A major question
In the normal way of our government, Congress makes laws, like the Clean Air Act, and then agencies make rules and polices to implement the law.
In West Virginia vs. EPA, the Supreme Court thought the EPA’s rules went too far—making policy on what they refer to as a “major question.” A major question that they said should belong to Congress to address. According to the majority opinion, “...it is not plausible that Congress gave EPA the authority to adopt on its own such a regulatory scheme...”
I’m not a lawyer, but I feel like it IS plausible that Congress, when it passed the Clean Air Act, intended for EPA to clean the air. I seem to be in good company on this—the dissenting opinion on the same case states, “Congress charged EPA with addressing those potentially catastrophic harms [from climate change], including through regulation of fossil-fuel-fired power plants....Section 111 of the Clean Air Act directs EPA to regulate stationary sources of any substance that ‘causes, or contributes significantly to, air pollution’ and that ‘may reasonably be anticipated to endanger public health or welfare.’ Carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases fit that description.”
But, I will not attempt to make a legal argument here. I will make an existential one.
The climate is different now. We are seeing more extreme weather events and even new types of extreme weather events. Last year, I didn’t know what an atmospheric river was. Now I’ve been soaked by several of them. The year before I didn’t know what a heat dome was. Last year, nearly 100 people in Washington State died in the unprecedented high temperatures of a heat dome.
These extreme weather events are hurting us. Our allergies are worse, because plants produce more pollen in response to heat and increased carbon in the air. And yet it’s harder to grow the food we eat. We went all May and three weeks of June with no strawberries this year. Through those berryless weeks, Facebook memories showed me photos from years past of my kids, younger, faces covered in strawberry juice.
Photo, and dessert, by author, in a year with abundant June strawberries
The climate is continuing to change. It’s getting worse. There are consequences to the warming planet that we are already experiencing, others we can predict but cannot prevent at this point, and then there are the potentially devastating consequences that are within our current power to avoid.
Climate scientists create models to predict future levels of greenhouse gasses and future planetary temperatures, based on assumptions about how aggressively we will act to combat climate change. The worst-case model assumes that we will enact no new policies to reduce pollution by greenhouse gasses, we will increase coal use, and we will have more babies than the planet can support. Some scientists are optimistic that we will take enough action to avoid this worst-case scenario, though this last week of Supreme Court decisions moves us in the wrong direction.
We all have different ideas about what we want out of the social contract we make with our government. Generally, we agree that we don’t want to get sick when we eat at restaurants; we don’t want sewage in the streets; when we turn on the faucet, we want clean water to run. Can we also agree that our government should protect our communities from floods, wildfire, unlivable heat? Can we agree that we want our government—all branches and levels of it—to keep us off the path to global catastrophe?
There is work to do. We all need to make decisions and live our lives in a way that preserves the livability of our world. The recent Supreme Court decision, West Virginia vs EPA, undermines the work of the EPA to reduce greenhouse gasses. It makes the planet-saving work a bit harder. It’s the wrong direction on a major question.