[✔️] July 1, 2022 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

[Richard Pauli]

/*July 1, 2022*/

/[//SCOTUS kneecaps the EPA -- //a one-minute video rant -- ]
/*BREAKING: Supreme Court issues DEVASTATING new ruling*
Jun 30, 2022
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-kkpDhdFYI

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/

/[ Living on Earth - an eight minute analysis of the EPA ruling - audio]/
*Pat Parenteau on West Virginia v. EPA*
Jun 30, 2022  Vermont Law School professor Pat Parenteau explains the US 
Supreme Court ruling of West Virginia v. EPA./
//https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRAjZ2gCBpc
/

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/

/[ a bold headline grabs our attention -- ] /
*The Supreme Court Just Fucked the Planet*
The court's decision in West Virginia v. EPA says that the agency 
effectively does not have the power to regulate carbon dioxide emissions 
from power plants.
By Molly Taft
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled Thursday in West Virginia vs. EPA in favor 
of plaintiffs who argued that the Environmental Protection Agency does 
not have the power to regulate carbon dioxide from power plants—the 
country’s second-largest source of CO2 emissions—without input from 
Congress.

The ruling almost completely disrupts any major plans to fight climate 
change at the federal level in the U.S., and is likely to have 
wide-ranging implications for federal agencies looking to protect public 
health under bedrock laws like the Clean Air Act. It also signals how 
the court is likely to rule in other environmentally damaging cases in 
the pipeline.

The vote was 6 to 3, with the court’s three liberal members in dissent. 
Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the majority, said that Congress 
had not explicitly given the EPA the authority to regulate emissions as 
it designed the Clean Power Plan to do.

“There is little question that the petitioner States are injured, since 
the rule requires them to more stringently regulate power plant 
emissions within their borders,” Roberts wrote in the opinion.

In a dissenting opinion, Justice Elena Kagan wrote that the court’s 
decision “strips the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) of the power 
Congress gave it to respond to ‘the most pressing environmental 
challenge of our time.’”

The court’s decision follows a series of major policy reversals, 
including a devastating rollback on abortion rights, by one of the most 
conservative Supreme Courts in history, created by a dark-money network 
powered by pro-polluter interests. And it isn’t done wreaking havoc on 
public health just yet.

*What is West Virginia vs. EPA?*
This case is a strange one for a lot of reasons, and it’s been a winding 
road of confusing legal moves to get to today’s catastrophic decision. 
The host of plaintiffs, which include several attorneys general from 
Republican states and two coal companies, essentially brought a 
preemptive case against the Biden administration’s EPA as it worked on 
its own rule to replace the Obama administration’s 2015 Clean Power Plan.

The Clean Power Plan, which proposed to reduce emissions from the power 
sector by setting reduction targets that states would have needed to 
meet, never actually went into effect; it was tied up in conservative 
court challenges for years (including one led by West Virginia Attorney 
General Patrick Morrisey, who is leading this current challenge) before 
being ultimately repealed by the Trump administration in 2018. 
Complicating matters even further, in 2021, during the waning days of 
the Trump administration, a federal judge repealed the rejection of the 
Clean Power Plan as well as Trump’s weak replacement for the policy.

Even weirder still, the Biden administration actually hasn’t introduced 
its replacement policy yet—there’s currently no EPA regulation of the 
power sector actively on the books. Usually, Supreme Court cases are 
based around an actual policy or piece of regulation that is in play, 
but this case is based on the idea of what the agency is able to do 
under the Clean Air Act. The fact that the conservative Court took up 
this case against a theoretical policy and ruled in favor of the 
plaintiffs signals that it is more willing to take an active hand in 
dismantling federal agencies’ ability to regulate than the role the 
judicial branch would normally play.

“This is a Court that’s now taking on a series of precedents like we’ve 
never seen a Court do, really, in our lifetime,” said Lisa Graves, who 
served in the U.S. Department of Justice and now runs True North 
Research, a public policy watchdog group. “For this Court to try to take 
away the EPA’s power, it’s not inside baseball—it’s a dramatic departure 
from federal policy, from legal precedent.”

*Why is the court’s ruling important?*
The decision technically places the responsibility for regulating 
emissions from the power sector into the hands of the legislative 
branch. In a well-functioning democracy, Congress would be able to pass 
laws that would then direct the EPA to regulate emissions and pollution 
through specific mechanisms. But as anyone who has been paying any 
attention at all to the state of national U.S. politics can tell you, 
climate action in Congress has been dead in the water for the past 
decade or more. This, experts say, was a core part of the plan of the 
special interests that brought this case forward.

“The Court is not naïve,” Graves said. “The majority knows that 
Republicans have blocked in Congress every major significant effort to 
mitigate climate change in the past few decades. They know that some of 
the same forces that are behind the amicus briefs [in this case] have 
been able to thwart Congress’s ability to craft new laws to address this.”

And the interests lining up behind this case are powerful. The amicus 
briefs filed in support of the plaintiffs’ position read like a who’s 
who in organizations that have fought tooth and nail for polluters, 
including the Competitive Enterprise Institute, which has been a force 
in spreading climate denial, and the Americans for Prosperity 
Foundation, an advocacy group founded by the billionaire Koch brothers, 
arguably two of the most powerful pro-oil and gas political funders—and 
spreaders of climate denial—in recent decades. Charles Koch himself, 
Graves said, was a notable driving force in creating the conditions for 
this case, as well as other cases that could be teed up before this 
court. Many of the judges currently sitting on the court were nominated 
thanks to campaigns funded by some of the same pro-pollution donors 
behind this case. And this landmark ruling may be just the beginning of 
their attempts to give even more freebies to polluters.

“This case represents a victory for right-wing infrastructure that has 
been funded by Koch and other anonymous donors to try and strip away the 
power of our federal agencies to regulate industries, like Koch 
industries, the oil and gas industry, and more,” Graves said.
https://gizmodo.com/supreme-court-west-virginia-epa-power-pollution-ruling-1849112254 


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/[ Greenpeace activism ]/
*President Biden, please declare a climate emergency.*
https://engage.us.greenpeace.org/onlineactions/QfCpOni3xkaPlCXiM7SUEA2

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/[  The New Yorker and Bill McKibben use more civil language ]/
*The Supreme Court Tries to Overrule the Climate*
A destructive decision in West Virginia v. E.P.A.
By Bill McKibben
June 30, 2022
Credit where due: the Supreme Court’s 6–3 ruling in West Virginia v. 
E.P.A. is the culmination of a five-decade effort to make sure that the 
federal government won’t threaten the business status quo. Lewis 
Powell’s famous memo, written in 1971, before he joined the Supreme 
Court—between the enactment of a strong Clean Air Act and a strong Clean 
Water Act, each with huge popular support—called on “businessmen” to 
stand up to the tide of voices “from the college campus, the pulpit, the 
media, the intellectual and literary journals, the arts and sciences, 
and from politicians” calling for progressive change. He outlined a plan 
for slowly rebuilding the power of industrial élites, almost all the 
elements of which were taken up by conservative movements over 
subsequent years: monitoring textbooks and TV stations, attacking 
left-wing faculty at universities, even building a publishing industry. 
(“The news stands—at airports, drugstores, and elsewhere—are filled with 
paperback and pamphlets advocating everything from revolution to erotic 
free love. One finds almost no attractive, well-written paperbacks or 
pamphlets on ‘our side,’ ” Powell wrote, but he was able to imagine a 
day when the likes of Ann Coulter or Sean Hannity would reliably top the 
best-seller lists.)

Fatefully, he also wrote: “American business and the enterprise system 
have been affected as much by the courts as by the executive and 
legislative branches of government. Under our constitutional system, 
especially with an activist-minded Supreme Court, the judiciary may be 
the most important instrument for social, economic and political 
change.” At the time he was writing, the “activist” court was standing 
up for things that most Americans wanted, such as clean air and 
water—and the right of women to control their own bodies. But the 
Supreme Court, and hence the judiciary, has come under the control of 
the kind of men that Powell envisioned—he may not have envisioned women 
on the bench, but Amy Coney Barrett is otherwise his type of judge. And, 
with this ruling, they have taken more or less total control of 
Washington’s ability to generate policy that might disrupt the status quo.

In essence, the ruling begins to strip away the power of agencies such 
as the E.P.A. to enforce policy: instead of allowing federal agencies to 
enforce, say, the Clean Air Act to clean the air, in this new 
dispensation, Congress would have to pass regulations that are much more 
explicit, as each new pollutant came to the fore. As West Virginia’s 
attorney general explained, “What we’re looking to do is to make sure 
that the right people under our constitutional system make the correct 
decisions...  these agencies, these federal agencies, don’t have the 
ability to act solely on their own without getting a clear statement 
from Congress. Delegation matters.”

But, of course, the Court has also insured that “getting a clear 
statement from Congress” to address our deepest problems is essentially 
impossible. The decision in Citizens United v. F.E.C., in 2010, 
empowered corporations to game our political system at will. That 
explains, in part, why Congress has not passed a real climate bill in 
decades. The efforts that Democratic Administrations have made to try 
and control greenhouse gasses have mostly used provisions of the Clean 
Air Act because it is the last serious law of its kind that ever came to 
a President’s desk (Nixon’s, in this case).
A train of similar cases now approaches the high court—they would, for 
instance, make it all but impossible for the federal government to 
regulate tailpipe emissions or to consider the financial toll of climate 
change when deciding whether to approve a new pipeline. As the Times 
reported in a recent investigation, the plaintiffs in these cases “are 
supported by the same network of conservative donors who helped former 
President Donald J. Trump place more than 200 federal judges, many now 
in position to rule on the climate cases in the coming year.”
And this new jurisprudence would, in turn, make it even harder to 
achieve any international progress on rising temperatures. If the United 
States—historically, the world’s largest emitter of carbon—can’t play a 
serious policy role, it won’t play a serious leadership role. John 
Kerry, Biden’s climate envoy, who has been trying to rally the world for 
more aggressive climate action, is running out of cards to play.

Given the record flooding in Asia, the record heat in the Mideast, the 
record fires in the Southwest, and the record rainfall in Yellowstone, 
there’s a nihilist strain to this ruling. Be careful what you wish for: 
the biggest threat to corporate futures today is not a paperback about 
“erotic free love”; it’s an out-of-control climate that will undercut 
financial stability. But the conservative drive to roll back federal 
power has long since become more ideological than practical; the 
right-wing luminary Grover Norquist updated Powell’s plan for a feistier 
age, when he said that he wanted to shrink the federal government to a 
size that he could then “drown in a bathtub.” But drowning whole 
communities as the sea level inexorably rises?

And what about the large majority of Americans who want action on 
climate change, and the activist campaigners who have pushed that desire 
to the fore? Those activists have engaged with good faith over many 
years in an effort to use the latent power of the federal government to 
make necessary change, but now that effort seems less and less sensible. 
There remains an outside hope that the Build Back Better bill might 
still pick up fifty votes in the Senate before the fall, when 
Republicans could potentially regain control of Congress; the tax 
credits for renewable energy it contains would probably pass Supreme 
Court muster. But beyond that it’s hard to see exactly what the point of 
demanding federal climate action is now; why march on the Capitol or the 
White House if the Supreme Court won’t let elected leaders act even if 
they want to? And there’s no real way to march on the Supreme Court—it 
exists outside the ambit of normal politics—though rulings like this 
will also raise the pressure to expand the size of the Court, if and 
when the Democrats have the votes to do so.

You could also hope that an engaged Federal Reserve might take action—as 
Aaron Regunberg pointed out in a recent article, Court precedent (for 
whatever that’s still worth) might give the Fed some latitude. And state 
legislatures can act, too, though even there the Court may hem in their 
ability to, say, set mileage restrictions on cars—in fact, Republican 
attorneys general from around the country have already filed suit in the 
D.C. circuit court to do just that. (The D.C. circuit court contains new 
appointees such as Neomi Rao, who oversaw deregulation efforts in the 
Trump Administration before he offered her a seat on the bench.) 
Campaigners will keep trying to win elections, and to write policy, but 
it took Lewis Powell fifty years to win this fight, and it may take 
fifty years to win it back—and we do not have that kind of time in the 
fight against warming.

Wall Street may be the only other actor large enough to actually shift 
the momentum of our climate system. The pressure on banks, asset 
managers, and insurance companies will increase precisely because the 
Court has wrenched shut this other spigot. Convincing banks to stop 
funding Big Oil is probably not the most efficient way to tackle the 
climate crisis, but, in a country where democratic political options are 
effectively closed off, it may be the only path left.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/the-supreme-court-tries-to-overrule-the-climate?

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/[  twitter comment  ] /
*People vs. Fossil Fuels*
@FightFossils
While this decision weakens critical environmental regulations it does 
not erode Biden’s executive authority to declare a climate emergency and 
stop approving fossil fuel projects.
@POTUS
https://twitter.com/FightFossils/status/1542522735208718337

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[ twitter says ]
*@SCOTUS just ruled to sharply limit the EPA's ability to regulate power 
plant emissions under the Clean Air Act in West *Virginia vs. EPA.
Quote Tweet
SCOTUSblog
The Supreme Court sharply curtails the authority of the EPA to regulate 
greenhouse-gas emissions that cause climate change. In a 6-3 ruling, the 
court sides with conservative states and fossil-fuel companies in 
adopting a narrow reading of the Clean Air Act.
https://twitter.com/FightFossils/status/1542522733388374021



/[ as with other stunning events - like a SCOTUS ruling ]/
*One extreme climate event can worsen others, studies show*
Andrew Freedman , author of Axios Generate
One study published this week in the journal Geophysical Research 
Letters warns that certain extremes, such as drought, can exacerbate 
other climate hazards like heat waves.

Driving the news: When climate change-related extremes interact, they 
can create cascading and unprecedented outcomes, per the new research.

The Southwest is currently enduring a prolonged, human-induced 
megadrought, and these conditions are raising the odds for a hotter, 
drier summer with high wildfire risks.
The big picture: The study shows that extreme drought in the Southwest 
during June of 2021 led to record heat throughout the region, and 
exacerbated the dry conditions.

Its authors say similar interactions between drought and heat likely 
enabled wildfires in New Mexico to grow to record sizes in the past few 
months.
"The outcome is more than the sum of its parts," study co-author 
Benjamin Zaitchik, a Johns Hopkins University researcher, said via an 
email exchange.
"We're seeing a climate change signal of earlier springs, faster drying, 
and early summer warmth feed back on itself, leading to larger impacts 
than we would predict taking each hazard on its own."
Context: The threat of compound, unprecedented events, is one reason 
scientists have been studying differences in risks associated with 
different levels of global warming.

The world is already about 1.2°C (2.2°F) warmer than preindustrial 
levels, and is on course for around 3°C (5.4°F) of warming through 2100, 
barring more stringent emissions cuts.
The second study, published today in the journal Climatic Change, uses 
projections from 21 computer models.

The researchers determined how much society's climate risk exposure, 
from effects such as water scarcity to heat stress, would differ by 
holding warming to 1.5°C, compared to more severe levels.
What they found: The study found that by limiting global warming to the 
most stringent Paris target, societal risks could be reduced by 85% 
compared to those associated with about 3.6°C (6.48°F) of warming.

Risks to people would be slashed by 10% to 44% globally if warming is 
limited to 1.5°C when compared to 2°C, it found...
https://www.axios.com/2022/06/29/extreme-climate-events-compound-reaction



/[ top NPR news today - temps of 35 to 40C =  95 to 104F]/
*Japan tells millions to save electricity as record heat wave strains 
power supply*
https://www.cnn.com/2022/06/28/asia/japan-heatwave-air-conditioning-power-electricity-shortage-climate-change-intl-hnk/index.html 


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*Japan swelters in its worst heatwave ever recorded*
Japan is sweltering under the hottest day yet of its worst heatwave 
since records began in 1875.
The blistering heat has drawn official warnings of a looming power 
shortage, and led to calls for people to conserve energy where possible.
But the government is still advising people to use air conditioning to 
avoid heatstroke as cases of hospitalisation rise with the heat.
Weather officials warn the heat is likely to continue in the coming days.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-61976937



/[The news archive - looking back to 1983 ]/
/*July 1, 1983*/
*July 1, 1983: NBC's "Today" reports on the risk of sea level rise from 
global warming.*
http://archives.nbclearn.com/portal/site/k-12/flatview?cuecard=40383
/[ NBC seems to have lost this remarkable video archive ]/

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