Supreme Court EPA Decision Will Accelerate Climate Change
On June 27, a city worker in San Antonio heard a cry for help from a tractor-trailer abandoned on a desolate road. He followed the haunting cry, leading him to a horrific scene. More than 50 migrants lay dead or dying in the sweltering heat , reportedly covered in steak seasoning in what authorities said may have been an attempt to hide the stench. Forty-eight people died in that trailer, and another five were in the slow process of dying. After hearing this news, I was unable to sleep; I couldn’t stop thinking of how brutal the future of my people could be on a hotter planet. Higher temperatures will cause more deaths, and drought and other extreme weather will create even more refugees as people leave homes that are no longer livable.
As a Latino kid born and raised in Miami, I’ve known about the threats of a warming world for as long as I’ve been alive. I remember the fear I felt as a toddler when the roaring winds of Hurricane Katrina made steel structures sway in the building where I lived with my mother. In high school, Hurricane Irma barreled through Miami, hitting poor, Black, and brown communities the hardest. In the aftermath of that storm, the wealthy, white kids got power back in their homes far sooner than I did. I felt worthless in the eyes of a government that claimed to represent me. On Thursday, I woke up to a headline that conjured this familiar feeling.
In West Virginia v the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Supreme Court sided with fossil fuel executives over our communities and delivered a 6-3 ruling that severely limits the agency's power to fight the climate crisis. The ruling held that a section of the Clean Air Act can no longer be used to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from existing coal and gas fired power plants. The EPA cannot, without explicit congressional approval, establish nationwide standards to limit greenhouse gas emissions like carbon dioxide, forcing utilities to switch to renewable energy sources.
The story of how we got here begins decades ago. In the twentieth century, as a response to massive wins by social movements like the civil rights, environmental, labor, and feminist movements, a dangerous right-wing alliance of corporate executives and white supremacists began a decades-long project to reverse the progress won. They formed a coalition to dismantle their common enemy: democracy. They aimed to take over the Republican Party, exploit loopholes in the Constitution, and use stolen power to force everyone back into their nightmare world. After decades of following this playbook, this movement has hijacked the Supreme Court and turned it into a corporate-friendly, antidemocratic death cult. In many ways, the success of this movement takes us back; back to a time where women and birthing people have no rights over their bodies, back to a time when Black political power is diluted, back to a time when Christian fundamentalists can persecute those who don’t believe what they do. But the extreme right wing isn't just taking us back to the 1950s — they are taking us somewhere we've never been before.
https://www.teenvogue.com/story/supreme-court-epa-decision