Op-ed by David Wallace-Wells, The New York Times, July 1, 2022
Many of the headlines about the Supreme Court’s 6-to-3 ruling on West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency on Thursday have suggested an existential setback: a major blow to American decarbonization and global climate ambition. But the effect is less like a nail in the coffin and more like putting an additional set of brakes on an already stalled project. For the time being, at least, the decision functions chiefly to cement the status quo.
The problem is, the status quo is bad enough. Cristiana Figueres, a former head of the United Nations Framework on Climate Change, recently described the world’s current trajectory as “a suicidal path,” and globally, the United States was already the most conspicuous laggard. Without meaningful legislative progress in the coming months, President Biden will have managed to deliver on only 9 percent of his climate promises.
Without them, the country will fall far short of its international pledges, which, given the scale of American emissions, will make it almost impossible for the world as a whole to fulfill its already unlikely targets. If Republicans win control of Congress in the November midterms, then the window on the prospect of such legislation may be shut for at least a few years. The E.P.A. decision may feel like a back breaker, but the policy path to responsible, aggressive emissions reductions looked pretty broken yesterday.
Of course, the right question isn’t “Are we moving in the right direction or the wrong one or standing still?” That’s because, given the urgency of decarbonization and the pressing threat of dramatic climate effects, time is the most precious commodity. That’s the meaning of the writer and activist Bill McKibben’s famous phrase “Winning slowly is the same as losing.”
The Supreme Court decision is a bit worse than that, though, in how it restricts the E.P.A.’s ability to effectively regulate dirty energy rapidly off the grid without the explicit support of Congress. But this case was unusual in that it applied to potential powers rather than ongoing policy or law and because that kind of power has never been and is not now being exercised by the agency, the judgment applies more to hypothetical futures than to present-tense policy.
And while every climate scientist and advocate would tell you that the country needs to do much, much more to curb emissions, West Virginia v. E.P.A. applies centrally to powers the agency is not presently exercising and takes some possible future approaches away from regulators without turning back the clock, as it did last week in overturning Roe v. Wade. In recent weeks, when climate-conscious analysts surveyed the range of possible outcomes, this was not one of the apocalyptic possibilities, and the agency has retained some authority to regulate greenhouse gases — just not in the comprehensive, generation-shifting way designed under President Barack Obama’s never-realized Clean Power Plan. The judgment even affirmed that greenhouse gases are a public danger.
And so given how unlikely near-term American policy progress seemed to begin with, the more profound effect of West Virginia may ultimately be cultural, shifting the climate mood in two ways: some mix of new outrage, frustration and despair among those Americans holding out hope for political and policy reversals and an embrace of global climate leadership, and eye-rolling and exasperation by those abroad who are already inclined to see the United States as the world’s biggest climate hypocrite.
At home, a majority of Americans want to see more done by Congress (61 percent), the president (52 percent) and corporations (70 percent), according to the gold-standard polling conducted by Yale Climate Communications last fall, which also found that a record share of the country (33 percent) was “alarmed” about warming. For the alarmed — and for the many more Americans who described themselves as “concerned” — the decision may confirm an intuitive sense, pieced together also from setbacks well beyond climate, that the system is broken, with power aligned against action and every avenue of potential progress barricaded by the forces of inertia. For the country’s highest court to consider the urgent challenge of warming and say, in effect, that we should be doing less rather than more — whatever the immediate policy effect — comes as a profound psychological blow.
Indeed, this term, the supermajority conservative court seems to be taking over the role long played by Congress as the public face of federal dysfunction and stalemate — at best. On reproductive rights and guns, the picture is darker still.
On climate, as recently as several years ago, advocates had hopes of seeing a much different case reach the court and radically reshape the climate priorities of the country. In Juliana v. United States, often called Kids v. Climate, a group of underage litigants hoped to establish a younger generation’s fundamental right to a future undisturbed by the climate effects imposed by earlier generations. Given the makeup of the court even then, this was probably always a somewhat optimistic hope. (At the moment, Juliana is stalled in U.S. District Court.) Instead, West Virginia v. E.P.A. is the climate case — and decision — the country got. The mood is grim, and “We’re only as screwed as we were yesterday” is not much of a comfort or a rallying cry.
Internationally, the climate reputation of the United States is already somewhat tattered. The United States is the world’s largest producer of oil, its second-largest producer of gas, its third-largest consumer of coal and also its largest historical emitter by an outrageous margin, responsible for about twice as much carbon damage already done to the planet as any other country on Earth. Per capita, the country has done five or six times as much damage as China, which is the second-most responsible nation; given likely emissions curves this century, that gap will probably never close.
And yet — despite that responsibility, despite the United States’ early environmental action a half-century ago and despite the fact that, thanks to abundant land and renewable resources, it may now be the best positioned in the world to race through a power transition, which would also generate considerable prosperity — the United States pulled out of the Kyoto Protocol, undermined negotiations in Copenhagen and withdrew at least briefly from the Paris climate accord.
Domestically, it failed to pass major climate legislation with a filibuster-proof Democratic Senate majority in 2009 and failed again in 2021 and so far in 2022, with a slimmer majority but still with control of both Congress and the White House. And according to at least one recent assessment from O.D.I. Climate and the Zurich Flood Resilience Alliance, it has fallen much more spectacularly short in delivering on its own promises of climate finance aid to the developing world than any other nation in the Global North — a shortfall of more than $40 billion in 2020, when no other country missed its mark by even $5 billion.
This is all terrible. But it isn’t much changed by West Virginia v. E.P.A., either. U.S. emissions are not likely to rise. The powers the judgment restricts were never actually exercised under the Clean Power Plan. The Affordable Clean Energy Rule, devised by President Donald Trump as a fossil-fuel-friendly alternative to the C.P.P., is not in effect, either. And American emissions have fallen faster without a cap-and-trade program and without the C.P.P. than advocates of either suggested was possible under those programs.
That’s not to say that where things stood yesterday is an encouraging place to be or that the decision is meaningless. It could well prove a significant setback in the years ahead, though presumably only under a more aggressive or more empowered Democratic administration than this one.
For the time being, it probably changes more about the way we might imagine possible climate futures than anything about the one we are building today through inaction. But when it’s all hands on deck, you don’t want one hand tied behind your back. Which is why, for those keeping a close eye on the ever shortening timelines for action, today probably feels considerably more restrictive still — a handcuffing.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/01/opinion/environment/supreme-court-climate-change-west-virginia-epa.html?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newsletter_axiosgenerate&stream=top