Just in time for Chula Vista’s upcoming July climate workshops, the ultraconservative business-friendly Supreme Court last week overturned a legal precedent that, at worst empowered expert bureaucrats in a given field and, at best advocated for consumers, moms, dads, children, the elderly, infirm—virtually everybody with a pair of lungs or a pocketbook.
In 1984’s Chevron v. Natural Resources Council federal judges ruled, essentially, that in cases where the law is ambiguous they should defer to government agencies and their presumed expertise.
Over time soft murmuring of big government turned into roaring, histrionic tirades condemning deep state practices, conservatives and libertarians started leaping enthusiastically toward smaller government and fewer safeguards and regulations.
The High Court’s late June action that rendered the Chevron decision pointless is one more step toward concentrating power and influence among legislators and judges and their rich patrons who placed them in power.
Chula Vista’s Climate Action Plan has been in operation now for nearly a quarter of a century. It was created to “address the threat of climate change impacts to the local community” and periodically the plan is updated after conducting community workshops to gauge the thoughts and goals of local residents.
But in light of the Supreme Court’s recent action, coupled with the possibility of an uber-friendly deregulation-minded Trump administration, one has to wonder just how useless any of these workshops and climate action plans will be in the future.
The authority and effectiveness of government agencies—the Environmental Protection Agency for example—charged with being caretakers of the public good is being undermined and dismantled by judges and legislators taking their orders from corporations that don’t want to be hampered by regulations that will prevent them from banking record profits.
We can come up with plans to combat climate change all we like, but there is a very real possibility that if a proposed regulation or action plan is challenged in court by a gross polluter, courts could dismiss the expertise of the EPA as irrelevant.
That’s a bad policy and bad for our health.
