Before Thursday’s Presidential debate and several disturbing Supreme Court decisions were announced, I planned to focus on the enormous gap between the climate change policies of the Presidential candidates. Rather than write about those differences, the headlines and links to articles below tell the story clearly. If you care about reducing carbon emissions to slow the impact of climate change, vote Democrat over Republican. This is generally true not only in the President’s race, but up and down the ballot.
How the U.S. Supreme Court’s decisions can undo federal efforts to address Climate Change
The President is not the only player when it comes to environmental policy and the power of federal regulation. On Friday (June 28, 2024), the U.S. Supreme Court issued a decision in Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). The Associated Press headline and first paragraph sum it up, and the article explains: What it means for the Supreme Court to throw out Chevron decision, undercutting federal regulators. “WASHINGTON (AP) — Executive branch agencies will likely have more difficulty regulating the environment, public health, workplace safety and other issues under a far-reaching decision by the Supreme Court.
After Friday, virtually every decision an agency makes will be subject to a free-floating veto by federal judges with zero expertise or accountability to the people.
Mark Joseph Stern of Slate
This ruling will have a disastrous effect on every federal agency’s ability to regulate corporate behavior that is potentially harmful to the American people. To better explain the impact of the decision, I respectfully offer the perspective of The Climate Reality Project and Mark Joseph Stern of Slate.
Stern’s piece in Slate is titled Elena Kagan Is Horrified by What the Supreme Court Just Did. You Should Be Too. The first paragraph explains the impact of the ruling:
“The Supreme Court fundamentally altered the way that our federal government functions on Friday, transferring an almost unimaginable amount of power from the executive branch to the federal judiciary. By a 6–3 vote, the conservative supermajority overruled Chevron v. NRDC, wiping out four decades of precedent that required unelected judges to defer to the expert judgment of federal agencies. The ruling is extraordinary in every way—a massive aggrandizement of judicial power based solely on the majority’s own irritation with existing limits on its authority. After Friday, virtually every decision an agency makes will be subject to a free-floating veto by federal judges with zero expertise or accountability to the people. All at once, SCOTUS has undermined Congress’ ability to enact effective legislation capable of addressing evolving problems and sabotaged the executive branch’s ability to apply those laws to the facts on the ground. It is one of the most far-reaching and disruptive rulings in the history of the court.”
The Climate Reality Project’s newsletter sent this message: “Today’s Supreme Court decision to overrule the longstanding Chevron doctrine is a big deal. It strips experts at agencies like EPA of the power to do their jobs and gives unelected judges the final say in complex matters far beyond their expertise, such as regulating air pollution and fighting climate change. And there’s a reason fossil fuel interests helped bring these cases: To undo the policies protecting our families from pollution and climate change and allow them to continue to pollute without recourse.
With just six years left to halve emissions and avert catastrophic warming, we need bold commitments. We need urgent climate action. This is a huge setback. But our grassroots network isn’t giving up and neither should you. From holding world leaders accountable to their climate commitments to preventing climate-changing fossil fuel projects from ever being built, our network of 3.5 million is fighting for a just and sustainable future for all.”
To help The Climate Reality Project continue its work, please donate here.
What Biden vs. Trump, or Democrats vs. Republicans, will do about climate change
I urge you to read through the articles cited below to get a more complete picture about how the Democratic and Republican Parties differ on their approach to the fossil fuel industry, the increase in greenhouse gases, and the resulting climate change and weather disasters we are facing every day in the U.S. and throughout the world.
The Hill: Trump posts climate talking points online before debate with Biden
NPR: Biden has taken more action on climate than any president. His pitch? It creates jobs
The New York Times: Biden vs. Trump on Climate Policy
By Manuela Andreoni
“The stark differences between the candidates have major implications for the planet’s climate.
The bottom line: The Biden administration’s climate policies are expected to cut the country’s greenhouse house gas emissions by 40 percent by 2030, from 2005 levels, though his policies are not meeting expectations in some areas.
In March, the news service Carbon Brief estimated that a Trump victory could result in more than four billion tons of additional U.S. emissions by 2030. The extra emissions in a second Trump term, Carbon Brief estimates, “would negate — twice over — all of the savings from deploying wind, solar and other clean technologies around the world over the past five years.”
Missouri Independent: Presidential election seen as climate turning point as CO2 hits record
“And in the early days of his presidency, Biden promised to cut 2005-level emissions in half by 2030. According to the World Resources Institute, a Washington-based research organization, the U.S. is on track to achieve that goal…Trump has criticized Biden’s record on climate and energy and has pledged to defer more to the oil and gas industry. At an April meeting at Mar-a-Lago, the former president’s South Florida club and residence, Trump told the country’s top oil executives that if elected, he’d reverse Biden’s environmental policies and stop all future ones, according to the Washington Post. In exchange, Trump asked them to contribute $1 billion to his campaign.”
Bill McKibben on the Fallout from the Presidential Debate
McKibben, founder of Third Act and an avowed advocate for climate change has expressed my own views about the impact of President Biden’s poor performance in Thursday’s debate, along with the horrible character and policy views of his opponent. I thought it best to simply share his recent communication to Third Act members:
Give Joe Some Room – If it’s time to withdraw he will–and in the process perhaps reshape our politics
| “What happened of course was that Biden looked feeble. Yes, Trump lied with his usual feral energy, and yes the CNN moderators were utterly inept. But both those things were givens. What wasn’t a given was Biden’s performance. He lacked the agility and the poise to handle Trump’s onslaught, and it wasn’t close. The single easiest question for Biden should be abortion—polling shows people detest the end of Roe. But here’s how Biden handled it: “I supported Roe v Wade, which had three trimesters. First time is between a woman and a doctor. Second time is between the doctor and an extreme situation. And a third time is between the doctor – I mean, it’d be between the woman and the state.” That’s not okay. I’m a Biden supporter, I helped write Third Act’s endorsement of Biden, if Biden is the nominee I’ll work as hard as I can to make sure he wins—I spent yesterday afternoon planning out campaigning trips to Nevada, Arizona, and Pennsylvania in the final weeks of the election, because I think older voters will be key, and that we can rally them to defeat Trump. (And nothing I write here speaks for Third Act, or anyone else but me). An ineffective Biden would be a hundred times better (and a hundred times less worse, which might be more important) than any version of Donald Trump. But again, that’s not enough. Politics is about changing people’s minds, channeling their intuitions, organizing their moods. Communication is the main tool for that. And Biden is no longer a consistently effective communicator. He’s got good people around him, he can and has made wise decisions, I am not worried about the operation of the Republic under his care. But clearly he can no longer count on his ability to rally Americans. He can no longer reliably summon people to action, appeal to their better angels, let them share a vision of a workable future; There’s no shame in that. Most people never have that ability. Biden himself has never been a great speechifier, but across his long career he has always been able to communicate an effective in-your-corner regular-guy I’ve-got-this message. He’s been reassuring. He’s been a father figure, trending towards cool grandfather. But eventually you’re a great grandfather, and your hard-working days are behind you. Which is fine. You still have plenty to contribute, but that contribution is in the form of counsel, not leadership; it’s in the form of support, not of dominance. He’ll be reluctant to admit it, because we all are reluctant to admit, even to ourselves, the things we lose as we age. (One of the odd secrets of aging is that you really don’t feel older from the inside). And perhaps he doesn’t need to admit it yet—we can wait a few days for the polling data to emerge, and perhaps it will show nothing. But I doubt it. And I think Biden will get this. He’s a patriot, he’s spent his life in service, he clearly understands that the country is more important than any person. So he will steel himself to the task of watching the tape of last night’s debate, and he won’t make excuses. And then he may say ‘I’ve done my part well—I rescued America from Trump and from covid. And now I have one great duty left, which is to pass on the reins. So I’m freeing up my delegates to choose someone else.’ That’s not easy to do—save for the sad example of LBJ, no one’s ever really had to. It will take courage, and self-knowledge, and it will take time. But there is some time, thank heaven. Give him some time. It’s not that far from someone deciding that they need to leave their home and move into a retirement community; it’s an admission that one time is past and another coming. But there’s the chance for this to be not just a defensive decision, but a proud and game-changing one—perhaps our best chance for getting out of the wearying rut of our contemporary politics. Let’s say those delegates (perhaps with a bit of prodding from Biden) choose someone who America doesn’t know particularly well. There’s plenty of possibilities, but just for the sake of the argument my choice would be Gretchen Whitmer, the governor of Michigan, because she’s progressive and normal at the same time, and because she’s very popular in her upper Midwest state. She’d carry it, and likely she’d play well in the demographically similar states of Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, and that will be that. But there’s more. She, or someone like her, could be an actual new voice—a new chance, a new door opening. And it feels like that is what we desperately need—our politics have grown stale and brittle and carping; the same people at the forefront. (That’s why, by the way, I think it would be noble of Kamala Harris to take a pass too—we need something new). Whitmer, for instance, could say—’these MAGA guys literally tried to kidnap and kill me. But I stood them down easily, and I didn’t let it get to me. Because we have work to do.’ That would be exciting. We need exciting. We need new. We need a door out of the emotional prison that our country has become. And now we have, unexpectedly, a moment that might give us that door. It’s not like we won’t have time to adjust to someone new—our current news cycle guarantees we’d know all about a Whitmer or a whoever within days, and we wouldn’t have time to grow tired of her before November. She or someone like her would unleash the energy of the possible, at a moment when in fact we have huge possibilities. On energy, for instance: Biden has done a beautiful job of working the IRA through Congress, but the polling shows he’s never managed to make its importance sink in. He couldn’t explain its power last night, couldn’t summon people to a future that runs on the sun. That’s a crucial task, a way of giving young people hope as they face a daunting future. Not just young people—really, most Americans keep saying they’d like a fresher choice for our future. Suddenly there’s a moment when that could happen. People keep saying ‘Biden won’t step aside, so we need to support him.’ And if he doesn’t we must. But the very thing that make him worth supporting—an old-fashioned commitment to something more than himself—is the thing that may convince him (and his wife, who actually loves him) to do the bold and interesting thing. To do the thing that could mark a new moment in our political life. If Biden chooses to stay in, so be it—I’ll work my heart out for him, and ungrudgingly. But even if he manages to win, we’ll still be stuck in the same poisonous paralysis we inhabit now. Someone sometime has to break us out of this stalemate, and it might as well be that right man for this moment, good old Joe Biden. Trumpism is selfishness—that is its parts and that is its sum. With a powerful act of selflessness Biden can break the evil spell that selfishness has cast. It would be a remarkable thing for an old man to do, and a hell of a way to cap a career that began in the 1960s. Ask what you can do for your country! |
My only addition to what McKibben says is that the combination of a Democratic President, Democratic-controlled Senate, and Democratic-controlled House of Representatives can and should lead to changes in the U.S. Supreme Court’s make-up. Increasing the number of Justices, setting term limits, and establishing enforceable ethics rules for the U.S. Supreme Court can restore the type of balance needed for the Court’s role in a true democracy.
