America’s most powerful corporate shills on the US Supreme Court are at it again, but this time their well established bias in favor of corporate power could deliver a fatal blow to the recently concluded Paris Climate Accord (along with mankind’s best opportunity to do harm reduction on a planetary scale). A Supreme Court decision giving corporate decision makers the prerogative to continue to cling to their well established and profitable business model, that trashes the Global Climate with repercussions that could linger long beyond the foreseeable future. Our Corporate Decision Makers have only one metric under our system of corporate governance: maximizing profits.
Supreme Court’s Blow to Emissions Efforts May Imperil Paris Climate Accord
By CORAL DAVENPORT
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court’s surprise decision Tuesday to halt President Obama’s climate change regulation could weaken or even imperil the international global warming accord reached with great ceremony in Paris less than two months ago, climate diplomats said.
The Paris Agreement, the first accord to commit every country to combating climate change, had as a cornerstone Mr. Obama’s assurance that the United States would carry out strong, legally sound policies to significantly cut carbon emissions. Over history, the United States is the largest greenhouse gas polluter, although its annual emissions have been overtaken by China’s.
But in the capitals of India and China, two of the world’s largest polluters, climate change policy experts said the Supreme Court decision threw the American commitment into question, and possibly New Delhi’s and Beijing’s, too.
“If the U.S. Supreme Court actually declares the coal power plant rules stillborn, the chances of nurturing trust between countries would all but vanish,” said Navroz K. Dubash, a senior fellow at the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi. “This could be the proverbial string which causes Paris to unravel. The Paris agreement was a fragile and hard-fought consensus.”
The court’s verdict does not block the climate change rule permanently but halts its enactment until legal challenges against it have been decided, a process that could take a year or more. Legal experts said the justices’ unprecedented decision to stop work on the rule before any court had decided against it appears to signal that the regulation could ultimately be overturned.
If the Supreme Court majority’s view holds that the rights of private property holders are so sacrosanct they even trump all of mankind’s right to a more livable planet, it would be reprehensible and unconscionable. This could well be a tragic decision for the country, the world, and civilization itself, potentially lasting for 10,000 years.
Global warming likely to extend for next 10,000 years, says study
Boston: The damaging climate consequences of carbon emissions will grow and persist for millennia without a dramatic new global energy strategy, a new study has warned. Rising global temperatures, ice field and glacial melting and rising sea levels are among the climatic changes that could ultimately lead to the submergence of coastal areas home to 1.3 billion people today, researchers said.
"What our analysis shows is that this era of global warming will be as big as the end of the Ice Age. And what we are seeing is a massive departure from the environmental stability civilisation has enjoyed during the last 10,000 years of its development," said Jeremy Shakun from Boston College in the US.
They reconstructed a record of natural carbon emission, temperature rise, glacial melting and sea-level rise stretching back 20,000 years to the peak of the Ice Age. That paleo-climatological portrait shows, for example, that the sea-level rise of 130 meters required roughly 10,000 years to retreat as a stabilised climate emerged in which human civilisation has flourished.
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I took the post down briefly, edited the title for accuracy, then republished it.