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Opinion: Supreme Court’s dangerous gut punch for Earth

Photo by T.J. Kirkpatrick of The New York Times / The coal- and natural gas power plant that services the U.S. Capitol campus a few blocks away, in Washington, is shown on June 30, 2022. The Supreme Court on Thursday limited the Environmental Protection Agency's ability to regulate carbon emissions from power plants, dealing a blow to the Biden administration's efforts to address climate change.
Photo by T.J. Kirkpatrick of The New York Times / The coal- and natural gas power plant that services the U.S. Capitol campus a few blocks away, in Washington, is shown on June 30, 2022. The Supreme Court on Thursday limited the Environmental Protection Agency's ability to regulate carbon emissions from power plants, dealing a blow to the Biden administration's efforts to address climate change. Photo by T.J. Kirkpatrick of The New York Times / The coal- and natural gas power plant that services the U.S. Capitol campus a few blocks away, in Washington, is shown on June 30, 2022. The Supreme Court on Thursday limited the Environmental Protection Agency's ability to regulate carbon emissions from power plants, dealing a blow to the Biden administration's efforts to address climate change.

By Pam Sohn 5 min read

Just as with abortion, our dangerous new majority Supreme Court didn’t have to go beyond the case in front of it to decide a clean air case and endanger the earth. But it did.

Ruling 6-3 in West Virginia v. EPA, the court in essence took authority away from Congress by turning a congressional mandate to the U.S. Environmental Regulatory Agency on its head, rolling back the guts of fighting climate change. What’s more, the court took this action at a point when we’ve little time left to try avoiding the worst impacts of global warming.

Please let us outline the setting. Here in Hamilton County and much of East Tennessee in late March and early April, usually rainy periods in our locale, we were under “high fire danger alerts.” Tennessee icon Dolly Parton was asking for prayers to help the firefighters working to fight spreading flames in the Smokies and in East Tennessee. Meanwhile, thousands of miles away in Antarctica, the Thwaites Glacier, a frozen chunk the size of Florida and holding enough ice to raise global sea levels at least two feet, was terrifying scientists with its melting as temperatures there soared 40 to 70 degrees above normal.

A month later on May 9, the Associated Press headline in the Chattanooga Times Free Press screamed, “Earth given 50-50 chance of hitting key warming mark by 2026.” It was a prediction by a team of 11 different forecast centers for the World Meteorological Organization. In case you’ve lost your calendar, 2026 is almost exactly three and a half years from now.

Against this backdrop, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and the other five conservatives flexed their right-wing muscle to rule that Congress didn’t “speak clearly” when crafting Section 111 of the Congress-passed Clean Air Act to give EPA the authority to issue sweeping carbon regulations that would reshape energy policy – policy like limiting coal-fired and gas-fired power plants and encouraging alternative energy.