Rhode Island Sues Oil Companies Over Climate Change, First State To Do So

InsideClimate News - Nicholas Kusnetz

The lawsuit blames the burning of fossil fuels for contributing to sea level rise, extreme weather and warming oceans. The state's already seeing coastal damage.

“For a very long time, there has been this perception that ‘Big Oil’ was too big to take on, but here we are – the smallest state – taking on some of the biggest corporate polluters in the world,” Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Kilmartin said in announcing the lawsuit. Credit: Marc Choquette/CC-BY-2.0

Rhode Island on Monday became the first state to sue oil companies over the effects of climate change, filing a complaint seeking damages for the costs associated with protecting the state from rising seas and severe weather.
Standing atop a seawall in Narragansett, state Attorney General Peter F. Kilmartin compared the case to the lawsuits filed decades ago against tobacco companies and said it would hold the companies—including ExxonMobil, Chevron, BP and Royal Dutch Shell—accountable for harm they have caused.
"Big oil knew for decades that greenhouse gas pollution from their operations and their products were having a significant and detrimental impact on the earth's climate," he said. "Instead of working to reduce that harm, these companies chose to conceal the dangers, undermine public support for greenhouse gas regulation and engage in massive campaigns to promote the ever increasing use of their products and ever increasing revenues in their pockets."
The lawsuit, filed in Providence/Bristol County Superior Court, names 14 oil and gas companies and some of their affiliates, saying they created conditions that constitute a public nuisance under state law and failed to warn the public and regulators of a risk they were well aware of. It follows a series of similar lawsuits filed by local jurisdictions around the country.
Rhode Island is known as the Ocean State—it has more than 400 miles of coastline—and officials stressed the risks that coastal communities face as a result of rising seas. Kilmartin noted that the area where he was standing could be underwater if a major storm were to hit later in the century, when the seas are several feet higher.
"As a direct and proximate consequence of Defendants' wrongful conduct described in this Complaint, average sea level will rise substantially along Rhode Island's coast; average temperatures and extreme heat days will increase; flooding, extreme precipitation events, such as tropical storms and hurricanes, and drought will become more frequent and more severe; and the ocean will warm and become more acidic," the lawsuit states.
It says Rhode Island is already seeing the effects, and taxpayers are left to pay the costs.
Shell released a statement to Reuters saying that "lawsuits that masquerade as climate action and impede the collaboration needed for meaningful change" were not the answer to climate change.

Latest in a Wave of Lawsuits
More than a dozen cities and counties in California, Colorado, New York and Washington have filed similar lawsuits against major fossil companies in recent months in attempts to hold them financially responsible for the effects of climate change. Many of those cases involve coastal communities—such as New York City and tiny Imperial Beach, California—that have seen the damage sea level rise can cause and are now looking for how to pay for protective infrastructure.
The fossil fuel industry has been fighting to have these cases dismissed or moved to federal court, where it faces better odds of having the cases thrown out.
That tactic succeeded last month, when a federal judge in California dismissed the lawsuits filed by San Francisco and Oakland. In his decision, U.S. District Judge William Alsup wrote that the dangers of climate change are "very real" and that fossil fuel companies didn't dispute that burning their products causes it, but that the issue should be handled by Congress rather than in a federal liability lawsuit.
State courts, where other lawsuits are still being handled, may take a different view.

'A Greater Burden on States to Take Action'
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), who spoke at the press conference announcing Rhode Island's lawsuit, said the courts are an appropriate venue.
"The fossil fuel industry is fond of saying, you're in the wrong forum, you shouldn't be going to the courts, you should be going to Congress," he said. "The reason they say that is because they have Congress locked up with their political power and their money and their influence."
Rhode Island Gov. Gina Raimondo said the Trump administration's inaction on climate change means that states must do more.
"Given that we have a president in the White House who denies climate change and has pulled out of the Paris climate accord, it puts a greater burden on states to take action," she said. "If the federal government isn't going to do their job, we'll do it for them."

Links

• Fossil Fuels on Trial: Where the Major Climate Change Lawsuits Stand Today
• Exxon's Own Research Confirmed Fossil Fuels' Role in Global Warming Decades Ago
• Coastal Communities Sue 37 Oil, Gas and Coal Companies Over Climate Change
• Youth lawsuits pending on climate change
• 2 City Lawsuits Against Big Oil Dismissed, But That’s Not the End of It

The COALition's Coal Infection: Is It Contagious?

Independent Australia - Graeme McLeay*

When a large number of apparently sane people suggest, not only prolonging existing coal-fired power but building more coal-fired power stations, we must consider what is causing the psychosis, writes Dr Graeme McLeay.

Cartoon by Mark David

IT IS INCUMBENT on a doctor to get the diagnosis right.
When a patient comes complaining that he has been abducted by aliens, psychosis comes to mind. But when others follow who are also seemingly deranged, the doctor must search more widely for the cause.

And so it is with Canberra when a large number of apparently sane people suggest, not only prolonging existing coal-fired power but building more coal-fired power stations.
Was it an infection they picked up on a visit to the climate-denying Heartland Institute? Or something in the environment, perhaps? Maybe it's that lump of coal they passed round in Parliament?



How is it that so many of our elected representatives are so divorced from scientific reality?
Global warming and its resultant climate change is no longer a theory.
It is a stark reality, as even a casual reader must grasp:

• 16 of the warmest years on record this century;
• unprecedented melting of the polar ice caps with the Arctic experiencing heat waves;
• many species, including the infectious sort, occurring out of their normal range;
• sea level rise and coastal erosion;
• an extended bushfire season in both hemispheres;
• droughts in Africa, the Middle East, Northern India and Pakistan; and (dare we mention it, Australia) 
• global coral reef bleaching.

And the list goes on. Already the effects on human health and well being are widespread.
How strange it is that some in the National Party seem also to be afflicted with this condition. It is the regional areas which have so much to lose unless we mitigate and adapt to climate change. Drought is a natural phenomenon in Australia but scientists have warned that the southern half of our continent is drying. Cereal crops have an optimal temperature for growth and in extended heat waves productivity falls off dramatically.
But it’s the economy! they all shout — as if the economy was somehow divorced from nature. Australia’s emissions – which are possibly under-estimated because gas is not properly measured – are “only” 1.3 per cent of the global total, they say. But added together with similar sized nations, we make up 40 per cent of the global total.
Australia’s emissions are rising – even now – and have been since the carbon tax was abolished. Near the top of the league table for emissions per capita, we are part of the problem rather than being part of the solution as we could so easily be.
Leaving aside Canberra’s delusional sickness, climate change and the pollution from fossil fuels are very real health threats to Australians, especially the young who continue to be exposed to pollution from coal and transport and under the business as usual – or worse – scenario expressed by Kelly, Morrison, Abbott and others, will be for a long time to come.

Clarke & Dawe on climate change

*Dr Graeme McLeay is a retired anaesthetist and member of Doctors for the Environment Australia, which concerns itself with links between the environment – particularly climate change – and human health.

Links

• Doctors for the Environment Australia
• Government climate policy: Do Australians need to be protected from it?
• Budget 2018: Climate change denial and conservation jobs slashed
• Why Australia’s youth vote is the key to climate action
• How persistent and respectful advocacy is getting this doctor heard on climate change
• Earth's sixth mass extinction event under way, scientists warn

Watch The Climate Change In Real Time With These Trackers

Vox - Umair Irfan

These tickers show the unrelenting rise in global temperatures and carbon dioxide.

It’s getting hot in here. NASA/Getty Images

Global warming isn’t something that will happen decades down the line — it’s happening every day, bit by bit.
It’s possible now to actually see the concentration of greenhouse gases and the energy they trap ticking ominously upward in real time.
Brian Kahn at Earther highlighted a clock that shows the rising global warming index:

Global Warming Index

The ticker was built by researchers at the University at Oxford and the University of Leeds, and it’s based on their paper published in Scientific Reports last November that tracks warming due to human activity relative to the pre-industrial era of the mid-19th century.
The Current GWI, steadily ticking upward, represents the amount that burning fossil fuels and other human endeavors have driven up the planet’s temperature, while accounting for natural variations in the climate to isolate humanity’s role. You can dig into all the details on how they made it here.
If you want to step further into the rising tide, there’s another, more frenetic ticker from the University of Oxford showing the rise in greenhouse gases, counting up toward humanity’ trillionth metric ton of carbon dioxide emissions:

Trillionth Tonne

In 2015, Bloomberg published a carbon clock that measures rising atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide. (The team also helpfully published the methodology behind their calculations.)

Bloomberg

And if you want to see how we got here, the death slinky has you covered:

Kevin Pluck

Tick-tock.

Links

• Current Global Warming Index
• A real-time Global Warming Index
• What is human-induced warming?
• trillionthtonne.org
• Bloomberg Carbon Clock
• Trend of global warming

A City In Oman Just Posted The World’s Hottest Low Temperature Ever Recorded: 109 Degrees

Washington Post - Jason Samenow

MODIS satellite image from June 26, 2018 shows clear weather over Oman on the day the 24-hour world high-minimum temperature record was set at Quriyat, Oman. Image credit: NASA.

Over a period of 24 hours, the temperature in the coastal city of Quriyat, Oman, never dropped below 108.7 degrees (42.6 Celsius) Tuesday, most likely the highest minimum temperature ever observed on Earth.
For a location to remain no lower than 109 degrees around the clock is mind-boggling. In many locations, a temperature of 109 degrees even during the heat of the afternoon would be unprecedented. For example, in nearly  150 years of weather records, Washington, D.C.’s high temperature has never exceeded 106 degrees.
Quriyat’s suffocating low temperature, first reported by Jeff Masters at Weather Underground, breaks the world’s previous hottest minimum temperature of 107.4 degrees (41.9 Celsius), also set in Oman, on June 27, 2011.
Masters received word of the exceptional temperature from weather records expert Maximiliano Herrera. Incredibly, the temperature in Quriyat, Masters said, remained above 107.4 degrees (41.9 Celsius) for 51 straight hours. Its blistering afternoon high temperature of 121.6 degrees (49.8 Celsius) Tuesday was just about two degrees shy of Oman’s all-time heat record and its highest June temperature, Masters reported.

Temperature difference from normal at 10 p.m. local time Tuesday in Oman analyzed by American (GFS) model. (TropicalTidBits.com) LARGE IMAGE

Over a period of 24 hours, the temperature in the coastal city of Quriyat, Oman, never dropped below 108.7 degrees (42.6 Celsius) Tuesday, most likely the highest minimum temperature ever observed on Earth.
For a location to remain no lower than 109 degrees around the clock is mind-boggling. In many locations, a temperature of 109 degrees even during the heat of the afternoon would be unprecedented. For example, in nearly  150 years of weather records, Washington, D.C.’s high temperature has never exceeded 106 degrees.
Quriyat’s suffocating low temperature, first reported by Jeff Masters at Weather Underground, breaks the world’s previous hottest minimum temperature of 107.4 degrees (41.9 Celsius), also set in Oman, on June 27, 2011.
Masters received word of the exceptional temperature from weather records expert Maximiliano Herrera. Incredibly, the temperature in Quriyat, Masters said, remained above 107.4 degrees (41.9 Celsius) for 51 straight hours. Its blistering afternoon high temperature of 121.6 degrees (49.8 Celsius) Tuesday was just about two degrees shy of Oman’s all-time heat record and its highest June temperature, Masters reported.
Quriyat, sometimes also spelled Qurayyat, is a small fishing village in northeast Oman adjacent to the Sea of Oman that spills into the Arabian Sea. The city’s population is just over 50,000, and it is about an hour southeast of Muscat, Oman’s capital.
This sweltering episode marked the second exceptional weather event to affect Oman in as many months. In May, Category 3 Tropical Cyclone Mekunu slammed into its southwest coast, making landfall near Salalah. It was the most intense tropical cyclone to make landfall on the Arabian Peninsula on record.
Tuesday’s record-breaking heat resulted from a strong high-altitude, high-pressure system or heat dome anchored over the region, which pumped air temperatures up to 15 degrees above normal. Masters said sea surface temperatures in the adjacent waters were about 90 degrees, keeping air temperatures elevated even through the night and offering no reprieve from the oppressive conditions.
Tuesday’s 109-degree low, while the highest known, is not official and remains unverified. Although the World Meteorological Organization validates and maintains records for the hottest maximum world temperature, it does not do so for minimum temperatures.
Nevertheless, assuming it is legitimate, this weather extreme adds to a tremendous number of hot-weather milestones established around the world in just over the past year, which include:

• In April, Pakistan posted the hottest temperature ever observed on Earth during the month of 122.4 degrees (50.2 Celsius).
• Dallas had never hit 90 degrees in November before, but it did so three times in four days in 2017.
• In late October 2017, temperatures soared to 108 degrees in Southern California, the hottest weather on record so late in the season in the entire U.S.
• On Sept. 1, 2017, San Francisco hit 106 degrees, smashing its all-time hottest temperature.
• In late July 2017, Shanghai registered its highest temperature in recorded history, 105.6 degrees (40.9 Celsius).
• In mid-July, Spain posted its highest temperature recorded when Córdoba Airport (in the south) hit 116.4 degrees (46.9 Celsius).
• In July 2017, Death Valley, Calif., endured the hottest month recorded on Earth.
• In late June 2017, Ahvaz, Iran, soared to 128.7 degrees Fahrenheit (53.7 Celsius) — that country’s all-time hottest temperature.
• In late May 2017, the western town of Turbat in Pakistan hit 128.3 degrees (53.5 Celsius), tying the all-time highest temperature in that country and the world-record temperature for May, according to Masters.

All of these heat records are part and parcel of a planet that is trending hotter as greenhouse gas concentrations increase due to human activity. The past four years have been the hottest four years on record.

Links

• April was Earth’s 400th warmer-than-normal month in a row
• The U.S. just observed its warmest 3-, 4-, and 5-year spans on record
• The U.S. just had its warmest May in history, blowing past 1934 Dust Bowl record
• For a contrast: The planet’s most frigid region is even colder than scientists thought
• Assessing The Global Climate In May 2018
• Pakistani City Breaks April Record With Day Of 50c Heat
• April 2018 Australia’s Hottest On Record Courtesy Of “Exceptional Heat”
• Sydney Smashes April Records With A Month Of Summer-Like Heat
• One Of Six Warmest Marches On Record
• Climate Change: 1.5°C Is Closer Than We Imagine
• The Temperature Is Rising ... And So Is The Death Toll

Could Climate Change Lead To The Extinction Of Bees?

Newsweek - Lisa Spear

A mason bee pollinates a flower. Scientists found that when they heated up the bees' environments, up to 70 percent of them died. Getty Images 

The survival of bees is hanging in the balance. Some species are dying off at a record pace, and toxic agricultural chemicals might be to blame. There seem to be many threats to these winged creatures, but climate change may be the final straw for some bee species. If the Earth continues to warm and bees don’t find a way to adapt, some populations could face extinction, according to new research.
A team of scientists found that 30 to 70 percent of mason bees died when they heated up the bees' environments. This reveals that if temperatures continue to climb, bee populations could begin to die off at faster rates, disrupting ecosystems worldwide, said Paul CaraDonna, an ecologist at Northwestern University.
“It was a pretty sobering result. This is not good news for this bee,” CaraDonna told Newsweek.
Over two years, CaraDonna led a team of researchers in Arizona’s Santa Catalina Mountains to simulate the impact of climate change on bees. They built 90 nest boxes, housing up to 15 bees each. The scientists painted some boxes with white reflective paint to simulate a cooler environment, similar to that of the 1950s. A second set of boxes were painted with a clear coating to act as a control for the experiment.
And a final set of boxes were painted black to simulate the future climate predicted for the years 2040 to 2099. By simply painting the boxes black, they absorbed more radiant energy, heating the box and the bees inside. The bees lived in the altered environments from early in larval development all the way through metamorphosis and into adulthood. The findings were published Thursday in Functional Ecology, the British Ecological Society’s journal.
“Almost no bees die when you have cool conditions or regular conditions, and quite a bit more die when you warm things up a couple of degrees on average,” CaraDonna said. “I was quite surprised in those years there were many bees that didn’t make it.”


The bees that survived the heat became smaller, lost much of their body fat and suffered from disruptions to their hibernation. These results suggest bees that survived were not healthy and might struggle to find food or a mate.
“Local bee populations could possibly go extinct in the future because of climate change,” said CaraDonna, who also works as a research scientist for the Chicago Botanic Garden, a conservation science center.
This species of mason bee, Osmia ribifloris, also called the “blueberry mason bee,” is native to the western United States and northern Mexico. This particular bee constructs nests inside of holes and cracks in dead tree stumps. As a primary pollinator of the flowering desert manzanita shrubs, this bee may have a big impact on its ecosystem.
“Native pollinators are a really important part of what makes nature run smoothly,” said CaraDonna. “It's estimated that close to 90 percent of all flowering plants benefit from animal pollination. That ends up at around more than 300,000 plant species worldwide.”
While the specific mason bees used in the experiment do not pollinate agricultural crops, it’s possible that the rising temperatures could also hurt other bee populations. Through a trickle-down effect, the die-off of bees could eventually disrupt human life by hurting our agricultural systems, said CaraDonna.
“You start tinkering with all these pieces, and there are many consequences that can start disrupting the function of natural ecosystems, and eventually that can cascade to affect humans as well,” he said.

Links

• Climate Change Could Drive Bees in Warmer Regions to Extinction
• Study Shows Future Climate Change Could Decrease Bee Population
• Bees are dying. What can we do about it?
• How Climate Change is Messing with Bees
• The buzz on climate change: It's bad for bees
• Save the Bees: EU to Ban World’s Most Common Pesticides

Responding To Economic Climate Risk In Australia

Four Twenty Seven - Natalie Ambrosio

Regulatory pressure and financial damage are necessitating an increase in physical climate risk disclosure in Australia.
In exercising their own due diligence and assessing the exposure to physical climate risks in their portfolios, investors arm themselves with valuable information on corporate risk exposure which they can leverage to engage with companies around resilience.
This report explores the connection between climate hazards and financial risks and shares examples of corporate adaptation and investor engagement to build resilience.

LARGE IMAGE

The global tide of interest in the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD) has hit the shores of Australian financial markets, steered by regulators concerned about the systemic risk climate change poses to the economy.
In 2017 Australian Prudential Regulation Authority’s Geoff Summerhayes was the first Australian regulator to formally endorse the TCFD.
“Some climate risks are distinctly ‘financial’ in nature. Many of these risks are foreseeable, material and actionable now,” he said.
This sentiment was echoed by John Price of the Australian Securities and Investments Commission in 2018 and reflects growing regulatory concern over climate risk disclosure internationally, as shown by Article 173 of France’s Law on Energy Transition and Green Growth and the 2018 European Commission Action Plan.

LARGE IMAGE

This Four Twenty Seven Report, Responding to Economic Climate Risk in Australia, explores the drivers of financial risk in Australia and discusses approaches to addressing this risk.
The nation’s dominant industries are particularly threatened by the prevalent climate hazards.
For investors, understanding a company’s risk to climate change is an essential first step to mitigating portfolio risk, but must be followed by corporate engagement to build resilience.
Institutional investors are increasingly leveraging shareholder resolutions and direct engagement to prompt companies to disclose their climate risks and adapt.

Key Findings

• Australia’s “Angry Summer” of extreme weather in 2013 cost the economy $8 billion and was followed by another summer of extremes in 2016-2017.
• Construction, mining and manufacturing constitute almost 20 percent of Australia’s economy and are highly vulnerable to heat stress and water stress, which threaten large swaths of the nation.
• Boral Limited and Rio Tinto are both Materials companies exposed to water and heat stress in their operations, but they have different risk scores stemming from differing vulnerabilities in their markets and supply chains.
• Engagement on climate is relatively new for Australian shareholders, but is gaining momentum, with institutional asset managers voting on several climate risk disclosure resolutions in 2018.
• Investors can address physical climate risk by reviewing their asset allocations, disclosing their own risks, investing in new opportunities and engaging with corporations.

Links

• Report: Responding to Economic Climate Risk in Australia (pdf)
• Task  Force  on  Climate-related  Financial  Disclosures  (TCFD)
• Australia's new horizon: Climate change challenges and prudential risk
• ASIC recommends voluntary disclosure of climate risks
• Climate Council - Angry Summer 2016/17: Climate Change Super-Charging Extreme Weather (pdf)

A Landmark Climate Change Ruling Could Go Up In Smoke After Justice Kennedy Retires

Mashable - Mark Kaufman

Exhaust and steam rising from a steel mill. Image: Lukas Schulze/Getty Images

After 30 years on the Supreme Court bench, Justice Anthony Kennedy will leave the nation's highest courthouse at the end of July.
With Kennedy's departure comes much uneasiness. One cause for concern is over the paramount climate decision Massachusetts v. EPA, in which Kennedy proved to be the deciding swing vote, as he often was. The worry is that with him gone, the ruling will be left imperiled.
The case occurred after the EPA decided, in 2003, that it could not regulate heat-trapping greenhouse gases. Twelve states, including Massachusetts, sued the agency. They argued that these gases were pollutants and a danger to the public. Eventually, the case found its way to the Supreme Court.
Settled by a five to four vote in 2007, Massachusetts v. EPA ruled for the first time that heat-trapping greenhouse gases are pollutants, and that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) can regulate them, just as the agency reins in pollution emitted by cars and trucks.
"I think Massachusetts v. EPA is the most important environmental decision the Supreme Court has ever decided," Ann Carlson, the director of the Emmett Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the UCLA School of Law, said in an interview.
President Donald Trump will select the next Supreme Court nominee, and it's almost certain this individual will, at minimum, find Massachusetts v. EPA flawed or bad law. Trump is openly hostile to widely accepted climate science, and appears not to have even an elementary understanding of how climate works.

Just how important has Massachusetts v. EPA been?
Before the decision, the EPA did not consider greenhouse gases — notably the invisible, potent gas carbon dioxide — an air pollutant. So it wasn't regulated as one.
Kennedy's swing vote changed that.
"I think it’s a highly significant case because it opened what had been a locked door," Joseph Goffman, executive director of Harvard University's environmental and energy law program, said in an interview.
"The case was tantamount to the opening gun in a race."

Justice Anthony Kennedy (on right) administers the judicial oath to Judge Neil Gorsuch in April 2017. Image: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Specifically, the case enabled the EPA to use a powerful law, the Clean Air Act, to rein in greenhouse gas emissions from cars, trucks, power plants, and industry. This same law had already proven hugely effective in limiting other air pollutants, like the nitrous and sulfur oxides expelled from cars.
"The Clean Air Act has been exceptionally successful as law in making huge changes in public health," said Goffman. "All you have to do is look at L.A. in the 1970s, and then look at it today."
"I remember visiting L.A. in the '70s, and after a day or two, having a sore throat because of smog," he added.
Following the Massachusetts v. EPA decision, the Obama Administration could use the power of the Clean Air Act to regulate greenhouse gases, which didn't cause sore throats and coughing fits, but stoked accelerated warming and disruption of the global climate.
Cars, trucks, power plants, and fossil fuel operations all became regulated. In 2012, for example, the Obama Administration finalized ambitious gas efficiency standards for cars in the U.S. The goal was to slash fuel use in half by 2025, and accordingly, greenhouse gas emissions, too.
President Obama, though, chose to focus on something all Americans could get behind.
"By the middle of the next decade our cars will get nearly 55 miles per gallon, almost double what they get today," Obama said.
But the most far-reaching effort was the Obama Administration's Clean Power Plan, which finalized EPA standards that intended to slash the carbon dioxide produced by U.S. power plants (notably from coal burning) substantially, to less than 30 percent of 2005 levels by the year 2030.

Smog-filled Los Angeles in the late 1970s. Image: Nick Ut/AP/REX/Shutterstock

The Trump administration now seeks to overturn both the historic Clean Power Plan and fuel efficiency standards.

Will a new court overturn Massachusetts v. EPA?
Instead of simply overturning the verdict, it's possible that a new court could take it apart piece by piece.
"I think they’d chip away at it instead of overturning it outright," said Carlson.
For instance, in 2014 the Supreme Court ruled, following conservative Justice Antonin Scalia's opinion, that the EPA couldn't regulate greenhouse gas emissions from some smaller sources of air pollution.
If Kennedy's replacement proves wary or opposed to Massachusetts v. EPA, each time an EPA greenhouse gas regulation is brought to court, the conservative majority may find another way to narrow the scope of when these gases can be reined in.
"This is really where I think people who view the Clean Air Act as the ongoing tool for limiting green gases in the future should be focusing their anxiety," said Goffman.
It's also still plausible that the court could overturn the decision completely.

The Sago coal mine in West Virginia. Image: Jeff Swensen/Getty Images

"It’s unlikely, but not impossible," said Carlson, noting that just this week the court overturned a 40-year-old labor union decision.
Two current justices, Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, already believe the decision should be overturned, said Carlson.

Massachusetts v. EPA embraced climate science
The landmark case didn't just allow the federal government to mitigate greenhouse gases, it also signaled an early embrace of climate science.
"It recognized that the science of climate change is strong and indisputable," said Carlson.
"Massachusetts v. EPA needed to determine if greenhouse gases endangered health and welfare,"  just like other pollutants, said Carlson.
The court found it did. These risks included "increases in temperatures, changes in extreme weather events, increases in food- and water-borne pathogens" and were supported by evidence from both the U.S. Global Climate Research Program and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
The Clean Air Act, on which the decision rests, certainly didn't always regulate gases like carbon dioxide, but it left ample room for the sciences to progress and reveal new threats to the public.
"It's hard to overstate how much the Clean Air Act was driven by science and an understanding of how science works," said Goffman, noting that Congress overhauled the law in 1977 and 1990 to account for advances in environmental and public health sciences.
"It’s almost as if Congress knew there would be a new class of pollutants," he said.

Ever wonder how the universe might end?

Links

• The Energy 202: Kennedy's retirement could bring a seismic shift to environmental law
• Massachusetts v. Environmental Protection Agency - Wikipedia
• The Post-Kennedy Supreme Court: What 2 Dissents on Climate Rules Tell Us
• SUPREME COURT: Is Massachusetts v. EPA a goner?