1970 Clean Air Act was intended to cover carbon dioxide
e360.yale.edu
e360.yale.edu
For what it's worth, the linked press release's description of the Supreme Court's decision is wrong; the court did not, in fact, hold that "Congress had not empowered the EPA to regulate greenhouse gases," but that it could not regulate in the manner that it did. And, so far as the statute at issue is concerned, the evidence is overwhelming that it was never intended to empower EPA to restructure the nation's electricity system. I wrote a fair bit about this at the time, and was apparently persuasive.[1]
[1] https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/20/20-1530/204857/202...
Separately, while it’s very interesting that you played a role in writing this, and I believe that you’re correct in general about the errors in the linked articles: despite the fact that you are highly experienced, there are still idiots who win court cases, even Supreme Court cases, on crap arguments, sometimes. However, idiots never become surgeons. In my personal experience, I don’t know any idiots who also write sophisticated software. So this idea that there is some kind of objective, apolitical correct interpretation of a statue - that the practice of law at the highest levels in trials in front of the Supreme Court has this major objective element to it as surgery and math does - is kind of bupkis, you are as much practicing something imaginary, subjective, political, and poetical as the musings of Alan Ginsburg as the professors do.
So what is your opinion: do you really think Supreme Court decisions are apolitical? How would you tell the difference between a politically motivated decision that uses your arguments as a “parallel construction” to support that political decision, and a sincere belief that your way of reading the statue is objective and apolitical? Because that is what people are pissed off about.
That would once have been taken as gospel, then came Ben Carson standing by his statement that Egyptian pyramids were built for grain storage.
In the medical world there are strong opinions as to whether the procedural dexterity inherent in excelling as a surgeon also requires better than average reasoning prowess.
Carson has also uttered statements in total sincerity that boggle the minds of historians, physicists, and the generally logically inclined. When questioned he's doubled down on "reasoning" that is considered to be anything but.
It highlights that we as a whole need to consider our role models for various peaks of achievement; medicine is a hard degree, it takes epic feats of rote memorisation and recall of thick textbooks, the ability to associate collections of indicators with multitudes of potential causes, the ability to grind and grind hard long hours through residency.
Surgery, for some, is a turn away from diagnostics towards human carpentry .. with no disrespect to surgeons, that's a framing they've heard before and a number embrace.
Really? One need only look at lists of physicians whose medical licenses have been revoked or who have been sued for malpractice or abusing their patients to disabuse themselves of the notion that "idiots never become surgeons". Heck the history of medicine itself is instructive on that front. Education and success in a specific field does not preclude you from being an idiot in others or indeed even within your own field.
People are so fixated on a result (in this case lowering CO2 emissions) that they can't see past that to consider the actual fundamental legal principles of court decisions, especially supreme court ones. I see this as a failure of our legislative branch, they are incapable of legislating effectively and people look to the courts to achieve their desired ends. Moreover it seems like people don't consider the negative effects if courts decided cases in the other direction (e.g. how federal agencies could abuse their authority if Chevron had been upheld).
I try to read the actual decisions, especially for Supreme Court ones, especially when I superficially disagree with the result and I very rarely end up disagreeing with the decisions. It's bizarre to me how the media only reports on how they disagree with the result (which is a legitimate opinion) and completely fail to discuss, debate or report on the legal theory behind the decision, they commonly seem to not even report on the actual legal question being decided! I have never seen a single mainstream news article which correctly casts blame on congress for failing to legislate effectively or unambiguously.
In a lot of cases, they do more than that and outright misrepresent it.
Uh, the US has a deeply dysfunctional system. It covers most aspects of governance, judiciary, legislative, electoral system, the fifth estate.
It’s entirely reasonable people are only concerned with outcomes, and not process.
Alternatively, we pass giant tomes of legislation (esp budgets) which literally nobody can understand let alone agree on.
Conversely, not passing laws is a feature, not a bug.
> Alternatively, we pass giant tomes of legislation (esp budgets) which literally nobody can understand let alone agree on.
I agree. These massive laws are rushed through precisely because leadership knows that people won't have enough time for debate, let alone in proper order.
No, instead the system is working as designed. When there is no consensus on a policy, the policy is not passed.
In a representative democratic system.
The US does not have a representative democratic system.
That's not even close to how laws get passed. If what you say were true, then why don't we have many laws the vast majority of Americans want and have laws most Americans oppose? Americans are overwhelmingly against gerrymandering, but miraculously there's no law banning the practice. They also disapprove of overturning Roe v Wade and corporations being considered people. They support legalization of marijuana, support free college education, early voting, data privacy legislation, criminal justice reform, and a 4 day work week but again no help there.
"who fund their campaigns" fits at the end, doesn't it?
ref: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=what+are+bills+written+by+lobbyist...
Although "who kept a lucrative job waiting for them, once their term ends" works too.
ref: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=revolving+door+congress&ia=web
It's a very short-sighted thinking of how the process change they want to achieve their outcome today could result in someone else using that same process change for a very bad outcome in the future.
This point needs to be amplified to a near unbearable volume. Turn it up to 11, as it might be said.
Discussions like packing SCOTUS to achieve "desirable" outcomes today completely ignore what the next person in office can/will do with such a precedent tomorrow. We can see this already with Executive Orders and how commonplace they have become - only for the next person in office to undo most or everything.
People, in general, need to be more focused on what is best for the nation long-term, not what is best for their political party today. Unfortunately for many, it seems, the difference has become blurry or unrecognizable. So many people have become victims of believing whatever propaganda their party of choice has put out there, and become hostile to any viewpoints that do not fall inside those lines. "We'll lose our democracy if X happens or if Y is elected". How many "most important elections of our lifetime" are we going to have?
How many more candidates will buck precedent and try to actively overturn election results?
In my estimation each election is quite consequential if at least one candidate is behaving in a way that undermines democratic norms.
Do you see the problem?
That's the short sightedness the GP was commenting about, and it's kind of nutty to realize so few people comprehend such a basic concept. Yet, here we are.
MAD only works when both sides are rational.
Nobody is packing the court right now. What’s on the table (and only as a discussion, not even as an actionable legislative proposal) is a reasonable package of term limits and meaningful ethics rules — rules that frankly shouldn’t even be a little bit controversial, or even necessary if the Court was doing an even mediocre job of self-policing. But if things get extreme and the Court does begin to cross political lines and override electoral decisions, then I would much rather see a Constitutional response than political violence. My hope is this possibility causes everyone to be as cautious as possible, rather than starting a political war nobody will win.
> But if things get extreme and the Court does begin to cross political lines and override electoral decisions
This is now the information bubble that was also discussed in this thread.
No, "one side" is not using the court to realize political outcomes. Both sides are - and one side had a few decade head start if we really must sling mud. Some people don't like the outcomes recently, so they attack the courts as being stacked/abused/etc. forgetting all about the past few decades where they championed nearly every outcome...
In politics, you don't always get what you want. Some people find that concept inconceivable. When they don't get what they want, it must be because of cheating/abuse/criminality/whatever.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideological_leanings_of_United...
That’s gonna take perhaps 100 years, nobody is even talking about it. One party wants to move to some sort of crypto-fascism where a former but dwindling majority will stay in power forever. The other party fashions itself as the „only“ democratic choice against that, and enjoys that position of being the only choice… and doesn’t seem to see the irony that if you’re „the only choice“ in a democratic system, it’s not a democratic system.
In the meantime while fixing the system, please deal with the climate crisis, otherwise this whole „long term view“ will be moot.
For example, I've had it argued to me that that homosexual individuals shouldn't be allowed civil unions, as doing so would lead to the bankruptcy of the federal government. The "long-term thinking" here was that allowing unions between homosexual individuals would, at some future point, lead to allowing unions between polygamous groups*, which would then lead to people joining in unions for tax purposes, which would then lead to a disruptive loss of income for the government.
We don't need to hypothesize, Chevron was the law of the land for most of our lifetimes until the self-appointed Supreme Court super-legislature intervened. Arguably Chevron itself was the courts recognizing established legislative function with federal agencies that had existed for decades prior. We can see exactly how federal agencies would or would not abuse their authority, and congress really didn't have a problem with the situation as evidenced by the the absence of legislation to change the arrangement.
The legislative failure is really that congress hasn't immediately drafted new legislation to reverse this brazen power grab, discipline the rogue justices, and reform the Supreme Court back into its place as an apolitical branch.
I would argue that federal agencies have absolutely spent those decades abusing their authority.
In the same judgment where the Supreme Court gave themselves total power to interpret technical implementations of the law, they confused nitrogen oxides with laughing gas.
I wish I shared your faith in the ability of narrowly specialized lawyers to work outside their core competency.
My faith is in the same thing all of open source places their faith in, enough eyeballs. Congress makes a law, administrators enforce said law, citizens challenge said enforcement, courts rule on the state of the law, congress makes a law. And as we iterate over this process, the bugs are ironed out, the stakeholders have input and we work ever more towards a "more perfect" ideal.
This is a wholesome, well intentioned idea that I support.
The problem is that for most of our lifetimes congress has been operating under a model, specified by the Supreme Court, that regulators would make a reasonable interpretation of the laws that congress wrote. Think of it as the city council saying "The parks service shall keep the parks clean and safe." Not splitting hairs about every possible threat to safety, or defining exactly what clean means. Like it or not, legislators can't and don't want to exhaustively consider every possibility, and they can't react in a timely fashion to novel problems.
The courts suddenly turning this arrangement on its head and seizing the reins is not something that voters or legislators ever envisioned. It's exactly the kind of disruptive, chaotic move that an apolitical court would run far away from, and exactly the kind of move that destroys faith in the courts.
The one blessing that could come from this move is that it will force the other two branch to take a sober look at the brazen partisanship of the supreme court, and hopefully exercise congress's power to deeply reform. Regardless of your political leaning, we should all want to rip partisanship out of the courts by the roots.
The parks service can continue to be mandated to "keep the parks clean and safe", but when their regulation that "no minor children shall be allowed in the parks except under the supervision of a related adult" is challenged by the local pre-schools because it prevents them from having field trips to the parks, the courts are no longer required to find that because requiring children to be supervised by relatives is a reasonable interpretation of "keeping the parks safe" that they must then conclude the regulation is within the scope of authority.
>The one blessing that could come from this move is that it will force the other two branch to take a sober look at the brazen partisanship of the supreme court, and hopefully exercise congress's power to deeply reform. Regardless of your political leaning, we should all want to rip partisanship out of the courts by the roots.
I find myself hoping that the other branches rather take a sober look at their own behavior and seek to remove the need for the courts to be so involved in the day to day operations of the government. We are in this position largely because for a few decades now Congress has abdicated their responsibility to legislate and regulate and also to represent the people in favor of deadlocking themselves and avoiding responsibility for making hard decisions. Net Neutrality is a perfect example of this. It's exactly the sort of major change in regulation of communications that congress should absolutely be responsible for outlining, and instead they have allowed the executive branch and the courts to fight it out and so we've seen it flip flop from being law to not law multiple times.
A good number of those in congress intend to exploit this opportunity to push ideological and political changes while crippling the efforts of the other members to do anything to stop them. Unless/until there are enough people in congress who see this situation for the danger that it is, there's no chance of new legislation that would do that.
Are you equally persuaded by the dissenting opinions? It seems likely that you’ve been fooled by a bunch of lawyers, who are smart and highly trained at making plausible-sounding arguments for whatever their clients require.
Constitutional law is political. The Supreme Court is recruited and appointed for their political loyalties, and to a large extent their decisions conform to their political alignment. To treat their arguments seriously about which side is correctly interpreting a very old, very ambiguous document can be an interesting academic exercise, but it misses the point about what they are actually doing.
I don't think it is possible to have judges without legal ideology because it is an inherent part of the subject.
Precisely.
The court isn't ruling about CO2 emissions, it's ruling how the government operates within the confines of our constitutional system.
If Congress fails to pass a law that correctly empowers an administrative body to regulate X, then that regulatory body should be prevented from regulating X.
The issue then gets kicked back to Congress, where their job is to refine the law to address its deficiencies.
The idea that Congress can pass overly broad laws that administrative bodies can then independently interpret that are outside the ability to challenge in a court of law seems like a terrible system.
1. Posit for a second that 1970s lawmakers did intend to delegate sweeping powers to the EPA under the CAA and allow it to regulate CO2 in ways that reshaped the every sector of the economy, when the time comes. MQD says the CAA as-written didn't accomplish that, regardless of what legislators wanted, because the EPA can't decide major questions except where legislators clearly scope and delegate that authority. True?
2. Posit that a supermajority of lawmakers, today, wanted to rewrite the CAA to actually delegate those sweeping powers of CO2 regulation to the EPA. This would be impossible, because it's not possible to enumerate all the major questions, and clearly scope and delegate the necessary authority, in order to free the EPA's hand across future decades of rulemaking impacting every major industry. True?
3. My sense is that the 2012 EPA rules mostly killed new coal plants and doomed existing facilities, practically accomplishing the same kind of "generation shifting" described in your brief. This seems like the kind of "major question" that you argue cannot be decided by EPA rulemaking. Though any number of legal and practical facts may shield those 2012 rules from post-hoc scrutiny, similar rulemakings today would probably not pass muster. True?
4. What (if any) defensible actions do you think the EPA could take, today, to reduce CO2 emissions under authorities granted by 111(d) of the Clean Air Act?
Again, thanks for your 2c.
On your third point, see the paragraph on page 38 of my brief linked above. "Generation-shifting," as used in the CPP, was EPA's claim that it could set "achievable" emissions standards based on turning off a source. One can argue about whether new-source standards satisfy the statutory test (BACT) applicable to major industrial facilities and whether the agency's decision to set those standards at a particular level is supported by the evidence or otherwise arbitrary and capricious. But that's an entirely different inquiry from whether Congress empowered EPA to switch off more or less every source of emissions in the country as it so chooses.
How do you square a legislative failure to be specific with Gorsuch lambasting the length of most modern laws?
Recent court opinions seem to take the stance that congress hasn’t legislated thoroughly and accurately, and now have crippled the chevron doctrine saying it should be in their hands.
There’s parallels here with software development, I think. It’s easy to come up with a basic system that works as intended but is not robust to failure. It’s extremely hard to near impossible to be both succinct, correct, and robust to failure. You also wouldn’t expect the PMs to be responsible for the implementation.
Of course, many lawmakers are happy to outsource the coding to special interests.
Specificity plus brevity plus non-delegation add up to a limit on the load of law that we are subjected to. It's the bias toward freedom of individual action of classical liberalism. You are entirely correct that this kind of limitation would be crippling to a software project. Gorsuch just doesn't think that the state should have that degree of detailed control.
The ambiguity, of course shifts the power to the courts to resolve.
Something to keep in mind when thinking about Chevron.
Consider the 2nd Amendment. I'm not a gun nut, and in the abstract don't care much if gun ownership was banned. However, that would require simply ignoring the 2nd Amendment. If the 2nd can be ignored, ignoring the rest cannot be far behind.
When you let a tiger into your house to get rid of the dog, the tiger won't stop there.
A constitution is not a sacred text but a very practical one. The constitution of my country went trough five major rewrites and was amended approximately a dozen of times since the last rewrite and somehow we are still a liberal free country.
The idea that touching it in any way or form is a slippery slop leading to less rights is a fallacy.
If an amendment is passed to change the 2nd amendment, that’s one thing.
But not doing that, and just banning private gun ownership (or whatever law one might want to pass that goes against the second amendment) anyway, would be a rather different thing.
The Second Ammendment could be nullified with a new Amendment that undoes the Second, but this isn't seriously entertained by gun control activists in America because it would be extremely unpopular so there's no way they could pull it off. Instead, they intend to simply ignore the law.
Anyway I’m not American. The quality or lack thereof of the US political system doesn’t really affect me. Would appreciate the US getting its act together when it comes to GHG emission however because we share the same planet.
That complaint isn't addressed by empowering political appointees from the executive to write laws the courts aren't allowed to challenge. Least of all, laws which violate he Bill of Rights!
Beyond that, the states themselves can petition for a constitutional convention. 2/3s of the state legislatures would be all it takes to kick that process off, no senate "representativity" required (unless I suppose the senate wanted to argue that "congress shall call a convention" does not obligate congress to do so. But I suspect that's a constitutional crisis even the most obstructionist senators would be reluctant to take on in the face of 2/3s of the states actually petitioning congress.
Yes, very much so. That’s part of why the UN is not taken very seriously and why the security council exists.
> The senate has plenty of representativity.
Debatable. It was certainly fit for purpose when it was set in place. Is it appropriate nowadays? Probably not, especially when you consider how it impacts the electoral college.
I tend to find the USA political system a bit dubious (I think the same of the one of my own country to be clear and I generally have a poor opinion of presidential systems anyway). Still, the country has been mostly stable until now so I guess it’s fit for purpose.
It's amazing the US has lasted as long as it has, although I've lived long enough to see a significant erosion of rights.
For example, civil asset forfeiture.
"Despite the Supreme Court’s rulings in Heller and McDonald, many constitutional historians disagreed with the court that the Second Amendment protected an individual right to “keep and bear Arms” for the purpose of self-defense in the home. Indeed, for more than two centuries there had been a consensus among judges as well as scholars that the Second Amendment guaranteed only the right of individuals to defend their liberties by participating in a state militia. However, by the late 20th century the “self-defense” interpretation of the amendment had been adopted by a significant minority of judges. The self-defense view also seemed to be taken for granted by large segments of the American public, especially those who consistently opposed gun control."
"A well educated electorate, being necessary to the proper functioning of a democratic state, the right of the people to keep and read books, shall not be infringed."
A reading of the 2nd amendment that doesn't see it as an individual right means we must read the forgoing as protecting the right to keep and read books only for the class of people that are eligible to vote, and only in the service of educating them. And realistically, if you put that text on a multiple choice SAT with the question "Who has the right to keep and read books?" I don't think you're going to get many people answering "only people eligible to vote".
Beyond that, to read the 2nd amendment as not protecting an individual right would also require an interpretation of a right of "the people" to mean something other than every other reading of "the people" throughout the rest of the document:
* The right of "the people" to peaceably assemble as outlined in the first amendment is not limited to members of religious orders or members of "the press".
* The right of "the people" to be "secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects" is certainly not limited to some government defined collection of people who only have that right while they are collectively acting.
* The "person" whose rights are protected by the fifth amendment has been time and again ruled to be an individual.
* The tenth amendment clearly distinguishes between the federal government, the states and "the people". If "the people" are supposed to be the militia, how then are they distinct from the federal government or the state?
* The fourteenth amendment refers to "persons" and their privileges, immunities, life, liberties and property. But how could the state infringe on the rights of those people if the people are the militia and the militia is an arm of the state?
It seems strange that in a collection of amendments specifically in place to outline some hard limits on government power and particularly with respect to individuals under that government, that one and only one of those limits was to restrict the government from limiting another arm of the government, but in terms that referred to individuals in every other case it was used.
Decentralized, peer-to-peer systems tend to be pretty robust. Even if a few states "fail" the others will be fine.
2)If you move it to the state-level how does that simplify the statutes?
Imagine one day we invent portable teleporters. They would immediately be used for crime once they are available on the market although there would certainly be plenty of legal uses. That sounds like something the federal government should regulate, yes? You simply can't leave that up to the states because everyone is going to have a different standard for who can own one such that all you would need to do is travel to the least regulated state, buy a teleporter, and teleport back home. Having 50 different laws saying who can and can't own one would simply not be feasible based on how easy people can travel across the country. The federal government would need to establish regulations but only if the constitution says they can. Congress in 2024 would not have any notion that those could exist and would likely not explicitly give the federal government the power to regular them.
Which is sort of the point of the structure of the US government. A government of a United collection of States, whose power is derived not from holy writ or mandate but from the people of those states granting powers to that government. If they don't grant the power, the government can't do it.
>You simply can't leave that up to the states because everyone is going to have a different standard for who can own one such that all you would need to do is travel to the least regulated state, buy a teleporter, and teleport back home. Having 50 different laws saying who can and can't own one would simply not be feasible based on how easy people can travel across the country.
And yet we do this all the time. Cars and their ownership are regulated on a per-state level, marijuana (ironically because the federal government has overstepped too far and the states and their people fought back) is legal or not in various forms on a per state level (and this as I note, despite being federally illegal). Guns, knives and indeed pepper spray are similarly regulated on a state by state basis. As are radar detectors. So much of people's day to day lives are regulated at the state levels and it works plenty fine most of the time. This need for everything to be uniform across the country is tempting, but like all things in life is full of trade offs. One shouldn't have to cast their memory too far back in time to imagine what it might be like for a federal administration run amok to have absolute authority over too many things.
(And a supreme court that will weigh in when they desire)
Federal laws are great because they can cover the majority of that stuff that applies to every state and meaning that you only have to worry about a few small changes (if any) from state to state. Federal law is more stable and can even override state laws. That's so much easier.
If every business only had the reach of a local corner grocery store, maybe state laws would be ideal, but for a national or international business the less you have to worry about local laws the better.
This is actually quite typical. Most areas of the law are not within exclusive federal preemption, so companies do have to navigate the laws of 51 jurisdictions (not counting cities and counties which may also have applicable laws) if they want to operate nationwide.
It depends on the size of the overall system. The smaller the system the easier this is to achieve.
> many lawmakers are happy to outsource the coding to special interests.
In and of itself, this is actually a good thing, as you point out:
> You also wouldn’t expect the PMs to be responsible for the implementation.
So what you really want is two third parties. One to write. The other to review. Which, we have, in that the President is entitled to veto any legislation that hasn't passed with a super majority.
I think what you would want are non-bribed congressmen writing laws for the good of the people and not to increase the wealth and power of a select few at the people's expense, while those laws are being informed/reviewed by experts who don't have a conflict of interest (which should include not accepting money/favors from people who do) and then having a President (who should also not be accepting bribes) able to veto laws.
Having corporations and lobbyists hired by industry write laws that favor them to the detriment of everyone else, then getting those same laws passed thanks to a series of dark money bribes and promises, then having a similarly bribed president rubber stamp those laws is what brought us to where we are right now.
If our current system is working as intended, then the system has failed by design and needs adjusting. If it isn't working as intended and private corporations were never supposed to be able to have this level of influence over government or have the ability to cause harm to the degree that they have, then the system still needs adjusting to correct the situation.
How do you create this rather mythical class of individual? Wouldn't the time taken to gain the expertise also subject them to bias from the companies they worked for? We can put time limits on the "revolving door" but you're essentially building a policy that actually relies on it.
> lobbyists hired by industry
When an industry is not monopolized and has healthy competition why would you expect the industry, possibly represented by a trade group, to be incapable of writing good long term policy? How do you account for the many times where this has actually happened and continues to happen?
There is a monopolization problem in many industries. This gives a single corporate entity massive power. Perhaps more power than the federal government itself. Isn't this what "too big to fail" or "too big to disband" represents? Hasn't it been shown that actual legislation is meaningless to these entities already?
> is what brought us to where we are right now.
Where did you think we were before?
> then the system still needs adjusting to correct the situation.
If laws aren't being enforced already how is modifying the system for writing them possibly going to solve your apparent complaints?
If you've known many employees you'll know that having worked for a company doesn't always instill undying devotion to that company or require placing the company's interests above all over concerns. I'm also not convinced that all experts need to have actively worked directly for the companies being regulated either.
> why would you expect the industry, possibly represented by a trade group, to be incapable of writing good long term policy?
I don't, but I do expect them to write policy that benefits them regardless of who else or how many others are hurt in the process. Corporations are amoral monsters that care only about profit. They'll happily create legislation that allows them to pollute the Earth, poison entire communities, hinder existing competitors while limiting the ability of would-be competitors to become a threat, and limit our ability to hold them meaningfully accountable for the harms they cause. In some instantiates legislation can further their selfish goals while, even if only by coincidence, also align with the general public's interest. Their legislation might also not pass as written, and through negotiation to get them what they want a representative might concede to modifications that give the people something they need as well. Industry doesn't write legalization for altruistic reasons and they certainly don't write it because they want to get or stay elected.
> Hasn't it been shown that actual legislation is meaningless to these entities already?
It shows that our current legislation hasn't been written with the intent to constrain them. We know from experience that strong regulation with teeth can do a lot of good, but industry spends massive amounts of money bribing lawmakers to throw out effective laws and regulation so that they can do whatever they want without consequence.
> Where did you think we were before?
I think that before corporations weren't spending billions every year in lobbying. I think that before Citizens United and Super PACs corporations weren't able to freely funnel unlimited amounts of money into the pockets of congressmen and presidents. Before we were in a nation that didn't grant nearly as many rights and privileges to corporations, didn't consider them people, and didn't consider money to be speech. Labor unions were much much stronger and public-interest groups had a greater influence on politicians because their voices weren't drowned out by the floods of money corporations were able to spend.
> If laws aren't being enforced already how is modifying the system for writing them possibly going to solve your apparent complaints?
Laws are being enforced, but laws constraining industry have been made limited, weak, and ineffectual following more than a century of coordinated efforts by corporations to corrupt our political system, overturn laws and regulations that limit their profits and power, and weaken the ability for anyone to hold them accountable. By modifying our system for writing laws in ways that seek to minimize corruption and limit the ability for corporations to pass self-serving policy, reforms to undo much of the damage they've caused our political system become possible. I do not believe that it is impossible to limit the outsized and still growing influence of corporations on our laws and political system. I think that we can still fight against corruption in politics, but we can't do that while the very cause of that corruption is writing our nation's policy and filling the pockets of politicians with limitless cash.
If Congress wants the EPA to regulate CO2 they should just pass that as a law. The reticence to act on this is bananas. Congress has all the power here -- they can give the EPA discretion or specify a mandate for how they handle CO2.
> greenhouse gases fit well within the CAA's capacious definition of air pollutant
- United States Supreme Court
The clean air act was already ruled to include greenhouse gasses. It's not under dispute, this court just disputes it because they have the power and ultimately are playing an end game of fostering a conservative government, i.e. they have long term political interests.
But they did not authorize the way that the EPA was setting standards for gas-fired power plants. The technicalities here run deep, but the fact that some academics at Yale think that it should be allowed tells us nothing -- already, three of the most brilliant legal minds in the country have already publicly dissented from the Supreme Court's opinion on the subject.
In the face of the ambiguity, the bias should be for the legislature to act to correct the ambiguity. There is no constitutional issue at stake, just a question of what the act authorized. Congress can just deal with this.
EDIT: This is incorrect; as pointed out below, the 1970 Act did not mention greenhouse gases or CO2 specifically. As of the 2022 amendment to the act there are several explict areas where greenhouse gases are specifically mentioned.
The text of the 1970 Clean Air Act is at https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/91/hr17255/text, in which places does the text specifically call out the authority of the EPA to regulate CO2?
I do not see the words "CO2" or "carbon dioxide" in the text. I see references to "carbon monoxide" and "hydrocarbons" neither of which refer to CO2.
You may also be interested in the 2022 amendments to the Clean Air Act passed by Congress, which explicitly enumerate greenhouse gases as substances to be regulated by the EPA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_Air_Act_%28United_States....
That does not contain wording "including specifically CO2", which was the assertion I responded to.
>> You may also be interested in the 2022 amendments
No, I was interested in the original assertion that the 1970 Clean Air Act "spell[ed] out certain places where the EPA has authority in regulating greenhouse gases, including specifically CO2".
The clean air act says the EPA can determine what is/is not a pollutant based off whether it can harm the public. That, to me, means the law covers CO2. I don't understand how you can interpret it otherwise.
I made a claim about specific wording which was correctly pointed out to be incorrect. There was no claim made about the "spirit" on either side or interpretation. I made a factually incorrect claim that was pointed out to be factually incorrect; I don't know why you are continuing to argue.
The argument is CO2 emissions lead to continued climate change which unless you think climate change is a hoax made by the Chinese to kill US manufacturing it is reasonably anticipated to endanger public health or welfare.
But since both sides are the same, I'm sure Congress will act with all due diligence.
Campaign donations are a powerful motivator but they lose to real public pressure every time. The public is not very interested in this problem because it's incredibly abstract and none of the proposed solutions seem designed to actually solve it without forcing a religious level of austerity on them.
Most Americans do actually want action on climate change: https://climatecommunication.yale.edu/visualizations-data/yc...
That case has implications respecting third party advertising but it has no bearing on direct campaign contributions to candidates.
> combine that with the gerrymandering of districts into very safe districts
The purpose of this gerrymandering is to reduce the total voter turnout. Most senators get elected with less than half the voting population turning out, many as little as 25%. Which means currently only 1/8 of your population needs to vote for you to win.
It's really a vulnerability they've created for themselves, but you have to have the confidence to run as a third party candidate in order to take advantage of this. This is a uniparty game that strengthens the false dichotomy and not really material for our purposes here.
> public pressure might no longer be sufficient to sway those politicians, the jury is still out on that.
Is there a case where significant public pressure has failed? Saying "voters want action on climate change" is meaningless. Of course they do. Who actually _wants_ to ruin the planet or destroy their health? Nobody.
How do we do this? Which metrics do we use? Who is responsible for implementation? What impacts will this have on average citizens? These are the questions that need answering, and unfortunately, there's too much actual division on these issues to foment a clear _federal_ plan forward let alone anything that would be effective or enforced world wide.
It's by now become rather clear that both parties have found loopholes to get around the so called firewall between the campaigns and these third parties:
https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2023/08/super-pacs-raise-mi...
> Is there a case where significant public pressure has failed?
I guess the best example would be campaign finance reform itself. That's an issue Democrats and Republicans actually agree on:
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2023/09/19/money-power-...
It is actually exactly the opposite [1]. The US is a country controlled by oligarchs.
"Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence."
[1] http://www.princeton.edu/~mgilens/Gilens%20homepage%20materi...
Lousy, that's how. Congress has been historically terrible at that the last few years. They can't even pass a budget. (No, the Nth continuing resolution for the next M months is not the same.)
So "dysfunctional" means "can't function", not just "doesn't do what I want".
That's flagrant hyperbole.
> This is mutually assured destruction,
That's even worse hyperbole.
Anyway, yes, Congress inevitably does always manage to pass a budget. There are sometime delays, the consequence of which is exaggerated to put pressure on the other side to give up ground in the negotiations, but at the end of the day it's just politics and people carry on.
> Anyway, yes, Congress inevitably does always manage to pass a budget. There are sometime delays, the consequence of which is exaggerated to put pressure on the other side to give up ground in the negotiations, but at the end of the day it's just politics and people carry on.
These two stances don't mesh.
But that misses the even bigger point. It takes Congress months of fighting back and forth on the budget every year. They barely accomplish anything else. Saying that they need to now write all of the federal regulations down to the tiniest detail (lest they spend all of their time in court doing nothing) is clearly unrealistic. Laughably so.
Edit to include: And this includes administrative agencies staffed by executive branch appointees. I'd like to see the Venn diagram of confused people who think 'no we shouldn't have an imperial presidency' but 'yes courts should defer to agency interpretations when the agency is run by appointees of the President'. Like The Office meme- it's the same picture!
Of course, that's the short term "republican makes it into office" solution. Past that, to other presidents, I don't know. In my personal opinion, I think they're banking on never having to get there.
I think their logic is basically "these people function ~identically to if they were democratic political appointees, so we might as well get the benefits of them being political appointees when we're in office". Whether that's actually accurate can be debated, but it's not just "let's not worry about ever losing ever again".
https://www.semafor.com/article/07/05/2024/trump-disavows-pr...
I mean, that's how it used to work:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pendleton_Civil_Service_Reform...
Yes, the rulebooks are literally rewritten every 4-8 years. EPA examples, Trump renewed the permit for the Keystone XL pipeline (Obama had denied it), 'rewrote key rules curbing U.S. carbon emissions and other environmental regulations' (1), rolled back all of the Obama administration's fuel economy & emission standards, rolled back efficient lighting regulations, etc. He replaced the Clean Power Plan, redefined what species are endangered, weakened the Coal Ash rule, revised the Mercury standards. And so on.
He did all of these directly through the EPA- not by passing new laws. Then, Biden reversed all of these
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_policy_of_the_Do...
The main assumption you are making here is that these career bureaucrats are not at all partisan, which is a pretty bold assumption to make. I'd like to see some evidence that this is true. That aside, if Congress isn't delegating something to the executive that's their fault. Write better laws. These people are mostly lawyers anyway. What, they forgot how to do it on the campaign trail?
Uhh, what? All of? There are 28 countries considered more democratic than the USA, and many of them have presidents.
I am not Juan Linz and I do not think having a president means we will automatically become an autocracy, but am more saying 'hey this is like the main danger to watch out for'
There are orders of magnitude more money to be made by the billionaires with a renewable based green transition than with oil. It will be the biggest transfer of wealth from the poor and middle class into the pockets of the bastardly rich in the whole history.
I think that this is a short-term picture. The US infrastructure has been set up to make owning a car a very rewarding proposition, so, of course, lots of people own cars, and that will continue to be the case as long as things stay in the neighborhood of where they are. But there's no reason that future infrastructure decisions have to be made in a way that continues to privilege cars over other forms of transportation, and car ownership will follow, with a lag, the way that infrastructure decisions point.
The problem isn't that you are wrong. You're right that Congress is for sale. The problem is, everyone is for sale, so that's a null argument; it cuts against you exactly as much as it cuts for you.
I mean, that totally blows. Don't mistake me for celebrating this. But it doesn't work as a "let's give the $BRANCH power over this" argument in any direction.
*becoming less illegal thanks to scotus https://www.scotusblog.com/2024/06/supreme-court-limits-scop...
We need a solution for bribery (including current forms of "legal" bribery).
Is this something that's recent you're seeing? I haven't done any research to find out if this has been a thing for the entire time the court has been around. I just know the media has suddenly gone after the justices since the courts majority changed from liberal to conservative for the first time in its existence.
Not at all: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lochner_era
Despite Anthony Kennedy not voting with the conservative bloc 100% of the time, he voted with them far more often than with the liberal bloc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rehnquist_Court is probably a better timeline for when the court changed from liberal to conservative.
[1] https://www.propublica.org/article/clarence-thomas-scotus-un...
[2] https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2023/09/new-filings-reveal-...
"Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor reportedly accepted nearly $2 million from Penguin Random House in a book deal, and then went on to sit in judgment of a copyright case involving that same company the following year."
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2023/may/4/sonia-sotoma...
Or the way she prodded institutions where she spoke to buy her books?
"Sotomayor's staff has often prodded public institutions that have hosted the justice to buy her memoir or children's books, works that have earned her at least $3.7 million since she joined the court in 2009."
https://www.npr.org/2023/07/11/1187005372/sonia-sotomayor-su...
Pot meet Kettle. Kettle meet Pot.
You do know the rules for disclosure were changed recently right? The ProPublica article used Thomas past dealings and then applied the recent changes to those dealings. That would seem, I don't know, a bit underhanded in their reporting no?
"The Smearing of Clarence Thomas"
Wall St Journal
April 2023
But it seems clear that the Court’s rules at the time all of this happened did not require that gifts of personal hospitality be disclosed. This includes the private plane trips. ProPublica fails to make clear to readers that the U.S. Judicial Conference recently changed its rules to require more disclosure. The new rules took effect last month.
Justice Thomas would have been obliged to disclose gifts that posed a conflict of interest involving cases that would be heard by the High Court. But there is no evidence that Mr. Crow has had any such business before the Court, and Mr. Crow says he has “never asked about a pending or lower court case.”
So then to review:
- Thomas had no obligation to disclose his trips
- The person he went on the trips with had no business before the court, nor did he ever inquire about any of the court's business.
- Thomas has said he will adhere to the new disclosure rules.
Yet:
- Sotomayor took $2M from a publisher who DID have business with the court
- Sotomayor was one of their clients and had an obvious conflict of interest
- She refused to recuse herself and ruled (shockingly) in favor of her beneficiary
And your take here is Thomas' was worst than Sotomayor's?
Maybe he is smeared for a reason?
In 1978 after the oil crisis Carter was already talking about getting off of foreign oil, we should develop renewable energy resources, be energy independent. Imagine where we'd be had we done even a few of the things he suggested?
Instead, the big oil companies, their lobbyists and OPEC made sure there would be abundance of cheap oil and then everybody just moved on and forgot about the long lines waiting for gas, rationing and other horrible stuff the oil crisis brought.
Not much has changed over the past 45 years which is pretty depressing.
And, now, for every new law that Congress passes, unelected bureaucrats in federal agencies create TWENTY-SEVEN new laws. https://www.forbes.com/sites/waynecrews/2017/08/15/how-many-...
And the size of the federal government has become simply immense, even discounting the size of the world's largest military. It's by far the world's largest employer in terms of monetary spend.
So, overturning Chevron was just a tiny step toward curbing the massive power that government agencies have over the citizens that they purport to serve.
Delegating is how things get done, surely you wouldn't like the individual details of every single thing you do at work to decided by the C-Suite.
> As of Dec. 13, 2019, 134 members of Congress and their spouses own as much as $92.7 million worth of stock in fossil fuel companies and mutual funds, according to an analysis of financial disclosures by Sludge. House members own between roughly $29.5 million and $78.2 million in fossil fuel stocks, while senators have between $3.8 million and $14.5 million invested in oil, gas, and coal interests. Members of Congress generally report the value of their investments in broad ranges, so it’s not possible to know exactly how much their stocks are worth.
https://prospect.org/power/members-of-congress-own-up-to-93-...
The people need to demand more from their elected officials but the two parties have done an outstanding job getting us to fight with each other so we forget how the corporations are controlling everything.
I hate tech people sometimes
"The term “new source” means any stationary source, the construction or modification of which is commenced after the publication of regulations (or, if earlier, proposed regulations) prescribing a standard of performance under this section which will be applicable to such source."
and
"The term “existing source” means any stationary source other than a new source."
Finally.. congress didn't hand EPA an unlimited authority to make decisions about sources. It handed them a process they must follow when it comes to ruling on "new sources."
With a law this complex, I'm not sure you can bring the intentions of a single sponsor into the consideration:
You would think that any competent lawyer would have had this research performed as part of the prior case. Makes me wonder what they actually found.
> The study, soon to be published in Ecology Law Quarterly, concludes that Congress “understood far more about the potential threat of anthropogenic climate change than either the [Supreme] Court or most commentators have recognized.”
This is an announcement and summary of key points of the study, it is not able to link to it because it's not been published yet.
Looks like it hasn't been published yet.
Marburey vs Madison was the courts interpreting the constitution to say that judicial review exists. Judicial review itself is a precedent that we've all been following in good faith.
I'd honestly love a historic review of judicial review and see if we think it's been a net positive or negative. For every civilian rights win there's also a dredd Scott, not sure how it's balanced on the whole. I've always thought it was a good thing and I like it in theory but... Now that I'm older I'm thinking about it's application in practice more critically
Here's a full list if you're curious: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_overruled_United_State...
One fun example: in 1940 they rule 8-1 that schools can compel students to salute the flag and recite the pledge of allegiance (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minersville_School_District_v....). Then 3 years later they say oops nevermind, actually you can't do that (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Virginia_State_Board_of_E...). Some justices were in the majority on both cases.
Did the Constitution change in those 3 years? No, the people changed.
The fact that the drafters were aware of the issue and didn’t make it explicit actually cuts the other way.
EDIT:
Ok, found some things. Google Image search for (no quotes) "clean natural gas" and set the range to 2000-2010. You'll find a variety of images both for and against this claim. Including things like "This Bus Is Running On Clean Natural Gas" (2009) [0] or "Clean. Affordable. Abundant. American. Natural gas is the answer. Tell Congress to put it to work." (apparently from 2010) [1]
[0] https://images.app.goo.gl/yfrQn8fYrB7zLqqh9
[1] https://images.app.goo.gl/4Aj7ybMt3wVWq49BA
Here's [2] an example from the 1980s calling it cleaner, source for me was [3].
[2] https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ympy04dETxXWfqkCn0zm9NmE1z1...
[3] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/nov/18/the-forg...
But it was around the time of this bill, so it makes one wonder.