clothes to press. Five hours of bright sunshine is enough to operate the
iron for six hours. The energy can be stored in a battery to provide
power on cloudy days. The cart also has a coin-operated cellphone and a
cellphone charging point where people can pay to recharge their phones
to supplement vendors' earnings...
[ Poignant speech ]
*Vinisha Umashankar | World Leaders Summit #COP26*
Nov 2, 2021
Earthshot Prize
The remarkable 15-year-old Vinisha Umashankar, Earthshot Prize
Finalist to Clean our Air, addressed World Leaders today at #COP26.
In her powerful speech updating
President John F. Kennedy’s Moonshot speech for a new
generation, she invited world leaders,
international organisations, civil society, and business
leaders to stand with her generation and back
the innovatio
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvLD6waVlkk ...
Umashankar was 8 when she first learned about climate change and says it
has had a huge impact on how she thinks about innovation. She's
exasperated by how the world shrugs off environmental issues as if they
are someone else's problems.
"All of us should understand that environmental issues are real and
can't be fixed at a later date," says Umashankar. "There is no stop
button. There is no magic fix."...
- -
An encyclopedia that was gifted to her when she was 5 sparked
Umashankar's passion for science. She wants to become a scientist and
invent products to help protect the environment for future generations.
She also aspires to invent a single flu vaccine that can protect against
all cold viruses. If it works out, she says she's pretty confident
she'll win a Nobel Prize.
https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2021/11/03/1050227033/a-15-year-old-girl-invented-a-solar-ironing-cart-thats-winning-global-respect
/[ See Congress's Build Back Better Bill all 2135 pages, and one
spreadsheet ]/
//RULES COMMITTEE PRINT 117–18
*TEXT OF H.R. 5376, BUILD BACK BETTER ACT*
https://rules.house.gov/sites/democrats.rules.house.gov/files/BILLS-117HR5376RH-RCP117-18.pdf
- -
[ spreadsheet of major expenditures]
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1oAy7k0Zi1Ei9K-30-_bEjfj8FS84CPyUaFmMytZSj4c/edit#gid=0
/
/
/
/
/[ Political training and policy making - Australia ]/
*The Politics of Climate Change | Steve E. Koonin*
Oct 21, 2021
John Anderson
As world leaders, including PM Scott Morrison, prepare to attend the
2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Glasgow, there is
mounting pressure for governments to apply a net zero energy policy by 2050.
In this interview, John talks with Steve E. Koonin, a theoretical
physicist and policymaker, about the future of energy and the politics
of climate change. Steve reflects on how the politicisation of climate
science has led to a lack of transparency regarding climate statistics.
From 2009 to 2011, Steve served as the Under Secretary for Science,
Department of Energy in the Obama Administration. Steve now works as
director of the Center for Urban Science and Progress at New York
University and as a professor in the Department of Civil and Urban
Engineering at New York University’s Tandon School of Engineering.
Steve is also the author of two books. His recently published book,
Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It
Matters, was a Wall Street Journal Bestseller.00:00 Introduction
3:35 Are humans to blame for climate change?
11:52 The Problem with Climate Modelling
21:29 The Costs & Benefits of Climate Policy
27:47 The Future of Renewable Energy
34:19 Adaptation and Climate Change
42:49 Net Zero: Is it Possible?
Conversations feature John Anderson, former Deputy Prime Minister of
Australia, interviewing the world's foremost thought leaders about
today's pressing social, cultural and political issues.
John believes proper, robust dialogue is necessary if we are to maintain
our social strength and cohesion. As he puts it; "You cannot get good
public policy out of a bad public debate."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V_g3DuNnDT8
- -
/[ politics for university students ] /
*Day 3 - Matthew Paterson: The centrality of politics to climate change
and the problem of climate...*
Oct 5, 2021
Institut des sciences cognitives - UQAM
ISC 2021 Summer School – Cognitive Challenges of Climate Change
(https://sites.grenadine.uqam.ca/sites...)
Day 3
Talk by Matthew Paterson: The centrality of politics to climate change
and the problem of climate politics
MC: Nadia Seraiocco, Lecturer and Ph.D candidate, Écoles des médias, UQAM
*Abstract:*
Integrating the social sciences into knowledge production about
climate change is widely recognized as difficult, for various
reasons. But political science presents a particular sort of problem
for such integrated knowledge production. When produced for
policy-oriented processes, where policy-makers may themselves get to
revise and approve the text of a document (as is the case for IPCC
reports), knowledge focused on explaining and evaluating the
performance of political systems on climate change is a particularly
difficult sell. Policy-makers are reluctant to accept analyses that
explain why their country has worse performance than another. This
presentation focuses on this twin character of political science
knowledge on climate change: everyone knows politics is central to
how effectively we respond to climate change, but everyone has
institutional incentives to avoid talking about it. It also outlines
the central elements of how we should understand the political
dynamics of climate change.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwpVA2_gs_k
/[ stress and anxiety - a press release ] /
*The American Psychological Association and ecoAmerica are pleased to
present Mental Health and Our Changing Climate, *a report publishing on
November 4, 2021 that chronicles the impacts of climate change on
Americans’ mental health and psychological well-being and provides
guidance and resources to act and advocate. The report builds on the
celebrated 2017 edition to include the latest research and expanded
sections on populations disproportionately impacted, climate anxiety,
and a spectrum of solutions. Join us on November 4 to hear the major
findings of this report from the authors and to preview the action steps
for communities, individuals, practitioners, and policymakers...
- -
The American Psychological Association and ecoAmerica are pleased to
offer Mental Health and Our Changing Climate: Impacts, Inequities,
Responses. This report is an update to the 2017 report, Mental Health
and Our Changing Climate: Impacts, Implications, and Guidance. It shares
the latest and best knowledge on the many ways that climate change
impacts mental health individually and community-wide, how structural
inequities cause certain populations to be impacted first and worst, and
the spectrum of solutions available to build resilience, strengthen
care, and inspire engagement for transformative progress. It is intended
to further inform and empower health and medical professionals,
community and elected leaders, and the public to understand and act on
solutions to climate change that will support mental health and well-being.
It is past time to focus attention on the far reaching toll climate
change is already taking on our mental health, as the economic,
political, environmental and health implications of climate change
affect all of us. It is time to face feelings of helplessness, fatalism,
and resignation that may be keeping us and our nation from properly
addressing the core causes of climate change and bringing forth solutions.
Now is the time to care for our mental health and our climate, and we can...
https://ecoamerica.org/mental-health-and-our-changing-climate-2021-edition/
- -
/[Read the full report ]/
*MENTAL HEALTH AND OUR CHANGING CLIMATE**
**IMPACTS, INEQUITIES, RESPONSES*
2021 Edition
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY 5
I. CONTEXT 9
Our Changing Climate: A Primer 10
How Climate Change Impacts Personal And Public Health 12
Mental, Physical, and Community Well-Being: Links to Inequity 16
Climate Change Concerns In The United States 18
A Closer Look: The Fight For A Livable Future 19
Psychological Barriers To A Proactive Response 20
Climate Attitudes That Can Spur Action 22
Climate Solutions Benefit Mental Health 24
II. THE MENTAL HEALTH IMPACTS OF CLIMATE CHANGE 26
Introduction 27
Impacts Of Severe Weather And Disaster Events 28
A Closer Look: American Youth: Angry, Terrified, And In Despair 32
Impacts of Longer-Term Climate Change 33
Climate Anxiety 37
A Closer Look: A Solution For Climate Anxiety: Spending More Time In
Nature 39
III. HOW INEQUITY IS EXACERBATED BY CLIMATE CHANGE 40
Populations Disproportionately Impacted By Climate Change 41
A Closer Look: Natural Connections: Collaboration With The
Environment 45
A Closer Look: Lessons From COVID-19 48
IV. PROMOTING AND BUILDING RESILIENCE 49
Resilience Defined 50
A Closer Look: Arts, Parks, and Climate Resilient Communities 51
Guidance To Support Individual Resilience 52
Guidance For Strengthening Community Resilience 55
A Closer Look: Community Hubs 61
V. ACCELERATING CLIMATE SOLUTIONS TO SUPPORT MENTAL HEALTH 62
The Urgent Need For Climate Policy And Investment In The United
States 63
Climate Solutions To Protect Mental Health 64
What Individuals Can Do 66
What Mental Health Professionals Can Do 68
https://ecoamerica.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/mental-health-climate-change-2021-ea-apa.pdf
/[ alternative viewpoints ]
/*Climate change isn’t the problem, so what is?*
By William Rees
Thanks to friend and retired blogger Gail Zawacki at Wit’s End for
bringing this excellent new talk by professor William Rees to my attention.
Rees discusses our severe state of ecological overshoot and the
behaviors that prevent us from taking any useful action to make the
future less bad.
Rees thinks there are two key behaviors responsible for our predicament:
Base nature, which we share with all other species, to use all available
resources. Most people call this the Maximum Power Principle.
Creative nurture. Our learned culture defines our reality and we live
this constructed reality as if it were real. “When faced with
information that does not agree with their [preformed] internal
structures, they deny, discredit, reinterpret or forget that
information” – Wexler.
I don’t disagree with Rees on the existence or role of these behaviors,
but we also need Varki’s MORT theory to explain how denial of unpleasant
realties evolved and is symbiotic with our uniquely powerful
intelligence, and other unique human behaviors, such as our belief in
gods and life after death...
- -
Some interesting points made by Rees:
- The 2017 human eco-footprint exceeds biocapacity by 73%.
- -Half the fossil fuels and many other resources ever used by humans
have been consumed in just the past 30 years.
- Efficiency enables more consumption.
- The past 7 years are the warmest 7 years on record.
- Wild populations of birds, fish, mammals, and amphibians have declined
60% since 1970. Populations of many insects are down about 50%.
- The biomass of humans and their livestock make up 95-99% of all
vertebrate biomass on the planet.
- Human population planning has declined from being the dominant policy
lever in 1969 to the least researched in 2018.
- The annual growth in wind and solar energy is about half the total
annual growth in energy. In others words, “renewable” energy is not
replacing fossil energy, it’s not even keeping up.
- The recent expansion of the human enterprise resembles the “plague
phase” of a one-off boom/bust population cycle.
- 50 years, 34 climate conferences, a half dozen major international
climate agreements, and various scientists’ warnings have not reduced
atmospheric carbon concentrations.
- We are tracking to the Limit to Growth study’s standard model and
should expect major systemic crashes in the next 40 to 50 years.
- This is the new “age of unreason”: science denial and magical thinking.
Climate change is a serious problem but a mere symptom of the greater
disease.
P.S. Stay for the Q&A session, it’s very good.
https://un-denial.com/2021/02/06/by-william-rees-climate-change-isnt-the-problem-so-what-is/
/[ Yikes! Long article... is this possible or just conjecture? ]/
*A new Supreme Court case could gut the government’s power to fight
climate change*
Neil Gorsuch’s dream case could be the Earth’s nightmare.
By Ian Millhiser Nov 3, 2021
The Supreme Court announced late last week that it will hear four very
similar cases — all likely to be consolidated under the name West
Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency — which could prove to be
some of the most consequential court decisions in recent US history.
That’s a bold statement, so allow me to explain.
The cases are the latest chapter in the seemingly never-ending
litigation over the Clean Power Plan, arguably former President Barack
Obama’s boldest effort to fight climate change. Though the plan was
never implemented, it still exists in a zombie-like state. A federal
appeals court decision revived the plan last January, but the Biden
administration said in February that it would not reinstate Obama’s policy.
Even though it’s no longer likely to be implemented, the petitioners in
the West Virginia case — red states, energy companies, and owners of
coal mines — are fighting to get the Court to rule that the federal
Clean Air Act does not authorize Obama’s plan. More importantly, they
call for new limits on the Clean Air Act that would severely restrict
the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to reduce greenhouse
emissions in the future.
But that’s only the tip of the iceberg. At least some of the parties in
the West Virginia litigation claim that it is unconstitutional for the
EPA to take the sort of aggressive strides against climate change that
the Obama administration took in its Clean Power Plan. This theory
wouldn’t just strip the EPA of much of its power to fight climate
change, it could potentially disable Congress’s ability to effectively
protect the environment.
And even this description of the West Virginia litigation doesn’t fully
capture the stakes. The most aggressive arguments against the Clean
Power Plan wouldn’t just apply to environmental regulations — they could
also fundamentally alter the structure of the US government, stripping
away the government’s power on issues as diverse as workplace safety,
environmental protection, access to birth control, overtime pay, and
vaccination.
In this scenario, hundreds of laws could be weakened or even
deactivated. Many of them would be gone for good, and reenacting any of
these laws would require passing legislation through a bitterly divided
Congress.
So West Virginia is a monster of a case — potentially the culmination of
a conservative vision incubated at the Federalist Society for years, and
long championed by conservative activists such as Justices Neil Gorsuch
and Brett Kavanaugh. Indeed, a majority of the Court has already
expressed sympathy toward Gorsuch’s plans to shrink the power of federal
agencies, which is a strong sign that the West Virginia petitioners are
likely to prevail on at least some of their claims.
In the worst-case scenario for the Biden administration, the West
Virginia case could make President Joe Biden the weakest president of
the United States in over 80 years, and it could give a Supreme Court
dominated by Republican appointees a veto power over huge swaths of
federal policy.
Buckle up. Because the United States will be a very different place if
the Court’s right flank gets its way in West Virginia.
The West Virginia litigation seeks to permanently entrench Trumpian
environmental policy
The heart of the West Virginia case is a conflict between Obama’s
environmental policy and the policy advanced by his successor, former
President Donald Trump. The red states, power companies, and mining
interests behind this lawsuit all hope to entrench Trump’s policies —
potentially forever.
The Clean Air Act requires certain power plans to use the “best system
of emission reduction” that can be achieved using existing technology,
while also taking into account factors such as cost. This scheme raises
an obvious question: Who shall determine what, exactly, is the “best
system of emission reduction” at any given moment?
Under the Clean Air Act, the answer to that question is the
Environmental Protection Agency. It’s the EPA’s job to study changing
technologies, determine when a new breakthrough should be adopted by
power plants, and to order those plants to use that technology by
issuing binding regulations. (Under certain circumstances, a power plant
does not have to use the exact same technology preferred by the EPA. But
power plants that use alternative methods typically will only be allowed
to do so if they can achieve the same levels of emission reduction that
would be achieved using the EPA’s methods.)
The Clean Power Plan didn’t simply call upon coal-firing power plants to
install devices that would make them burn more efficiently. It also
called for power plants to shift away from coal and toward cleaner
methods of generating energy, including both natural gas and methods
that produce no emissions at all, such as solar.
The West Virginia petitioners claim that EPA cannot require such a
shift. And these parties have always been likely to prevail before a
judiciary dominated by Republicans. In 2016, just days before Justice
Antonin Scalia’s death briefly denied Republican appointees a majority
on the Supreme Court, the justices voted 5-4 to halt the Clean Power Plan.
For a while, the Clean Power Plan’s opponents had powerful allies, in
Trump and his EPA. In 2019, Trump’s EPA announced a new policy,
euphemistically known as the “Affordable Clean Energy” (ACE) rule, which
replaced the Clean Power Plan with much weaker rules.
The Trump-era rules urged coal plants to install technologies, such as
upgraded soot-blowers and boiler feed pumps, which could marginally
reduce emissions — and that’s pretty much it. As a federal appeals court
explained in an opinion striking down these rules, “the EPA predicted
that its ACE Rule would reduce carbon dioxide emissions by less than 1%
from baseline emission projections by 2035.” And even that prediction
was optimistic. Trump’s EPA acknowledged that its recommended
technologies might wind up increasing emissions because they would
reduce the cost of producing energy with coal.
This appeals court opinion is now being reviewed by the justices in West
Virginia, and the various parties that brought this case urge the Court
to state definitively that the Clean Power Plan is not allowed. Such a
decision is likely to fundamentally alter the EPA’s powers in ways that
could make it very difficult for the Biden administration — or any
future administration — to abandon Trump’s policies.
*How federal agencies shape policy*
The Clean Air Act relied on a type of governance that is ubiquitous in
federal law. Congress lays out a broad policy — in this case, that power
plants must use the “best system of emission reduction” — and then
delegates to the EPA the task of implementing that policy through a
series of binding regulations.
Countless federal statutes rely on a similar structure. The Affordable
Care Act, for example, requires health insurers to provide certain
preventive treatments — such as birth control, many vaccinations, and
cancer screenings — at no additional cost to patients, and it delegates
the task of determining which treatments belong on this list to experts
at the Department of Health and Human Services. The Department of Labor
may raise the salary threshold governing which workers are eligible for
overtime pay, in part to keep up with inflation.
There are several reasons why this sort of governance, where a
democratically elected legislature sets a broad policy and then
delegates implementation to a federal agency, is desirable. For one
thing, Congress is a dysfunctional mess. If a new act of Congress were
required every time environmental regulators wanted power plants to
install new technology, it’s likely that those plants would still be
using devices that were on the cutting edge in 1993.
Delegating power to agencies also ensures that decisions are made by
people who know what they are doing. Imagine, for example, if Congress
had to pass a law every time the Food and Drug Administration wants to
make a new drug available to the public. Even if Congress had time to
vote on such a decision, most members of Congress know very little about
biology, chemistry, or medicine.
Delegation also insulates important decisions from political
horse-trading. The decision about whether to approve a new drug should
be made by scientists in the FDA, not by lawmakers who might be
concerned that the drug’s manufacturer is in Arizona, and that they need
to butter up Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) to secure her vote for the Build
Back Better Act.
Nevertheless, a majority of the Supreme Court is very hostile to the
idea that federal agencies should be allowed to set policy, and at least
five justices have signaled that they want to revive a largely defunct
constitutional doctrine known as “nondelegation.”
*Nondelegation, explained*
Nondelegation is the idea that the Constitution places strict limits on
Congress’s ability to delegate power to federal agencies. Although the
Supreme Court briefly wielded the nondelegation doctrine to strike down
New Deal policies that gave a simply extraordinary amount of regulatory
power to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, this doctrine largely lay
dormant for generations. Indeed, for many years, the Court’s decisions
typically emphasized how reluctant judges should be to second-guess
agency regulations.
During the Obama administration, however, the Court’s right flank
started agitating for limits on agencies’ authority that haven’t been
seen in generations. Under the strongest form of the nondelegation
doctrine, the version advocated by Justice Clarence Thomas in a 2015
opinion, agencies are simply forbidden from issuing binding regulations
of any kind. Thomas believes that any governmental decision that
“involves an exercise of policy discretion” also “requires an exercise
of legislative power.”
So laws like the Clean Air Act are forbidden, if Thomas gets his way. If
the United States wants to require coal plants to install a new device
that will reduce emissions by 2 percent, Thomas would require Congress
to enact a new law.
Most of the justices are unlikely to go that far, but a majority of the
Court has rallied around the approach Justice Neil Gorsuch laid out in
his dissenting opinion in Gundy v. United States (2019). A federal law
authorizing an agency to regulate, Gorsuch wrote in Gundy, must be
“‘sufficiently definite and precise to enable Congress, the courts, and
the public to ascertain’ whether Congress’s guidance has been followed.”
This vague new standard is inconsistent with the framers’ understanding
of the Constitution. Early American lawmakers — many of whom were the
same people who drafted the Constitution — delegated tremendous power to
executive branch officials.
Moreover, Gorsuch’s approach would effectively consolidate an enormous
amount of power within the judiciary. When the Supreme Court hands down
a vague and open-ended legal standard like the one Gorsuch articulated
in his Gundy opinion, the Court is shifting power to itself. What does
it mean for a statute to be “sufficiently definite and precise” that the
public can “ascertain whether Congress’s guidance has been followed”?
The answer is that the courts — and, ultimately, the Supreme Court —
will decide for themselves what this vague language means. The courts
will gain a broad new power to strike down federal regulations, on the
grounds that they exceed Congress’s power to delegate authority.
And Gorsuch would also apply this rule retroactively to statutes drafted
long before the Court’s decision in Gundy — an approach with profound
implications for the West Virginia case. The section of the Clean Air
Act at issue in West Virginia was enacted in 1970.
Perhaps, if the Nixon-era Congress had known it needed to write that law
with greater precision, it might have drafted it in a way that Gorsuch
would deem acceptable (although it is unclear whether judges like
Gorsuch would deem any meaningful environmental protection regime
acceptable). But it’s simply unreasonable to expect lawmakers in 1970 to
comply with a rule announced by a dissenting justice in 2019.
Gorsuch’s approach to nondelegation, in other words, wouldn’t simply
strip Congress of much of its power to delegate authority to agencies.
It would allow the most conservative panel of justices to sit on the
Supreme Court since the early days of the Franklin Roosevelt
administration to run roughshod through decades of federal statutes,
invalidating or severely weakening hundreds of provisions drafted at a
time when the nondelegation doctrine was widely viewed as a crankish
notion that was correctly abandoned in the 1930s.
West Virginia contains the seeds of a constitutional revolution. It
could, as Roosevelt warned in 1937, enable the Supreme Court to “make
our democracy impotent.”
*A more moderate approach that still isn’t especially moderate*
In 2016, when Obama was still president and Kavanaugh was still a lower
court judge, the DC Circuit Court heard another case involving the Clean
Power Plan, which was also known as West Virginia v. EPA. At the time,
Gorsuch was also still a lower court judge, and the nondelegation
doctrine was still just a reactionary idea touted at Federalist Society
conferences.
And yet, then-Judge Kavanaugh also suggested at oral arguments in this
first West Virginia case that the Clean Power Plan must fall. He rested
his arguments largely on something known as the major questions doctrine.
This doctrine derives from the Supreme Court’s decision in FDA v. Brown
& Williamson Tobacco (2000). Although federal law gives the FDA broad
authority to regulate drugs and devices used to deliver drugs, a 5-4
Court concluded in Brown & Williamson that this power does not extend to
tobacco.
Though courts should typically defer to an agency’s regulatory
decisions, Brown & Williamson concluded that “in extraordinary cases ...
there may be reason to hesitate before concluding that Congress has
intended” to delegate authority to a federal agency. In asserting the
power to regulate tobacco, the Court claimed, “the FDA has now asserted
jurisdiction to regulate an industry constituting a significant portion
of the American economy.” Congress, moreover, had previously “rejected
proposals to give the FDA jurisdiction over tobacco.”
So, in light of that history, the Court determined that the federal law
permitting the FDA to regulate drugs should not be read so broadly as to
allow it to target nicotine.
Although Brown & Williamson placed a great deal of emphasis on the fact
that Congress had rejected prior efforts to allow the FDA to regulate
tobacco, the Court expanded the major questions doctrine in Utility Air
Regulatory Group v. EPA (2014). Under Utility Air, any significant
regulation pushed out by an agency is potentially suspect, regardless of
whether Congress had given some outward sign that it disapproved of that
regulation.
“We expect Congress to speak clearly if it wishes to assign to an agency
decisions of vast ‘economic and political significance,’” Scalia wrote
for the Court in Utility Air. The Court, in other words, imposed a new
restriction on Congress. It could delegate broad powers to agencies, but
any statute that did so had to be written with an unspecified amount of
precision. And courts were free to invalidate regulations if they deemed
the statute authorizing that regulation to be insufficiently precise.
The major questions doctrine is, in some ways, weaker than the
nondelegation doctrine. For one thing, it doesn’t purport to be a
constitutional doctrine. Because nondelegation claims that there are
constitutional limits on Congress’s ability to delegate power, it is
likely that justices loyal to this doctrine would declare some
delegations invalid no matter how carefully Congress drafted a law. The
major questions doctrine, by contrast, theoretically can be overcome by
precise draftsmanship.
After Brown & Williamson was decided, for example, Congress enacted the
Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act of 2009, which
explicitly gave the FDA the power that the Court denied it in 2000. At
least so far, the Court has permitted the FDA to regulate tobacco under
this statute.
But the major questions doctrine also suffers from many of the same
problems as nondelegation. It is vague, so judges can easily read their
policy preferences into decisions challenging agency regulations. And it
changed the rules governing statutory drafting long after many important
laws were enacted.
Again, if Congress had known, in 1970, that it had to draft the Clean
Air Act in a certain way to prevent the Supreme Court from dismantling
the EPA’s powers, it could have done so. It’s simply not reasonable to
expect Congress to comply with a rule of statutory construction invented
decades after Congress enacts a law.
Doctrines like nondelegation and major questions, in other words,
threaten to retroactively undo decades of legislation. And, while these
doctrines might hypothetically permit Congress to restore at least some
old laws by enacting new versions that comply with the new rules, the
filibuster all but ensures that no bill will become law.
Now, the Supreme Court appears likely to wield these doctrines to
invalidate key provisions of the Clean Air Act. That means the federal
government may soon have to fight climate change with both hands tied
behind its back. And, if the Court does invigorate these doctrines,
countless other laws could be next on the chopping block.
https://www.vox.com/2021/11/3/22758188/climate-change-epa-clean-power-plan-supreme-court
/[The news archive - this is the 56th Anniversary]/
*On this day in the history of global warming November 5, 1965*
November 5, 1965: President Johnson's Science Advisory Committee issues
a report, "Restoring the Quality of Our Environment," that cites the
hazards of carbon pollution.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2015/nov/05/scientists-warned-the-president-about-global-warming-50-years-ago-today
- -
/[ Not many people have read this document - some brilliant minds wrote
this original report -- 348 pages scanned ]/
*Restoring the quality of our environment. Report*
[ especially see #34 (p.16) ]
https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.b4116127&view=1up&seq=13
/[ We used to have such a great government ]//
/
/-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------/
/Archive of Daily Global Warming News
<https://pairlist10.pair.net/pipermail/theclimate.vote/2017-October/date.html>
/
https://pairlist10.pair.net/pipermail/theclimate.vote
/To receive daily mailings - click to Subscribe
<mailto:subscribe at theClimate.Vote?subject=Click%20SEND%20to%20process%20your%20request>
to news digest./
- Privacy and Security:*This mailing is text-only. It does not carry
images or attachments which may originate from remote servers. A
text-only message can provide greater privacy to the receiver and
sender. This is a hobby production curated by Richard Pauli
By regulation, the .VOTE top-level domain cannot be used for commercial
purposes. Messages have no tracking software.
To subscribe, email: contact at theclimate.vote
<mailto:contact at theclimate.vote> with subject subscribe, To Unsubscribe,
subject: unsubscribe
Also you may subscribe/unsubscribe at
https://pairlist10.pair.net/mailman/listinfo/theclimate.vote
Links and headlines assembled and curated by Richard Pauli for
http://TheClimate.Vote <http://TheClimate.Vote/> delivering succinct
information for citizens and responsible governments of all levels. List
membership is confidential and records are scrupulously restricted to
this mailing list.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://pairlist10.pair.net/pipermail/theclimate.vote/attachments/20211105/00e08770/attachment.htm>
More information about the TheClimate.Vote
mailing list