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Supreme Court limits EPA’s power to cut emissions

bbc.com

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Re: Supreme Court limits EPA’s power to cut emissions

#591

Post by extheat »

fooey wrote: post #380
xxpor wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have to know the actual motivation: The point is to limit the administrative state and move power to congress (as you said), because federal rule making is relatively open, and the administration has experts. If it moves to congress, they'll just take the legislation lobbyists hand them and pass it, because they don't have the expertise to actually write technical regulations. This is a win for industry.

Congress doesn't remotely have the bandwidth to explicitly write out and decide all the little rules it takes to regulate the country, even if they had a clue what they were doing in each case It's pretty clearly designed to dismantle the federal regulatory apparatus

Then it should explicitly delegate that to the executive branch where applicable, as it does for other things. You don’t just throw away separation of powers because it’s convenient.

Re: Supreme Court limits EPA’s power to cut emissions

#592

Post by evanpw »

nostromo wrote: post #450
asdajksah2123 wrote: post #326

It's not clear to me if the court has ruled broadly regarding delegation here (we still need experts to read through the entire ruling), but they've clearly indicated that they believe that delegation is not okay with them. Which basically means that this court will reduce the Federal government to a non-entity very soon, making its functioning absolutely impossible. That may even be "constitutionally" correct (altho…

> this court will reduce the Federal government to a non-entity very soon This is an absurd take. All Congress needs to do is clarify that they’d like the EPA to regulate carbon emissions. That’s it. The laws regarding pollution control, many of which date back to the 1950s and 1960s, we’re not written with global warming in mind. So the court is saying the EPA needs to get permission from elected officials to regula…

That's not it at all. All parties agreed that Congress passed a law allowing the EPA to regular carbon emissions by setting emission limits on different types of power plants based on the best current technology available for emission reduction. The disagreement is whether that allows the EPA to set emission limits which are impossible to achieve, with the goal of forcing fossil fuel plants to shut down or subsidize renewable sources.

I encourage all the tech people around here to "read the code": https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/21pdf/20-1530_n758.pdf

Re: Supreme Court limits EPA’s power to cut emissions

#593

Post by throw0101a »

Sporktacular wrote: post #524
tablespoon wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The point is to limit the administrative state and move power to congress (as you said), because federal rule making is relatively open, and the administration has experts. > If it moves to congress, they'll just take the legislation lobbyists hand them and pass it, because they don't have the expertise to actually write technical regulations. Huh? Remember Ajit Pai? It hasn't been that long. It's profoundly anti-d…

Quoted post unavailable.

> Would you really like to live in a world where every judge, inspector and policeman is a politician too? Subject to the whims of popular sentiment?

A lot of these positions are elected in various US jurisdictions.

* https://ballotpedia.org/Judicial_election_methods_by_state

* https://ballotpedia.org/Judicial_selection_in_the_states

Re: Supreme Court limits EPA’s power to cut emissions

#594

Post by kar5pt »

ohCh6zos wrote: post #68
qalmakka wrote: post #14

The fact that people can't see that the conservatives are basically advocating worldwide for short term economic growth in exchange for basically our future is appalling to me. I am afraid we will see an immense amount of instability, increased poverty, mass migrations and authoritarian regimes rising up due to the fact that we couldn't manage to convince people that those parties do not care about them. In a previou…

If nationalism is a more general form of fascism, are all, or almost all governments prior to the modern era fascist?

Nationalism is very specific to the modern era. It didn't really exist before the French Revolution. So no.

Unless that was a typo and you mean to write "after the modern era"

Re: Supreme Court limits EPA’s power to cut emissions

#595

Post by alex_sf »

dsr_ wrote: post #458
zionic wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well the fix here is for Congress to pass a specific law empowering the EPA with explicit authority. If something like that can't make it through congress then it isn't democratic, and the task then becomes one of convincing the other side. I've the had the anti-coal conversation with plenty of conservatives and they were all open to my point of view. Ultimately this court's decision is a win for democracy, even if i…

You've almost got it, but you need to go one step further. Congress isn't democratic. Congress is overly concentrated. To begin with, the Senate is absurdly anti-democratic. The 710K residents of Washington, DC don't get a vote there at all. The 600K residents of Wyoming get the same 2 votes as Vermont (620K) and California (39 million). Anything that says that Texas and West Virginia are equal to each other in some…

> Anything that says that Texas and West Virginia are equal to each other in some mystical sense of having equal weight in decisions that affect the whole country is an ideology not compatible with democracy.

It's completely compatible with democracy, and makes perfect sense under federalism. The federal government was not meant to have the expansive powers it does; the problem is that via things like the commerce clause it's massively overstepped the boundaries that were supposed to contain it.

Re: Supreme Court limits EPA’s power to cut emissions

#596

Post by cryptonector »

exabrial wrote: post #571
cryptonector wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Positive example: The FAA has done an incredible job making air-travel safer than car travel. I have a feeling that a lot of the higher-ups are former engineers and have been able to put politics and red/blue crap aside for a common mission. 737MAX enters the chat

Definitely a failure. How the "the stabilizer trim depends on exactly one input device" was a huge oversight.

It wasn't just a failure, and it wasn't an oversight -- the FAA simply rubberstamped anything Boeing gave it, and it wouldn't surprise anyone if there is more to the story. It was a colossal failure that led to a complete loss of trust in the FAA. The FAA went from being an agency whose expertise we lent to the rest of the world to... being just one more captured domestic regulator. I bet the Europeans will lead the investigation of the next big accident outside the U.S., as well they should.

Re: Supreme Court limits EPA’s power to cut emissions

#597

Post by dang »

seoaeu wrote: post #161
yieldcrv wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's too complicated for most people. Although it does pain me to see people using their energy so ineffectively. Protester: "6 unelected officials can't decide what I can do!" Supreme Court: "That's literally what we just said!" If Congress punts issues around indefinitely for its own political wheeling and dealing, it still cannot outsource a decision on those issues to other branches of the federal government. W…

> Protester: "6 unelected officials can't decide what I can do!" > Supreme Court: "That's literally what we just said!" Bullshit. The court was perfectly happy telling millions of people they had no right to an abortion. They’re just a bunch of partisan hacks

Please don't cross into flamewar like this. It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for.

Even in a divisive thread like this one, your comment here stands out as breaking the site guidelines. Would you mind reviewing them and sticking to the rules when posting here? We'd be grateful.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Supreme Court limits EPA’s power to cut emissions

#598

Post by lolinder »

matthewdgreen wrote: post #437
rayiner wrote: post #306

Headlines about Supreme Court cases are almost uniformly misleading, because they suggest the Court is making decisions on policy issues rather than legal issues. The very first words of the opinion, on p. 2, make clear that the legal issue before the Court is very different: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/21pdf/20-1530_n758.pdf The Clean Air Act does not purport to give the EPA blanket regulatory authority ov…

This case could have been decided either way. The result clearly depends on the makeup of the Court and the justices' personal inclinations. As evidence: a very similar question was decided by the Court in 2009, with a completely different result [1]. [1] https://ballotpedia.org/Massachusetts_v._Environmental_Prote...

This doesn't make OP's point less true: the headlines surrounding this decision are misleading. This is not judicial overreach, it's an application of a different theory of judicial review than we've become accustomed to, and it's not necessarily a bad one.

If we don't like it when the police creatively interpret laws to target minorities, can we allow the EPA the authority to creatively interpret laws to target fossil fuel companies? Is it possible to give the executive authorities the power to be creative, but only in the service of a good cause? This Supreme Court believes it's not, and that seems like a reasonable position to take.

Re: Supreme Court limits EPA’s power to cut emissions

#599

Post by enragedcacti »

codefreeordie wrote: post #472
toomuchtodo wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can’t pass a law, too many climate change deniers in political positions. We’ll have to find other mechanisms to force coal plants offline. Lots of tools available besides the EPA.

"can't pass a law because I can't get enough voters to want it" Sounds like maybe you don't believe in democracy

> "can't pass a law because I can't get enough voters to want it"

Voters overwhelmingly want regulation on climate change. 41 senators representing roughly 22% of voters don't.

> Sounds like maybe you don't believe in democracy

if you're going to make snide remarks you better be accurate in your claims.

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/03/09/americans-l...

Re: Supreme Court limits EPA’s power to cut emissions

#600

Post by nostromo »

cryptonector wrote: post #580
nostromo wrote: post #499

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, Dobbs returns the power to legislate abortion to the congress. You are correct however on Bruen limiting the power of congress and the states.

> No, Dobbs returns the power to legislate abortion to the congress. It does? I thought it left it to the states.

Congress can ban or legalize abortion federally now. Or they can leave it up to the states -- which is the current default without Roe.

In fact, congress could have codified access to abortion at anytime in the past 40-odd years.

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