Supreme Court cripples the US government's power to fight climate change

[C C]

https://www.livescience.com/supreme-cour...nge-ruling

EXCERPTS: The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday (June 30) severely limited the federal government's ability to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, in a 6-3 ruling split between the court's conservative majority and liberal minority.

[...] The case in question is based on an EPA policy called the Clean Power Plan, which President Barack Obama unveiled in 2015. The plan proposed three carbon-reducing strategies for states, including a shift to more renewable energy and a call to use more natural gas in order to retire heavily polluting coal plants, Vice.com reported. However, the Supreme Court blocked the Clean Power Plan from coming into effect in 2016.

The plan was never enacted, nor was an alternative EPA emissions policy successfully put into place by the Trump or Biden administrations. However, coal companies and several Republican-dominated states, including West Virginia, continued to fight against the hypothetical provisions in the now-defunct plan, finally bringing their complaints to the Supreme Court in West Virginia v. EPA.

While some legal scholars argued that the court should not hear the case at all, as the plaintiffs were fighting a regulatory plan that never took effect, the court agreed to hear the case and rule on whether the EPA should have the authority to enact any similar greenhouse gas emissions-reducing policies on a national scale in the future.

The court's ruling — that the EPA cannot mandate nationwide energy policies to limit greenhouse gas emissions without specific approval from Congress — threatens to cripple the U.S. government's ability to fight climate change, according to the dissent... (MORE - missing details)

[Yazata]

EXCERPTS: The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday (June 30) severely limited the federal government's ability to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, in a 6-3 ruling split between the court's conservative majority and liberal minority.

The Supreme Court decision wasn't really about regulating greenhouse emissions at all. The decision reins in the power of Executive Branch agencies to simply write law by fiat, by calling what they are doing "regulations". In particular, the Supreme Court decision addresses dramatic changes that transform the whole of the US economy and society. The decision says that it is Congress, made up of the people's elected representatives, that Constitutionally decides on major matters of national policy like that, that decide the future direction of the country, rather than unelected civil-service bureaucrats at the EPA or in some other Washington DC office.

The court's ruling — that the EPA cannot mandate nationwide energy policies to limit greenhouse gas emissions without specific approval from Congress

It isn't a matter of "specific approval". It's that it's the people's representatives in Congress who are Constitutionally empowered to set "nationwide energy policies", not the EPA. The EPA is merely empowered in legislation that Congress passes to write regulations to achieve the goals that Congress sets.

threatens to cripple the U.S. government's ability to fight climate change, according to the dissent

And that implicitly concedes that the policies that the dissenting "liberal" justices favor would never be passed by Congress and must therefore be forced on the nation in an authoritarian fashion by extra-Constitutional means.

Isn't 'liberalism' supposed to be about liberty and the consent of the governed? How did liberalism transform itself into an increasingly authoritarian ideology of social control of the people (imagined as ignorant, backward and bigoted) by supposedly superior government (and media and educational) elites? Today's caricature of "liberalism" has somehow become profoundly anti-democratic.

This Supreme Court decision might very well be epochal in US history. I suspect that it will be. It's definitely the most important decision the Supreme Court has handed down this year.

It doesn't "cripple the US government's ability to fight climate change". It isn't really about climate change. It just requires that Congress needs to pass the necessary legislation.

What the decision does do is dial back the power of the federal bureaucracy's ability to effectively rule the country facelessly from deep the shadows, through the hundreds of thousands of pages of federal regulations they produce every year, minutely governing every aspect of American life.

[Syne]

Democrats haven't been liberals for a very long time. That's why I call them leftists. It's very much in the same vein as Islamist, where any means necessary are suitable to forward their ideology.