2 Cases Displaying The Pure Ideological Idiocy Of The Roberts Court On Climate

[hatrack]

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No, what sends shudders down the spines of environmental advocates is the way the deeply conservative minority saw things back then, spelled out in a pair of dissents—one written by Chief Justice John Roberts and the other by the late Justice Antonin Scalia, whose seat Trump filled last year with Neil Gorsuch. Both dissents were also joined by Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito.

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Roberts started off his dissent by stating that he would render "no judgment on whether global warming exists, what causes it, or the extent of the problem." But his framing of the question of standing—the threshold test of whether Massachusetts and other states even had the right to press their case in court—was out of step with the science. On coastal damages from sea level rise, an eventuality that is not just a risk but a certainty, readily observed and directly caused by the warming of ocean waters and the melting of ice masses due to rising carbon dioxide, Roberts wrote: "It is pure conjecture."

As for strengthening controls on the greenhouse gas emissions from new cars, one of the main sources of carbon pollution and the focus of the litigation, their tailpipe fumes played only a "bit-part" in causing the problem, he said. His point was that to even get their day in court, plaintiffs had to prove that a specific harm to them (coastal damage) had to be right around the corner (not decades away) and had to be knotted to a single act of regulatory neglect (lax auto standards).

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Next, take a look at the other dissent, written by Scalia—a judge who conservatives consider the archetype for the next nominee to the high court. Most of it is taken up by Scalia's brand of textualism, a contorted, dictionary-driven defense of the notion that man-made carbon dioxide is not even pollution. "Regulating the buildup of CO2 and other greenhouse gases in the upper reaches of the atmosphere, which is alleged to be causing global climate change, is not akin to regulating the concentration of some substance that is polluting the air," he wrote. (Ed. - emphasis in original).

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https://insideclimatenews.org/news/28062018/justice-anthony-kennedy-retirement-environmental-laws-climate-change-case-massachusetts-v-epa-supreme-court

[bettyellen]

1. I'm going to assume this nonsense was written for them by oil companies.