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It is Time for Joe Biden to step up and declare a Presidential Climate Emergency [1]
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Date: 2022-07-01
But now it is time for President Biden to step up and do more to rein in GHG emmissions, much more. It was Donald Trump who showed us how to go around the congress by declaring a border ‘emergency’. President Biden should use this Supreme Court ruling, as his cue to declare a Climate Emergency and bypass the Koch Network’s many retainers in the Congress like Mitch McConnell, and Joe Manchin. Catastrophic Climate Change is a genuine emergency, and i t is also one of the biggest drivers of migration from the northern triangle of Central America. The Court was very deferential to the Executive Branch when a President declares an emergency, allowing the executive to exert extraordinary powers.
Acting to reduce climate chaos is by far more urgent issue facing the USA in the 21st Century. Nothing else even comes close in urgency. And that is according to every credible expert in the related scientific fields.
The industry sector, according to the EPA, accounts for 24% of greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S. — most of which is from the burning of fossil fuels. Greenhouse gases, primarily carbon dioxide, trap heat in the atmosphere, increasing global temperatures .
While the case was still undergoing review by the Supreme Court, Patton told CBS News, the EPA was "quite clear" that any regulations would come from a clean slate and involved all stakeholders to develop pollution standards. "A number of" power companies also expressed support for the EPA's authority, as well as the American Medical Association and American Academy of Pediatrics, among others, she said.
"Today's Supreme Court ruling undermines EPA's authority to protect people from smokestack climate pollution at a time when all evidence shows we must take action with great urgency," she said on Thursday. "This is judicial overreach."
Power plants and smokestacks are "one of the single largest sources" of national and global climate pollution, according to Environmental Defense Fund general counsel Vickie Patton. That's what the regulations at issue in this case sought to address.
In a 6-3 opinion along ideological lines, the nation's highest court ruled in West Virginia v. EPA that the federal agency does not have the authority to regulate industry greenhouse gas emissions. The case stems from former President Obama's Clean Power Plan, which would have enforced mandates for how much emissions power plants could emit.
The five-member majority said in a brief order that the challengers appear to "have no cause of action" to review the Defense Department's authority to move up to $4 billion between accounts.”
The court's five conservative justices lifted an injunction against the border wall spending that had been imposed by a federal district court judge in California and affirmed by a federal appeals court. The injunction blocked spending while the lawsuit challenging it remains pending at the appeals court.
Then a year later the Supreme Court doubled down on giving the executive branch wide freedom of action where a Presidential Emergency is declared.
By Amy Howe
Jul 31, 2020
The Supreme Court on Friday turned down a plea from opponents of President Donald Trump’s border wall to order a temporary stop to construction. By a vote of 5-4, the justices declined to lift a stay, entered just over a year ago, that allowed the federal government to continue to spend federal funds on construction while a legal challenge to the wall continues. The challengers had urged the Supreme Court to intervene last week, telling the justices that if the stay were not lifted, the Trump administration could finish the wall before the court even decides whether to take up the case on the merits.
The brief one-sentence order was the latest in the dispute over the wall on the U.S.-Mexico border. The clash came to the court for the first time last year, after a federal district judge in California agreed with the challengers, the Sierra Club and the Southern Borders Communities Coalition, that government officials did not have the power to spend more than Congress had already allocated for border security. U.S. District Judge Haywood Gilliam barred the government from using $2.5 billion in funds originally earmarked for military-personnel funds to build the border wall, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit declined to stay that ruling while the government appealed. The Trump administration then went to the Supreme Court, which – by a vote of 5-4 last July — put Gilliam’s order on hold and allowed the government to use the Pentagon funds on the wall.
After the 9th Circuit upheld Gilliam’s decision last month, the challengers asked the Supreme Court to step in and lift the stay. Otherwise, they contended, the government would be able to finish the parts of the wall that are the subject of their challenge before the litigation concludes.
The Trump administration urged the court to leave its year-old stay in place. When the justices rejected the challengers’ arguments last year, U.S. Solicitor General Jeffrey Wall posited, they were “presumably aware that the result would be construction during litigation.” And in any event, Wall added, the government plans to file its cert petition seeking review of the 9th Circuit’s decision on Aug. 7, which would allow the justices to consider it at their first conference after the summer recess.
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https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/7/1/2107787/-It-is-Time-for-Joe-Biden-to-step-up-and-declare-a-Presidential-Climate-Emergency
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