The Supreme Court has handed a major environmental victory to President Obama reports Coral Davenport, of The New York Times. Her article, In Victory for Obama, Court Backs Rules for Coal Pollution, reports the courts ruling about supporting the legality of regulations governing cross-state air pollution know as the "good neighbor" rules.
WASHINGTON — In a major environmental victory for the Obama administration, the Supreme Court on Tuesday upheld the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to regulate the smog-causing pollution from coal-fired power plants that wafts across state lines from 27 Midwestern and Appalachian states to the East Coast.
The 6-to-2 ruling upholds a centerpiece of what has become a signature of President Obama’s environmental agenda: a series of new Clean Air Act regulations aimed at cutting pollution from coal-fired power plants. Republicans and the coal industry have criticized the effort as a “war on coal.”
Legal experts said the decision, written by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, signaled that the Obama administration’s efforts to use the Clean Air Act to fight global warming could also withstand legal challenges. The E.P.A. is expected to unveil in June a sweeping new climate change regulation, using the authority of the Clean Air Act to rein in carbon pollution from coal plants.
The E.P.A. argued that the rule were needed to "protect the health and environment of downwind states." Coal burning plants in Ohio and Appalachian states emit pollutants that are blown downwind into New England states where pollutants like NO2, and SO2 mixes with rain forming acids, which in the form of "acid rain falls down into our streams and lakes, turning many of them too acidic for fish populations and other aquatic life to survive.
Justice Ginsburg noted wind patterns blew across states and even quoted the book of John, “The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth.”.
In his dissent Justice Antonin Scalia, said this regulation was " Marxist and unwieldy," and Justice Thomas agreed.
WTH, Scalia, Seriously? I'm not a legal scholar but from my point of view this Antonin Scalia seems to be so far out on the fringe that I suspect if he were not a Supreme Court justice most "normal people" might suspect he was a "fringe goofball." And, I mean no disrespect for the court. But, "hello! E.P.A. regulations placing modest requirements that coal burning plants place stack scrubbers on coal plants are Marxist and unwieldy?" Has Antonin Scalia seen pictures on any major Chinese city lately? Where coal smog is so thick one sometimes can not see 50 feet? And rates of lung cancer, asthma and other respiratory disease are climbing so high even the communist Chinese are looking to emulate environmental laws in western capitalist countries.
Scalia should go spend some time with the real Marxists in China where he may be shocked when they ask him to tell them more about our wonderful environmental laws which may be just about the only major area left about our society they admire as still superior to theirs.
If Antonin Scalia were to do even the slightest bit of reading in the fields of environmental science, biology, or health sciences, he would quickly encounter descriptions of how bad pollution due to coal burning was in European and other western countries, in the last centuries, who eagerly moved away from it as much as possible, on a cost/benefit calculus.
About 35 years ago I was fortunate to be able to take a number of environmental science courses at the Harvard School of Public Health where we read about the major studies on the cost of air pollution and the incredibly high direct return on investment coming from installing stack scrubbers on coal fired plants that led to our current environmental protection laws. Many of these studies only counted the "costs" from very tangible things such as lost days of work from lung cancers directly attributable to coal emissions, cleaning costs, and other non-controversial things, not-quality of life and still found the costs paid themselves off and were returning a profit tot society within a reasonable number of years. Based on these studies, and many others like it, many of the foundation laws our E.P.A. is built upon were passed with widespread bipartisan support. How is it that Antonin Scalia has continued a lifetime of passing rulings on environmental laws and is unable to absorb these basic facts?
This ruling is good news for our environment and also in indirect ways for our global warming challenge. Now that coal burning plants are required to bear more of the true costs of their emissions, that until now they have been getting a "free ride on," one of the hidden subsidies coal benefits from will be reduced.