Republican Drive to Tilt Courts Against Climate Action Reaches a Crucial Moment (Published 2022)
A Supreme Court environmental case being decided this month is the product of a coordinated, multiyear strategy by Republican attorneys general and conservative allies.
www.nytimes.com
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.
Implications:
Victory for the plaintiffs in these cases would mean the federal government could not dramatically restrict tailpipe emissions because of vehicles' impact on climate, even though transportation is the country's largest source of greenhouse gases.
The government also would not be able to force electric utilities to replace fossil fuel-fired power plants, the second-largest source of planet warming pollution, with wind and solar power.
And the executive branch could not consider the economic costs of climate change when evaluating whether to approve a new oil pipeline or similar project or environmental rule.
Those limitations on climate action in the United States, which has pumped more planet-warming gases into the atmosphere than any other nation, would quite likely doom the world's goal of cutting enough emissions to keep the planet from heating up more than an average of 1.5 degrees Celsius compared with the preindustrial age.
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.
The rest of the article goes into how Republicans, despite being outnumbered to the tune of millions by Democrats in the United States, have coordinated this effort to impact the lives of all existing and future Americans.