Posted on February 17, 2016 by William Session
For us gray hairs, the phrase used to be “Dateline”, now it’s “Tweetline” . . . Flash!. . . President Obama @POTUS “. . . Addressing climate change takes all of us, especially the private sector going all-in on clean energy worldwide.”
Apparently “all of us” didn’t include five Supreme Court Justices, led by its Chief Justice, John Roberts. Indeed, it was SCOTUS going “all out” for climate change. As in, going “all out” to frustrate one of the EPA’s and President Obama’s signature efforts to respond to and act upon climate change challenges to the global environment. What EPA and the President got (by a split decision) instead was a stay that some have characterized as the quashing of the biggest environmental regulatory change in United States history.
That body blow to regulatory appropriation of the climate change debate was instigated by the challenge of virtually every major coal power company to the EPA’s issuance of binding emission reduction requirements for existing domestic power plants. The coal, fired power industry argued that EPA’s action was “draconian” and would cause the “shutting down or curtailing generation from existing plants and shifting that generation to new sources”. That, of course, was the precise intent of POTUS and other signatories of the Paris climate change accord last year.
SCOTUS’s stay was unprecedented and terse. Not a word of explanation about why the stay was issued. The proponents of the stay were modestly baffled. In the words of Basin Power’s legislative rep, Dale Niezwaag, the decision came as a surprise . . . “The supreme court has never issued a stay on a rule that hasn’t been ruled on by a lower court. So this is precedent, setting from our point. When we put it in, we figured it was going to be a long shot, so we were very surprised that the Supreme Court ruled in our favor”.
There are takeaways galore. However, two are most intriguing to me. Was this unprecedented stay an unwarranted and thinly disguised, reach into the realm of executive branch constitutional authority? Second, did the Supreme Court simply muscle its way into a social and scientific debate that begs any legal or factual question of “irreparable harm” to either the power industry or the citizenry of the republic. In short, was the stay an expression of SCOTUS climate change denial?
The stay makes EPA’s rules unenforceable and will undoubtedly limit their intended goal of achieving emissions cuts to (ostensibly) slow global warming. More importantly, the ruling, in effect, invalidated POTUS’s pledge on climate agreement made in Paris last spring. How should one construe the interjection of the Supreme Court into a case that would have, under normal circumstances, been taken up by the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit as soon as early 2017? Was a signal being sent to that court to heed the antipathy some believe certain SCOTUS justices have towards the global warming debate altogether?
In keeping with my “newsflash” metaphor, since I started writing this post, the country mourns the unexpected passing of Justice Antonin Scalia. The lack of a tie breaker justice for the foreseeable future could throw the question of the right of the EPA to forge ahead on the POTUS’s climate change agenda into months or years of limbo. Will the D.C. Circuit’s decision answer the question next spring? Will certain senators relent and vote in a replacement for Justice Scalia this year? Will the eight remaining justices do something other than call things a tie until they have a full complement on the bench?
Stay tuned to this blogspot for more breaking news.
Tags: Clean Power Plan, Paris, COP21, CPP, stay
Climate | Climate Change | Environmental Protection Agency | Greenhouse Gases (GHGs) | Supreme Court