On Monday, Slate’s Sabrina McCormick argued that the judicial branch is now our best shot at climate protection under Trump. Tuesday’s #ExxonKnew ruling, where a judge denied the oil giant’s request to avoid handing over certain audited documents to the New York attorney general, gives us some hope that McCormick might be right, though a couple other rulings suggest her piece is perhaps a touch too optimistic. (Not that we can blame anyone for hoping for the best.)
But these examples are far from the last word on the government’s responsibility to protect our collective right to a livable climate, and there’s at least one high-profile case brewing in that regard. While the 21 kids suing the government over climate change [edited per comment] won’t get their days in court until February, Xiuhtezcatl Martinez of Our Children’s Trust is doing the media rounds to discuss his book and the case itself. He was great on the Daily Show, and sharp on Bill Maher.
This, of course, makes him a target. Though pundits might feel it beneath them attack the 17 year old Aztec-Mexican-American activist, Washington Examiner columnist Tom Rogan took a break from defending the American Nazi Party and offering advice for police dealing with those pesky anti-Nazi protesters to prove that no one is too young to be the target of a political hatchet job.
Rogan starts out magnanimously, feigning praise for Martinez’s accomplishments in his headline and intro as “An impressive guy with unimpressive climate ideas.” But the faux-civility soon fades as Rogan busily begins to assemble a strawman.
The lawsuit Martinez is part of brings a constitutional challenge that the federal government is failing to protect our right to life and liberty, as unchecked warming will lead to an inhospitable climate. Most people with a basic grasp of the US Constitution or a faint memory of their high school AP Gov class can see that this is a question of the government upholding the central tenets of the Constitution.
But to Rogan, that is nothing less than attempted “judicial overthrow of that democratic mandate.” Trump, Rogan explains, was elected on an anti-regulatory platform. Thus, the ask that the government create a plan to prevent catastrophic warming, according to Rogan, “is authoritarian, arrogant, and dangerous” and a subversion of the will of the people. In Rogan’s argument, climate action would only be acceptable “if approved by voters at the polls.”
After that, Rogan simply starts making up theoretical arguments against the theoretical plan the government would need to come up with to address emissions. Rogan criticizes what he imagines this plan would be, assuming it would inflict suffering on millions of Americans.
Rogan also misrepresents Martinez’s suggestion that eating less meat presents all of us with the “opportunity to make a choice” as an eventual total ban on meat. It’s pretty obvious that all the “unimpressive” ideas Rogan attributes to Martinez throughout his piece are the ones Rogan made up himself.
But what is impressive is Rogan’s heroic attack on a 17-year-old who dares be politically active. Not many grown men are brave enough to use their position of relative power as a newspaper columnist to publicly criticize a teenager for claims the kid never made.
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