The Court rules against the planet.
A terrible decision. But we weren't doing much to begin with.
I can’t imagine we will look back on this past week and think it went well.
The week was bracketed by terrible Supreme Court rulings.
The Court denied women full citizenship early in the week and then voted 6-3 against environmental regulation of corporations yesterday.
This is Trump’s Court.
His life-time appointments will be with us for, well, a lifetime.
We will be living with a Court majority picked by an insurrectionist illegitimate President.
The New York Times’ David Leonhardt downplayed the Court’s decision on climate change.
…some of the early commentary exaggerated the decision’s meaning). The bottom line is that the ruling is significant, but it does not eliminate the Biden administration’s ability to reduce greenhouse gas pollution.
Well, that would be fine if the Biden administration and the Democratic majority in Congress were previously doing what was needed.
They weren’t.
Environmental experts agree that without immediate and radical action to curb things like greenhouse gas emissions, the planet is in real danger.
The Time’s Leonhardt makes it clear that the Republican Party is unconcerned about climate change.
That’s true enough.
But in reality only the Left wing of the Democratic Party, those who like Bernie and AOC, who have been the voices of a Green New Deal show that any Democrats take the issue as seriously as it needs to be
On this issue, like on so many others, Biden is a disaster.
Leading up to his election as President, nobody can claim that Biden’s long, long political career has been defined by environmental activism.
According to the League of Conservation Voters, Biden cast pro-environment votes 83 percent of the time over the course of his 36 years in the Senate.
That’s okay but doesn’t represent a the required sense of urgency needed to literally save the planet.
In most cases, Biden was simply lending a vote rather than proposing the legislation, and actual successes in passing those bills has never been all that impressive.
For years, Biden opposed introducing higher fuel efficiency standards for vehicles, voting against such protections on five occasions dating as far back as 1973.
Biden spent decades being part of the voting bloc that allowed increased air pollution from cars and trucks.
Then there was the day in 2008, when shortly before he took the office of Vice President, Biden failed to show up for a vote on the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act.
The bill, believed to be one of the strongest efforts to curb global warming at the time, would have reduced the country's greenhouse emissions by up to 19 percent below 2005 levels by 2020.
When he ran for President, Biden claimed to be one of the driving forces behind the Paris Climate Agreement, though I can’t find any evidence to indicate other than that he was considerably less involved than he has claimed.
He also has been tied to some of the Obama administration's less forward-thinking policies, including the embrace of natural gas and fracking that put the country on track to becoming the world's leading oil producer.
If Leonhardt is correct and the Court’s decision will not prove as big a deal as some thought, it is only because we weren’t really doing that much in the first place.
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