Court leaves dwindling paths for Biden’s climate mission
WASHINGTON » More than 500 days into his presidency, Joe Biden’s hope for saving the Earth from the most devastating effects of climate change may not quite be dead.
But it is not far from it. A Supreme Court ruling Thursday not only limited the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to regulate climate pollution by power plants, but also suggests the court is poised to block other efforts by Biden and federal agencies to limit the climate-wrecking fumes emitted by oil, gas and coal.
It is a blow to Biden’s commitment to slash emissions in the few years scientists say are left to stave off worse and deadlier levels of global warming. And it is a sign, to Democrats at home and allies abroad, of the dwindling options remaining for Biden to reverse the legacy of President
Donald Trump, who mocked the science of climate change. Trump’s three Supreme Court appointees provided half of the affirmative votes in Thursday’s 6-3 ruling.
After the ruling, a veteran Democratic lawmaker acknowledged he saw little hope of Congress producing any meaningful climate legislation, either. “There’s no easy fix from Congress from this mess,” Rhode Island Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse said.
‘Bizarre direction’
The foreign allies whom Biden once spoke of leading to a global clean-power transformation are wondering if the United States can even lead itself.
The climate decision in some ways “may have broader impacts at least on the European populace that this is a country that, A: can’t get things done and B: is going in a really bizarre direction domestically,”
said Max Bergmann, director of the Europe program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
And in a Houston neighborhood entering hurricane season, a man who had spent four decades advocating for the Black communities and other communities
of color and poorer communities hit hardest by pollution and the record heat, cold, floods and storms of climate change reacted to the ruling as many others did, saying salvaging climate efforts depends on Biden now, and his willingness to act and lead.
“This is real,” said Robert
Bullard, an academic who became a pioneer in what became the U.S. environmental-justice movement, of the multiplying natural disasters — the kind scientists say are influenced by the heating atmosphere — wrecking cities on America’s vulnerable Gulf of Mexico.
“Those communities that have been flooded out ... some of those communities still have blue tarps on their houses,” Bullard said. “So I don’t think the Supreme Court and some of our elected officials are speaking about the urgency of where we are when it comes to our climate.”
Biden’s EPA still has meaningful moves left to make, but it must move quickly, Eric Schaeffer, a former director of civil enforcement at the agency, said in a statement. Among them:
• Speed up a new rule limiting carbon pollution from power plants.
• Make long-overdue updates to standards on toxic discharges from the plants.
• Move faster to crack down on leaks of climatedamaging methane in natural gas, as the Biden administration has already promised.
After Thursday’s ruling, the EPA pledged to put forward a new proposed carbon rule for power plants by early next year.
Biden has pledged to cut the nation’s greenhouse-gas emissions in half by the end of the decade, and to have an emissions-free power sector by 2035.
“Our fight against climate change must carry forward, and it will,” Biden said in a statement after the ruling that offered no guarantees of success.
His team would “find ways that we can, under federal law, continue protecting Americans” from pollution and climate change, Biden said.