Scientific Ignoramuses On The Supreme Court Set To Decide If US Gov Allowed To Act On Global Warming
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This reality doesn’t seem to have penetrated the high court’s marble walls. In questioning Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar about the extent of the EPA’s statutory authority, Justice Samuel Alito twice denied the reality of the climate emergency. “What weight do you assign to … climate change, which some people believe is a matter of civilizational survival?” And in a follow-up question, he again framed dangerous climate disruption in hypothetical terms, stating that he didn’t see how considering costs of regulation would limit the EPA’s authority “if you take arguments about climate change seriously, that this is matter of survival.” (Emphases added.)
In these statements, Alito acknowledges that, if you believe the scientific consensus that there is a climate crisis, then it would be illogical to fail to respond because the costs of human suffering would dwarf any costs incurred by the fossil fuel industry. That’s no doubt true, but as Prelogar deftly explained in response, there are significant statutory limits on the EPA’s ability to regulate regardless of the enormity of the air-pollution problem the agency seeks to address. The larger, more important, point here is that Alito is apparently not among those “people” who view climate change as a global existential crisis—and, tragically, he’s also a justice about to render a decision about the extent of the EPA’s climate authority.
So will Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who has also engaged in climate-crisis denialism. During her Senate confirmation hearing, she refused to accept that “climate change is happening and is threatening the air we breathe and the water we drink.” Rather, she suggested that the question was inappropriate. When asked by then Sen. Kamala Harris whether she considered coronavirus to be infectious, cigarettes to be carcinogenic, and climate change to be real, Barrett responded: “You have asked me a series of questions that are completely uncontroversial … and then trying to analogize that to elicit an opinion … from me on a very contentious matter of public debate, and I will not do that.” Alarmingly, Barrett’s characterization suggests that she would deem many regulations aimed at responding to the climate crisis as attempts to address a so-called “major question” that agencies are supposedly without authority to address. In recent shadow docket opinions, Alito, Barrett, and the four other conservative justices struck down rules of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration providing COVID-19 protections on major-questions grounds, in part due to the “controversial” nature of COVID-19 response measures. According to Barrett’s previously articulated position, this line of thinking could also be applied to climate protections.
In a recent commentary, I detailed the problems with the court’s grant of certiorari in West Virginia v. EPA and with the conservative justices’ specious use of the major questions “doctrine” to strike down agency authority in the COVID-19 cases. In short, the danger of their use of the doctrine is that, under the guise of requiring that Congress answer the question rather than agencies, the court, the least accountable branch, in effect answers the question in favor of no action.
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https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2022/03/supreme-court-climate-skeptics-barrett-alito.html
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