Those are the exact words of a text message I got from one of my friends at the EPA last night, in response to this:
In a major setback for President Obama’s climate change agenda, the Supreme Court on Tuesday temporarily blocked the administration’s effort to combat global warming by regulating emissions from coal-fired power plants.
It puts yesterday’s New York Times headline into a larger context of what the Supreme Court’s decision to issue a stay on the Obama Administration’s efforts to regulate coal powered plants could really mean. If this holds, it’s not only going to derail the EPA’s comprehensive efforts to clean up the worst CO2 emitters in this country, but the effects of this reckless decision will ripple throughout the world, right into the painstaking details of an already fickle climate agreement negotiated in Paris. If the US has to renege on its commitment to get serious about curbing its own emissions, it is quite possibly going to undo the thousands upon thousands of pieces put into place across the global board like a flick of the first domino.
“It’s a stunning development,” Jody Freeman, a Harvard law professor and former environmental legal counsel to the Obama administration, said in an email. She added that “the order certainly indicates a high degree of initial judicial skepticism from five justices on the court,” and that the ruling would raise serious questions from nations that signed on to the landmark Paris climate change pact in December.
I’m trying to stay out of the primary wars and here’s one of the reasons (bolding mine):
The 5-to-4 vote, with the court’s four liberal members dissenting, was unprecedented — the Supreme Court had never before granted a request to halt a regulation before review by a federal appeals court.
I get the the whole desire for revolution and all, but seriously folks, when the will of the people (70 percent of Americans now believe that global warming is real) is trumped (hey, pun!) by whatever errant molecules are wreaking havoc on the brains of the likes of Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, I think it’s fair to say that replacing one of these jokers with a half-way rational and educated legal mind (which both Bernie and Hillary would nominate) gives you about as much bang for your survival-on-earth-buck as you can get at this point in U.S. governance. I’ll see your revolution and raise you a non-zombie Supreme Court Justice.
And lest we forget who’s behind all this:
“There’s a lot of people who are celebrating,” said Jeff Holmstead, a lawyer with Bracewell & Giuliani, a firm representing energy companies, which are party to the lawsuit. “It sends a pretty strong signal that ultimately it’s pretty likely to be invalidated.”
But tell me how we’re going to get these selfish greedy bastards from spiking their giant lumps of coal in the end(of life on earth)zone other than electing a President that’s to the left of at least Dick Nixon who, give him credit, created the EPA? I mean, really, not even Che Guevara would be able to do anything about the bankrupt morass that is the moral compass of Sam Alito and John Roberts.
Here’s the thing: In this existential struggle to keep the living systems of this beautiful magical planet from collapsing, we’ve witnessed world leaders from center right Angela Merkel to hard left Evo Morales come together to help hammer out an agreement that has us at least moving in a healing direction all together. It does really take a grand coalition to get big things done, and from my experience it works that way in international as well as national politics.
So, no matter who the candidate of our heart is, I think it’s important to remember that coalitions must and will be formed to keep moving that churning cruise ship of human relations with Planet Earth into stable waters.
In that spirit, I say: Go Bernie! Go Hillary! Be Gone Dinosaur Supremes!