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Comment by aaron_m04 | Hacker News Reader

> [...] if the Congress wants EPA to regulate emissions the way they tried to do, all it needs to do is to pass a law explicitly instructing it to do so. Of course, it won’t, because there is no political will in Congress to pass this.

At this stage in the climate crisis, we really need to be focused on direct results of political actions. The majority of the US population wants regulations to fight climate change, and the consensus among climate scientists is that if we don't aggressively cut carbon emissions immediately, things will get really out of hand. Therefore, if the Supreme Court is reducing the EPA's ability to help this, it is both anti-democratic and massively harmful to the public good. It really doesn't matter that the EPA is executive overreach according to some document written 230 years ago.

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No, I strongly disagree. If elected representatives cannot agree on what is proper policy and pass it as law, I for one do not want some nameless bureaucrats be the ones calling the shots. Unelected bureaucrats creating policy as they wish, unconstrained by what the law actually says, is what actually is undemocratic.

Look, even as there might be general agreement among the people to fight climate change, there might be little to no agreement among the people as to how to actually proceed doing that. Because of this, you cannot say that blocking EPA here is undemocratic, because “ majority of the US population wants regulations to fight climate change”: it is very much untrue that majority of people want the exact policy that EPA tries to introduce, and have it be executed by EPA. It’s like saying that majority of US population want regulations to improve their commute times, so SCOTUS cannot block DoT from eminent-domaining land through cities and building 10 lane highways on it. Some people want that, sure, but others want more trains or zoning regulations to improve walkability, and there is no majority agreement here on the details of the policy. You certainly don’t want unelected bureaucrats with no accountability to voters be deciding major issues like that.

We are in such a desperate situation with the climate that we pretty much have to look at which of the two is most likely to enact policies that cut carbon emissions: is it the EPA, or Congress?

The current situation is not in any way desperate. All claims that a desperate crisis exists are based on the assumption of feedback loops that do not yet show up in any actual data and in fact many temperature datasets e.g. from satellites, weather balloons or the USA's own state of the art surface temperature network show virtually no warming at all for decades. To see warming you have to look at heavily modified composite datasets that are constantly being revised using methodologies so extreme that they literally create entirely new trends where the raw data doesn't contain any.

In an environment with as much epistemic uncertainty as climatology has, it is madness to allow bureaucrats to control anything at all. They are in no way fit to make important decisions on scientific topics.

Your claims are really beyond belief. They fly in the face of everything I've seen these past several years. No warming, really?

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