WV Vs. EPA Likely Means That Kids The State Forces You To Bear Will Face An Unsurvivable World

[hatrack]

EDIT

A highly controversial case, West Virginia v. EPA, is on the docket of the Supreme Court, and according to New York Times top environmental reporter Coral Davenport: “Within days, the conservative majority on the Supreme Court is expected to hand down a decision that could severely limit the federal government’s authority to reduce carbon dioxide from power plants—pollution that is dangerously heating the planet. But it’s only a start. The case, West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency, is the product of a coordinated, multiyear strategy by Republican attorneys general, conservative legal activists and their funders, several with ties to the oil and coal industries, to use the judicial system to rewrite environmental law, weakening the executive branch’s ability to tackle global warming. Coming up through the federal courts are more climate cases, some featuring novel legal arguments, each carefully selected for its potential to block the government’s ability to regulate industries and businesses that produce greenhouse gases.”

Climate is literally the tip of the iceberg. The possible court ruling attacks the very foundation of modern regulation. In the face of today’s complex, technological world, conservative state attorneys general and right-wing jurists are demanding a degree of legislative specificity that is impossible for non-experts to articulate. Our elected leaders and judges are not chemists or toxicologists. They tend to be lawyers. When they write environmental laws, they leave important details to the experts in regulatory agencies. Many contemporary regulations are the result of knowledge gained via scientific and technical expertise. Some of these regulations are controversial in conservative circles and are thought to be the product of what they’ve termed the “deep state.” This deep state is a delusional, paranoid right-wing myth, but regulatory over-reach and the arrogance of some regulators is fact and not fiction. Regulatory edicts from experts on high are deeply mistrusted by some, and while some of this mistrust is warranted, most is not. Attacks on this mythical secret cabal of decision-makers was part of Donald Trump’s political mantra.

There is an actual issue here that is worth attention: regulatory over-reach. The result can be rules that do not adequately factor in indirect impacts. Scientific experts, like Supreme Court justices, can become a little full of themselves and reach for powers they should not exercise. But the fundamentals of the regulatory state require that we defer to experts in controlling the technologies developed by other experts. This is true of both social media algorithms and smokestack emissions. We need rules to navigate technological complexity and ensure it is steered to serve the public interest. Non-experts cannot formulate those rules.

However, as Davenport indicates, the anti-regulatory fervor of America’s right wing has now reached a key inflection point. “The ultimate goal of the Republican activists, people involved in the effort say, is to overturn the legal doctrine by which Congress has delegated authority to federal agencies to regulate the environment, health care, workplace safety, telecommunications, the financial sector and more. Known as the “Chevron deference,” after a 1984 Supreme Court ruling, that doctrine holds that courts must defer to reasonable interpretations of ambiguous statutes by federal agencies on the theory that agencies have more expertise than judges and are more accountable to voters. ‘Judges are not experts in the field and are not part of either political branch of the government,’ Associate Justice John Paul Stevens wrote in his opinion for a unanimous court. But many conservatives say the decision violates the separation of powers by allowing executive branch officials rather than judges to say what the law is. In one of his most famous opinions as an appeals court judge, Associate Justice Gorsuch wrote that Chevron allowed ‘executive bureaucracies to swallow huge amounts of core judicial and legislative power.’”

EDIT

https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2022/06/21/the-supreme-court-and-radical-environmental-deregulation/

[cachukis]

1. We've been given toys to keep our eyes bouncing, rather than focused on reality.

They've played their war well while getting rich.
We are only managing predicament now.