☀ Love it or hate it, the Supreme Court's EPA ruling presents an opportunity for climate and energy progress

5 Quick Questions for … ETH Zurich’s Didier Sornette on the need for risk taking in science and society

In This Issue

The Essay: Love it or hate it, the Supreme Court's EPA ruling presents an opportunity for climate progress

5QQ: 5 Quick Questions for … ETH Zurich’s Didier Sornette on the need for risk taking in science and society

Micro Reads: CRISPR at 10 and more …

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Quote of the Issue

“The appliances of 2014 will have no electric cords, of course, for they will be powered by long-lived batteries running on radioisotopes. The isotopes will not be expensive for they will be by-products of the fission-power plants which, by 2014, will be supplying well over half the power needs of humanity. But once the isotype batteries are used up they will be disposed of only through authorized agents of the manufacturer.” - Isaac Asimov, “Visit to the World's Fair of 2014,” from The New York Times, August 16, 1964

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The Essay

☀ Love it or hate it, the US Supreme Court's EPA ruling presents an opportunity for climate and energy progress

Thankfully, it only took about a day for a reasonable consensus to emerge regarding the US Supreme Court’s decision on Thursday in West Virginia v. EPA, the case challenging the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from power plants. No, as so many politicians and activists on social media initially emoted, the court’s six-member conservative majority did not “strangle,” “gut,” or “dismantle” the EPA’s authority. The EPA is not “gone,” as one hysterical tweeter concluded. Indeed, the decision wasn’t even the worst-case scenario that some environmentalists had contemplated: The decision does not prevent the EPA from regulating greenhouse gas emissions. Indeed, the Court affirmed greenhouse gases pose a public danger.

The actual impact is far narrower. The Court ruled that the disputed Clean Air Act regulation doesn’t give the EPA the authority to require utilities to shift from one source of power to another. But the agency retains considerable regulatory authority. The environmental news site Grist, hardly a repository of climate change skepticism, points out that the EPA “will still be able to require existing power plants to use the best available technologies to cut emissions — perhaps even through carbon capture and storage.” What’s more, the agency “can also still regulate carbon dioxide emissions from cars and trucks, as well as methane emissions from oil and gas infrastructure.”

Michael Gerrard @MichaelGerrard

The Supreme Court has prematurely and unjustifiably removed one tool to fight climate change. But it's a large toolkit, and much remains. -- EPA can still regulate GHGs from motor vehicles (the largest source) 🧵

For elites despairing the decision, the real damage is more about direction and morale: West Virginia v. EPA is another dispiriting step — a not insignificant one — away from the United States seriously tackling climate change anytime soon. This from New York Times opinion writer David Wallace-Wells:

… 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. … For the time being, it probably changes more about the way we might imagine possible climate futures than anything about the one we are actually building today through inaction.

I would hope for a different sort of “profound effect” and a different sort of “climate mood shift” than the ones Wallace-Wells describes. I also would hope for a different sort of change in “the way we might imagine possible climate futures.” A few key points regarding these hopes of mine: