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.