The US supreme court has declared war on the
Earth’s future
Kate
Aronoff
In a major environmental case, the court has made
clear that it would rather represent the interests of corporations and the
super-rich than the needs and desires of the vast majority of Americans – or
people on Earth
Fri 1 Jul
2022 08.46 EDT
In remarks
to the first Earth Day gathering in 1970, the Maine senator Edmund Muskie made
the case for the Clean Air Act – a bill he helped draft – in stark terms.
“There is no space command center, ready to give us precise instruction and
alternate solutions for survival on our spaceship Earth,” he told the crowd.
“Our nation – and our world – hang together by tenuous bonds which are strained
as they have never been strained before – and as they must never be strained
again. We cannot survive an undeclared war on our future.”
In its
Thursday ruling on West Virginia v EPA – in line with a string of decisions
that will make life here more dangerous – the US supreme court all but declared
that war, curtailing the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to regulate
power plants under a provision of the Clean Air Act and – more worryingly –
striking an opening blow to the government’s ability to do its job.
It hasn’t
done so alone. The foundations for today’s ruling, like the other disastrous
ones delivered this term, were laid well before Muskie gave his speech in
Philadelphia. Along with the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act – passed during
the Nixon administration – was a last gasp of the New Deal order, putting the
government to work on an audacious and unprecedented task. Muskie hoped, as he
said that day, that it might bring about “a society that will not tolerate
slums for some and decent houses for others, rats for some and playgrounds for
others, clean air for some and filth for others” through “planning more
effective and just laws and more money better spent”.
That
approach to governance is precisely what a coterie of rightwing philanthropists
and legal activists found so threatening, and why they became a core part of
the right’s decades-long crusade against the kinder, bigger state.
The
crowning achievement of that crusade was the election of Ronald Reagan, who
proved to be a useful cipher for fossil fuel-funded thinktanks and neoliberal
economists to get their message out. It was none other than Justice Neil
Gorsuch’s mother who helped Reagan try to strip the federal government’s
environmental protection apparatus for parts. As Reagan’s pick to lead the EPA,
Anne M Gorsuch made it her personal mission to shrink the body tasked with
enacting the Clean Air Act. She railed against what she described as a “set of
commands from Congress”. Looking back on her term, Gorsuch – who slashed the
agency’s budget by a quarter – took pride in having helmed the “only agency in
Washington that was truly practicing New Federalism”, devolving as many of its
responsibilities as possible down to the states. Following in her footsteps,
Judge Gorsuch has railed against the Chevron Doctrine that’s been a main target
of the conservative legal movement (not overturned today, thankfully), saying
it allowed “executive bureaucracies to swallow huge amounts of core judicial
and legislative power”.
But the
roots of this ruling run deeper than Neil Gorsuch wanting to make mom proud.
Polluters have always been happy to throw small fortunes at the right’s quest
for minority rule, keen to protect fossil fuel profits and their ability to
dump waste into the air and water from pesky things like democracy. As Nancy
MacLean writes in Democracy in Chains, Charles Koch took a special interest in
destroying public education, thus maintaining de facto segregation, before
leading the charge against climate policy at every level of government. He
continues to be a generous funder of the Federalist Society, an instrumental
force in building and filling the pipeline of clerks, judges and cases that has
created the judicial branch as we know it, and rulings like the one that
overturned Roe v Wade last week. Secretive dark-money outfits like Donors
Trust, as well as Chevron and the Scaife Foundation – furnished by old oil and
aluminum money – have joined him.
West
Virginia v EPA itself was brought with the help of the Republican Attorneys
General Association, a network of state attorneys general whose own funders
include the country’s biggest fossil fuel companies and the beleaguered coal
barons who had the most to lose from the modest power plant regulations. They
also spent $150,000 sponsoring Trump’s rally on 6 January.
The
interests of the country’s wealthiest residents and corporations are at odds
with the vast majority of people who live here. Luckily for the right, a
political system designed by slaveholders provides an easy on ramp to
concretize minority rule, encasing their power within definitionally undemocratic
institutions. With a young, ideological rightwing majority on the court,
there’s no telling how far they might go. And there’s not much that can stop
them.
Gorsuch,
ironically, put it well in his concurring opinion. But the line applies better
to him and his colleagues than to the federal bureaucrats he was railing
against: “a republic – a thing of the people – would be more likely to enact
just laws than a regime administered by a ruling class of largely unaccountable
‘ministers’.”
Kate Aronoff
is a staff writer at the New Republic and the author of Overheated: How
Capitalism Broke the Planet – And How We Fight Back
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