SUPREME COURT ADDS TO CLIMATE EMERGENCY
Day in and day out, the evidence that the climate emergency has arrived keeps piling up. Wildfire threats, rising sea levels, extreme heat, shrinking ice masses at the poles and water shortages are all expected to intensify for decades to come. Unless dramatic steps are taken to limit the emissions warming the atmosphere, it is not apocalyptic to say humanity faces an existential threat. But can humanity rise to the challenge? There are reasons to be doubtful because of a combination of factors — skepticism of authorities; a reflexive preference for the status quo and opposition to change; dismay over the expense and difficulty of responding to the threat; individual indifference and distraction. The cliches about how difficult it is to shift the direction of a massive aircraft carrier come to mind.
This week, however, put a spotlight on another impediment: the fundamental sluggishness of democratic government. The U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling Thursday in West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency — in which the court agreed with officials from that state that federal regulators lack the authority to regulate carbon emissions from power plants — has profound and grim implications for U.S. efforts to respond to the climate emergency.
In a vacuum, the 6-3 vote by the conservative majority was completely predictable and — according to many legal intellectuals — justifiable. When the EPA was created in 1970, the argument goes, the agency was given considerable authority — but not unlimited authority. And so — in keeping with recent high court rulings reining in edicts from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration — Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in his majority opinion that the EPA was making “a decision of such magnitude and consequence [that it should rest] with Congress itself.” Roberts, keep in mind, has worked for a decade to rein in the court’s conservative ideologues on issues such as abortion, Obamacare and immigration. Yet this case didn’t seem difficult to him; it seemed obvious. Laws originate with the legislative branch of government — period.
This follows the same logic embraced by The San Diego Union-Tribune Editorial Board for decades in opposing presidents of both parties who used “executive orders” to sidestep congressional opposition.
But the problem the EPA sought to address isn’t arcane. It’s about a looming global catastrophe. It’s about how the most powerful nation on Earth behaves and whether it sends the right message to the world about the urgent need for change. If a president’s ability to take constructive action and send such messages depends on whether he or she can get majority support from Congress over the opposition of the juggernaut that is the fossil-fuel industry — and coal-dependent states like West Virginia — then gridlock feels inevitable.
Yet this past week also brought reasons to hope that change is possible — even within the limits inherent in representative democracy.
In Sacramento, Gov. Gavin Newsom secured the Legislature’s approval of a far-reaching measure meant to achieve two goals: making it easier to approve renewable energy projects over local opposition and keeping the stressed power grid up and running in coming years by prolonging operations at Diablo Canyon, the state’s last remaining nuclear plant, and four fossil fuel plants along the Southern California coast. Environmentalists’ reflexive opposition to goal No. 2 is oblivious to the fact that nothing is more likely to turn the public against an embrace of renewable energy than if the state can’t keep the lights on as a result.
In San Diego, Mayor Todd Gloria, the City Council and environmental activists this week reached a compromise on Gloria’s Climate Action Plan 2.0 in which the mayor committed to setting clearer timelines for emission reductions, to the applause of Nicole Capretz and the Climate Action Campaign.
Neither development would have seemed particularly likely a month ago. But state and city leaders showed that it’s possible to be pragmatic and idealistic at the same time. If federal leaders can do so as well, hopes that humans can survive a massive mess of their own making get dramatically better.