WTF?
Every
morning I dread bringing up the online news. The relentless bad news
is not a good way to start a day. And today there was this
profoundly sad piece in the Washington Post on the oldest
trees in the world now in great danger:
Scientists rush to save 1,000-year-old trees on the brink of death
A
new study,
published Wednesday in the journal Nature, found that climate change
has pushed almost a quarter of Earth’s best-protected forests to a
“critical threshold” for lost resilience — the point at which
even a minor drought or heat wave could tip them into catastrophic
decline. Washington Post 07/16/22
Also today we have Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin, coal
baron extraordinaire and stalwart defender of the beleaguered fossil
fuel industry, again in the news. Manchin has set himself up as the self appointed linchpin
for the Demos getting anything passed at all this term regarding the now whittled down almost forgotten 'Build Back Better'
plan and its climate crisis component, He has now decided to pull the
plug on voting for it at all. This has left poor Biden stood up, broken-hearted again.
But
as bad as Manchin's Lucy snatching the football stunt is, the
antics of the Supreme Court are the far worst. The West
Virginia vs the EPA is
a disastrous decision for the environment in general and confronting
Global Warming specifically.
This grave mistake by this science blind dogma-driven
majority now makes it virtually impossible for the US to come
anywhere near its COP26 commitments (that we were already doing
poorly on anyway).
This
idiotic ruling comes despite recent Condition Red warnings from the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), alarm of the entire
scientific community as well as hundreds of environmental
organizations up in arms. These six stupid bastards must have cotton stuffed in their ears
and blinders on. Can't they see the ecocidal disasters on all sides
already - ever worsening floods, droughts (the entire Western US bone dry),
fires (the giant sequoias of Yosemite are in danger of burning up), storms (tornadoes in the winter?); awful signs every
directions like huge parts chunks of West Antarctica may soon slide
into the ocean raising sea levels everywhere.
This
landmark judicial blunder, besides
preventing the EPA from confronting fossil fuel emissions from power
companies using the Clean Air Act, does far more harm. It
also
undermines the executive's branch general overall authority to
delegate implementation of laws through government agencies. A
staggering array of federal rules are now potentially vulnerable to
cancellation by further law suits against federal agencies routinely
enforcing long standing existing federal mandates and laws, ones
accepted as reasonable and necessary. The American right is in the
process of eviscerating the authority of the federal government to
confront rapacious corporate behavior in all directions. This all
under the rubric of reining in what they call the 'administrative
state'.
This has been in the works since the so-called Reagan Revolution,
through Newt Gingrich's Contract on American and the fake populist
Tea Party Movement.
The
court in West
Virginia vs the EPA
is now requiring any major legislation on what Roberts calls “major
questions”
to
be fully defined in term of implemen-tation which, of course, is
impossible. Policy
wonks (often in a revolving door w/ industry) within every agency are
the only ones who have the in-house expertise to get 'into the weeds'
of the complex arcane technical issues that will arise. It is a crazy
irresponsible move against routine and necessary authority of
governance. It's neoliberalism on steroids; it's boldly jumping in
bed with Ayn Rand and her nutty ultra-libertarianism. Why remove
the authority of the alphabet soup of agencies that keep things
running halfway sanely? Think the FAA and the air travel; the FDA
and pharmaceuticals and food safety, Medicare/ Medicaid and profit
driven health insurance companies, the SEC and the financial sector.
And
the Roberts Court specifically timed their attack on the EPA
's authority just as we eat into the last decade before all hell
breaks loose (global temperature must not increase another 1.5C or
our gooses are cooked). The EPA with what authority it had under
the Clean Air was trying to act to address the painful transition
from fossil fuel to sustainable sources. The EPA had to take charge
due to the GOP's collective intransigence on any pro-
environmental legislation especially any confronting Climate Change .
In
this ruling the court killed three birds with one stone. First the
existing Clean Water and Clean Air Acts enforced by the EPA was all
that stood in the way of doing nothing – the GOP's preference. Secondly it
effectively attacks the authority of the executive branch at the same
time. And finally mixing this ground breaking decision in with two
other equally dramatic extremely unpopular decisions regarding
abortion and guns, it deflects attention from its serious
implications.
Short
term we are in very bad shape . The pitifully weak resistance for
decades of the Democratic Party to the hard charging, take no
prisoners, ruthless ethics-free GOP (on steroids during the Trump
era) is only part of the problem. Even as Donald Trump as president
made a joke out of the office until the pandemic hit and he spent too
much time in denial as hundreds of thousands died, many needlessly.
Before that he seemed graced with fair winds especially riding on the
momentum of an Obama's necessary but weak Keynesian stimulus-prodded recovery that was still growing from the post
2008 Great Recession. But as bad as the Trump regime was, the 2020 voters did not producd any Blue
Wave with the Demos barely winning the Senate by a razor thin Senate margin - but with two
turn-coat spoilers embedded.
But
beyond the Demos loss of support of much of the rural and rust-belt white working class
(mostly due to ossification and overemphasis on identity politics and
cancel culture BS), other forces were also at work. Plain old bad luck confronts them.There is
the pandemic distorted global economy created shortages and the
biggie, the devil incarnate - Inflation.
Then
there
is the perceived crime wave. Add to that, the geopolitical catastrophe of Vladimir Putin's stupid pointless neo czarist Ukraine War which puts a
super charger on existing but tolerable supply chain drive inflation with energy and food
prices exploding. And underlying that is corporate opportunism. Monopoly and oligopoly market control in many industries is allowing widened corporate profit margins to be tacked on to existing price increases. Net result: hard working but uninspiring
and charisma-challenged Joe Biden and his Democratic Party gets blamed for it all.
In
these dark times one can only hope a coalition of the sane will come
together composed of those with social and environmentally
consciousness but without unreal expectations together with those
with conservative values in the original sense of the word, who are level headed and fair minded and not driven by craven
political ambition or cynical pecuniary opportunism. Together maybe these two factions can effectively
confront the crazies that have invaded this country from within.