“Looking beyond the fate of this particular prosecution, the long-term consequences of today’s decision are stark. The court effectively creates a law-free zone around the president, upsetting the status quo that has existed since the founding. This new official-acts immunity now ‘lies about like a loaded weapon’ for any president that wishes to place his own interests, his own political survival, or his own financial gain, above the interests of the nation.”
On Friday, the Court’s right-wing majority decided in
"Loper Bright v. Raimondo"
to overturn something called the #Chevron#doctrine or Chevron deference,
which granted federal agencies the authority to interpret the laws that Congress passes.
“In one fell swoop,” Justice Elena Kagan summarized in her dissent, “the majority today gives itself exclusive power over every open issue
—no matter how expertise-driven or policy-laden
—involving the meaning of regulatory law.”
Here’s how the Chevron doctrine is supposed to work.
“Sometimes Congress will use language that says, ‘Put together a system that requires companies to install systems of pollution control,’”
Sambhav Sankar, senior vice president for programs for the environmental law firm Earthjustice, told me by phone.
“What does ‘system’ mean?
What Chevron said was, when that comes up, the agency gets to take a shot at explaining what ‘system’ means.
When a judge isn’t sure of what something means, the judge defers to the agency’s definition.
By removing Chevron, what Justice Roberts is saying is,
‘When you see that word “system,” judge, you’ve got to figure out what that means.’”
When members of Congress write laws, they employ their own staffers
as well as those of committees and independent bodies like the Congressional Research Service,
which is tasked with providing “timely, objective, and authoritative research and analysis” on a nonpartisan basis.
Even with those resources, laws
—and complex regulatory statutes, especially
—are written to contain significant ambiguities,
allowing for future developments and for agencies to put their considerable resources to work in determining how best to implement federal policy priorities.
It has historically been up to the EPA, for example, to determine that when the Clean Air Act refers to stationary and moving sources of pollution,
that specifically means smokestacks, cars, and a number of other devices.
💥Judges have no relevant expertise to make such determinations but are now entrusted with that power💥 should they hear a case concerning those definitions.
👉“Judges are by design isolated from society. Their staffers are, at best, recent law school graduates,” Sankar said.
“They have no ability to do research. They’re stuck with what the parties to a case tell them.
Agencies employ hundred and thousands of scientific experts who do years of research and stakeholder outreach to learn about the impact of their regulatory decisions.”
Agency heads are also subject to the control of the democratically elected politicians who appoint them,
who can be at least theoretically held accountable for their decisions and those of their appointees come Election Day.
Judges
—on the Supreme Court, most infamously
—are comparatively insulated from democratic accountability.
What’s worse is that
right-wing operatives like Leonard Leo
have spent years stacking the judicial branchwith activist, ideological appointees
churned out of outfits like the Federalist Society,
fueled by donations from corporate polluters and other industries with a vested interest in seeing certain regulations kneecapped.
The silver lining in the court’s ruling on Friday is that the justices opted not to call into question every single decision made on the basis of the Chevron doctrine.
Sankar emphasizes that the ruling isn’t automatically deregulatory. “Agencies are still supposed to be trying to figure out the best reading of statutes.
Now Congress is taking risks whenever it writes a law.
If the statute isn’t clear they can’t be sure what a court is going to think of it,
especially with some of these aggressively deregulatory judges.
If you’re an agency now you know that you are not going to get the benefit of the doubt anymore.”
Chevron’s destruction may well also be seen as an invitation to well-resourced industries and political actors to bring cases
that can chip away at whatever rules they don’t like,
particularly if they’re heard by judges who share their friends and/or politics.
Now that Chevron is gone, it is gonna be a lot of fun to have a judge like Aileen Cannon rule on, oh, let’s say Boeing’s safety as determined by the FAA.
Add into the mix that Judges can legally get “gratuities" after they rule, and gosh! What Bonanza for justice!
Robert Hubbell:
If you work in a safe job, have medical insurance, have a retirement plan invested in the stock market, own a car or a home, have a college degree, and have access to clean water and safe food, then you owe it all to the existence of well-regulated “administrative state” that keeps the complex US economy humming along in a way that is the envy of the world.
// That’s now been subsumed by the Roberts Court. #Chevron
For decades, the court’s decision in #Chevron USA v. #NaturalResources Defense Council directed judges to defer to the interpretations of #FederalAgency ofcls in cases that involve how to administer ambiguous federal #laws. Writing for the majority, Chief Justice #JohnRoberts said that framework has proved “unworkable” [for his corporate bros] & allowed #FederalAgencies to change course w/o direction from #Congress.
[cuz MTG knows more about climate regs than career professionals]
@Crispius “Chevron Deference” is a deference to the ruling in the Chevron U.S.A., Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc. case not to the company Chevron. The case was about ambiguous language in The Clean Air Act.
In the ruling it set a 2 part test for dealing w/instances of ambiguity in federal statutes. And deferred to Federal Agencies for clarification.
Until today’s #SCOTUS ruling, #Chevron was considered the most important decision in U.S. administrative #law.
"The production of plastic, which is made from #FossilFuels, is greenhouse gas-intensive.
By the middle of the century, global #emissions from #plastic production could triple to account for one-fifth of the Earth’s remaining carbon budget, an analysis has found.
The report was released before the 4th Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee (INC4) meeting for a global plastics treaty set to start next week in Ottawa, Canada."
I recently had the misfortune to travel past Shell's huge new plastic factory at Pittsburgh PA, fed by ethane from nearby fracking. And:
"Saudi Arabian Oil, the world’s largest oil company, plans by 2030 to send about a third of its oil to chemical plants, mostly to be used for #plastics.
#Chevron, whose CEO has said that no large-scale fuel refinery will ever again be built in the U.S., is constructing two major chemical plants —one in Texas and one in Qatar."
#climate#climatechange
SCIENTISTS DISCOVER THE VILLAINS DESTROYING THE PLANET
"As the new report indicates, just 57 industrial and state entities have since the 2015 Paris agreement produced the lion's share of greenhouse gas emissions. About a third are investor-owned oil companies like the US-based #ExxonMobil and #Chevron, and England's #BP. State-owned energy corporations like Saudi #Aramco and Russia's #Gazprom make up another 36 percent (...)."
If you think all the little things we ordinary mortals do are the driver of #ClimateChange, think again - "Just 57 companies linked to 80% of greenhouse gas #emissions since 2016
Analysis reveals many big producers increased output of fossil fuels and related emissions in seven years after Paris climate deal
A mere 57 #oil, #gas, #coal and #cement producers are directly linked to 80% of the world’s #GreenhouseGas#GHG emissions since the 2016 #Paris climate agreement, a study has shown.
This powerful cohort of state-controlled corporations and shareholder-owned multinationals are the leading drivers of the climate crisis, according to the Carbon Majors Database, which is compiled by world-renowned researchers."
...
"During this period, the biggest investor-owned contributor to emissions was #ExxonMobil of the #UnitedStates, which was linked to 3.6 gigatonnes of CO2 over seven years, or 1.4% of the global total. Close behind were #Shell, #BP, #Chevron and #TotalEnergies, each of which was associated with at least 1% of global emissions."
Today in Labor History March 4, 1998: In Oncale v. Sundowner Offshore Services, Inc., the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that federal laws banning sexual harassment in the workplace also apply when both parties are the same sex. Joseph Oncale had been subjected to repeated sexual harassment by male coworkers on a Chevron Oil platform in the Gulf of Mexico.
It would be more useful to separate individual actions from collective actions. If I want to know what /I can do now/ to ensure I’m doing all I can, the collective stuff is just clutter.
Switch to Ecosia
Ecosia looks like a greenwash to me:
Microsoft syndicate
MS partnered with the absolute worst of the worst oil companies to help them find places to drill for oil (#Chevron and #ExxonMobil) which also feeds the republican party and climate denial lobbyists
Patronizes Amazon for hosting (it’s hard to be more evil than Amazon)
Reverse proxies through Cloudflare who then pushes countless graphical CAPTCHAs (see ¶9).. not to mention being responsible for compromising the privacy of everyone in the world while enshitifying 30% of the web.
Forces use of Paypal so they can sell swag, yet Paypal was caught under estimating their CO₂ footprint by something like 4000%.
Ties to Google, who helps Total Oil find places to dig for oil.
The list just goes on and on... And Ecosia hopes planting some trees will somehow offset the damage of their own existence. Not even close. Mojeek does less environmental harm by far.
Prioritize transit over cars
W.r.t. individual actions public transport doesn’t improve much because public transport systems are also quite harmful. Bicycles are the answer here. I had to take the car → tram step because it’s psychologically harder to make the big change to bicycle. But then eventually realized I could skip the wait at stops by going to bicycle. I wish I had been faster to upgrade from tram to bicycle.
Ride your bicycle instead of the car
Ah, so you had that already.. that’s the problem with this list. I guess the public transport prioritization was a collective action.
-More widespread use of contactless payments
Cash is better for the environment. The #WarOnCash is giving far too much power to banks, who also have a huge CO₂ footprint that shadows what the armored trucks do. Those banks are dumping huge amounts of money into oil companies -- see the Banking on Climate Chaos report. And see the environmental abuses column on this page. The best move is to use cash for everything.
-Require all office work to be done from home for as much as possible
Suppose it’s the middle of winter or middle of summer and 1000 employees work in an insulated energy efficient commercial building. Sending 1000 people home to heat or cool 1000 uninsulated homes is not favorable, even if those homes have heat pumps. Teleworking likely only makes sense during moderate climate times of the year.
-Improve insulation in older buildings
Perhaps a rule that employees who live in a passive home or heavily insulated home can telework all year long would inspire that.
Increase energy efficient standards with new houses with solar panels mandatory
I heard Belgium has mandated that all new builds must be a passive, meaning the not just insulated but designed with big south facing windows and everything necessary to not even need a heating or cooling system. They go as far as not even allowing a windowsill to act as a thermal bridge. Whereas in much of the US people haven’t even heard the term passive house. I spoke to a real estate agent who never heard of a passive house but he was confident that no such house existed in his state.
Someone living in a significantly sized city in the US could not find a single roofer who could install a vegetated roof. So what do you do there? Ideally roofers would get asked for a vegetated roof often enough that they come to realize they should adapt.
@dromografos Only #ClimateCriminals would boast about #fossilfuels production when our planetary home is burning and flooding. Shame on every shareholder of #Exxon and #Chevron and every govt subsidizing these criminals.
Just in time for #Davos, here's 'Taken, not earned: How monopolists drive the world’s power and wealth divide," a report from a coalition of international tax justice and anti-corporate activist groups:
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
And energy companies are getting more monopolistic, with #Exxonmobil spending $65b to buy Pioneer and #Chevron spending $60b to buy Hess. Many of the world's richest people are fossil fuel monopolists, like Charles and Julia Koch, the 18th and 19th richest people on the Forbes list. They spend fortunes on climate denial.
Wouldn’t it be cool if we made a wiki list of every action we as a society/individual can take against climate change?
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/15354536...