#nrdc

[wetlandsday]

Saving the Bogs (and Peatlands, Swamps, Marshes, Fens…)

Dawn breaks over a cypress swamp in Arkansas. Wetlands cover just 6 percent of the planet’s land area but provide habitat for 40 percent of wildlife. Protecting Biodiversity Means Saving the Bogs (and Peatlands, Swamps, Marshes, Fens…)

[angelasouthern]

New work for @nrdc_org (Natural Resource Defense Council) 🌸🌎🌼 In celebration of National Poetry Month and Earth Month this April, NRDC has partnered with @orion_magazine to ask three poets to face our climate crisis head-on. Three writers counter despair and summon courage in facing the challenges of our warming world. #nrdc #rachelelizagriffiths #seanhill #janewong #poets #nationalpoetrymonth #poetrymonth #lettering #handlettering #letteringartist #digitalcollage #editorialillustration #letteringillustration #earthmonth (at Austin, Texas) https://www.instagram.com/p/CqbagEBL-wS/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[intlforestday]

Focus on how forests' ability to regulate the movement of rainwater and snowmelt through forested landscapes can be degraded by industrial logging.

Extreme flooding events are increasing with climate change. Research shows how clearcut logging increases risks to communities and ecosystems. Flooding in British Columbia's Fraser Valley in November 2021.

Research study: Forest Degradation Increases Community Vulnerability to Extreme Floods.

[musicmags]

[odinsblog]

Elena Kagan issued a devastating dissent to the decision of her hard-right fellow supreme court justices to overturn the Chevron doctrine that has been a cornerstone of federal regulation for 40 years, accusing the majority of turning itself into “the country’s administrative czar”.

Kagan said that in one fell swoop, the rightwing majority had snatched the ability to make complex decisions over regulatory matters away from federal agencies and awarded the power to themselves.

“As if it did not have enough on its plate, the majority turns itself into the country’s administrative czar,” she wrote.

For 40 years, she wrote, the Chevron doctrine, set out by the same supreme court in a 1984 ruling, had supported regulatory efforts by the US government by granting federal experts the ability to make reasonable decisions where congressional law was ambiguous. She gave a few examples of the work that was facilitated as a result, such as “keeping air and water clean, food and drugs safe, and financial markets honest”.

Now, the hard-right supermajority had flipped that on its head.

Instead of federal experts adjudicating on all manner of intricate scientific and technical questions – such as addressing the climate crisis, deciding on the country’s healthcare system or controlling AI – now judges would make those critical calls.

Kagan, displaying no desire to pull her punches, portrayed Friday’s ruling as a blatant power grab by the chief justice, John Roberts, and his five ultra-right peers, three of whom were appointed by Trump – Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett.

“A rule of judicial humility gives way to a rule of judicial hubris,” she wrote.

Not for the first time, her most caustic comments relate to stare decisis – the adherence to legal precedent that is the foundation stone of the rule of law. Respect for the previous judgments of the supreme court is a reminder to judges that “wisdom often lies in what prior judges have done. It is a brake on the urge to convert every new judge’s opinion into a new legal rule or regime.”

By contrast, she went on: “It is impossible to pretend that today’s decision is a one-off, in its treatment of precedent.”

It has become an unquestionable pattern: the new hard-right supermajority has a fondness for tearing up their own court’s precedents stretching back decades. They did it when they eviscerated the right to an abortion in 2022, upending 50 years of settled law; they did it again last year when they prohibited affirmative action in university admissions, casting out 40 years of legal precedent; and now they’ve done it once more after 40 years to Chevron.

“Just my own defenses of stare decisis, my own dissents to this court’s reversals of settled law, by now fill a small volume,” Kagan said, her final words as plaintive as they were defiant.

(continue reading)

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Ed Pilkington at The Guardian:

The US supreme court has overturned one of its own most important precedents, the Chevron doctrine, that for the past 40 years has guided the work of federal government in critical areas of public life, from food and drug safety to environmental protection. In a ruling that the Biden administration has warned could have a “convulsive” impact on the functioning of government, the court’s hardline conservative majority delivered a major blow to the regulatory powers of federal agencies. Voting as a block, the six rightwing justices who wield the supermajority threw out the supreme court’s own 1984 opinion in Chevron USA Inc v Natural Resources Defense Council, which has required the courts to defer to the knowledge of government experts in their reasonable interpretation of ambiguous laws.

Writing the opinion, chief justice John Roberts bluntly stated that the Chevron precedent “is overruled”. He lambasted the legal theory laid out in the ruling, claiming it “gravely erred” and calling it was “misguided” and “unworkable” despite the fact that it has steered the functions of the federal government for four decades.

Roberts not only eradicated the Chevron doctrine, he turned it on its head. Under his ruling, the relationship between courts and federal agencies is reversed: in the modern era, the courts have shown deference to the expertise of agencies, but from now on the courts alone will decide. “The constitution assigns to the federal judiciary the responsibility and power to adjudicate cases and controversies,” Roberts wrote. “Agencies have no special competence in resolving statutory ambiguities. Courts do.”

In recent years, the Chevron doctrine has become a central target of rightwing groups that blame it for what they see as a proliferation of government regulations executed by unelected bureaucrats in the so-called “deep state”. A key group behind the supreme court challenge, the New Civil Liberties Alliance, was founded with seed money from the oil billionaire Charles Koch.

[...] Elena Kagan issued a withering dissent, which was joined by her fellow liberal justices, Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson. She accused her rightwing peers on the bench of throwing out a precedent that had stood for 40 years as “a cornerstone of administrative law”.

Chevron had been applied over that period in thousands of judicial decisions and become “part of the warp and woof of modern government”, said Kagan. By casting out decades of settled law, the conservative supermajority had once again asserted their authority. “The majority disdains restraint, and grasps for power,” Kagan added.

The radical right-wing judicial activist majority on SCOTUS ruled 6-3 by Chief Justice John Roberts to overturn Chevron v. NRDC (aka the Chevron Doctrine) in the Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo ruling that would adversely impact federal government functions and regulatory powers in many aspects.

SCOTUS Justice Elena Kagan said it best in her dissent in Loper Bright Enterprises: “The majority disdains restraint, and grasps for power.”

[zmyaro]

I have so little patience for people insisting Z/llennials are anxious because of our phones. Do you think limiting federal agencies' abilities to protect workers and consumers would be less awful if I read it in a newspaper?? Do you think pollution would be less of a problem if Walter Cronkite told me about it?? Do you think more people under 30 would have secure employment and housing if the town crier shouted the stats??

Are there online platforms that create and exacerbate extremely unhealthy social situations? Absolutely, yes! But stop acting as though people aren't intelligent enough to also identify actual problems chronically affecting their lives.

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

President Joe Biden told an audience of conservation and environmental groups Wednesday that their work has never been more important at a time when they are battling the greatest threat facing future generations.

Speaking at the annual Capital Dinner of the League of Conservation Voters, Biden told the supportive audience there are “a lot of threats to our children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren” but climate change “is the only truly existential threat.”

He said the audience members and his administration had done good work in combatting the threat but everyone needed to “finish the job.”

Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris were endorsed by four environmental and conservation groups at the dinner: the League of Conservation Voters Action Fund, NextGen PAC, NRDC Action Fund and the Sierra Club. Speakers for the organizations praised the Biden-Harris team as the administration that has done the most to combat climate change.

In earlier comments, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who was honored by the League with its lifetime achievement award, told the audience they were fighting for democracy with their environmental efforts.

“What you have done is the highest of patriotism, democracy in action. The story of America is the story of everyday Americans coming together, making your collective voices heard.”

Biden touted a number of the administration’s accomplishments, including the Inflation Reduction Act and its $375 billion for clean energy, the biggest climate law in history. He elicited cheers from the crowd as he ran through areas that have been designated as protected during his administration, as well as when he talked about the executive order he signed in April targeting investments to disadvantaged communities dealing with pollution.

Despite the endorsement and list of achievements and no visible protests at the dinner, recent steps the administration has taken have given the President a more mixed legacy and brought him under criticism by environmentalists and Democrats, although that was not evident at the event. Those decisions include the administration’s approval of the Willow project, a large-scale oil drilling project in Alaska, and the inclusion of the Mountain Valley Pipeline in West Virginia in the must-pass debt limit package the President negotiated with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy.

[empiricalscotus]

Supremely Slow Out of the Gates

The Supreme Court has set several records in the past few terms related to its slow decision pace and small number of argued cases. Take a look to see what record the Court already set this term

The Supreme Court has hit several lows in the last few years. It recently had the lowest number of decisions in over a century and it has significantly slowed down its pace of decision releases.  It had set some new records as well including the highest rate of 6 to 3 decisions ever and the highest fraction of argued cases with at least one dissent (though not the highest number of overall…

[mariacallous]

This summer, the Supreme Court is poised to overturn a cornerstone of administrative law known as "Chevron deference." Established in the 1984 case Chevron v. NRDC, this doctrine instructs courts to defer to federal agencies' interpretations of laws where the underlying statute is ambiguous (or even silent). Absent Chevron, Congress could be forced to be much more specific in how it crafts legislation, delegates authority, and conducts regulatory oversight. If it refuses to adapt, agencies could be incapacitated and service delivery could stall.

Ironically, the effort to dismantle Chevron and return responsibility to the legislative branch may happen amid a historically unproductive and divided Congress. Briefing and oral arguments for Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, the case challenging the 1984 decision, raised questions about Congress' preparedness. And outside the Court, commentators fear Congress may be too broken to fix.

As close watchers of efforts to modernize Congress over the past decade, we don't share that pessimism. But a lot will have to change. In the 40 years since Chevron was decided, Congress has seen worsening dysfunction and atrophy. Staffing on House committees has shrunk by 41 percent. Critical support offices like the Congressional Research Service and the Government Accountability Office have downsized by more than 25 percent. Meanwhile, the complexity of the federal bureaucracy has increased immensely.

While Chevron is often described as diminishing congressional authority, that's not entirely accurate. Rather than stealing authority from Congress, the ruling created the political conditions for Congress to be deliberately ambiguous, and punt contentious policy details to the executive branch. This change was then followed by a hollowing out of committee expertise, increased dependence on lobbyists, centralization of power in leadership, and more gridlock. As attorney Paul Clement argued in Loper Bright v. Raimondo:

Chevron is a big factor in contributing to gridlock. And let me give you a concrete example. I would think that the uniquely 21st-century phenomenon of cryptocurrency would have been addressed by Congress, and I certainly would have thought that would have been true in the wake of the FTX debacle. But it hasn't happened. Why hasn't it happened? Because there's an agency head out there that thinks that he already has the authority to address this uniquely 21st-century problem with a couple of statutes passed in the 1930s.

A post-Chevron world could force Congress to increase its internal capacity, invest in expertise, overhaul its processes, better monitor implementation, and respond more quickly. If not, depending where SCOTUS comes down, things could start to break.

Massive institutional reforms in Congress are rare and usually come in response to a crisis or scandal, whether post-Nixon budget changes, post-Jack Abramoff lobbying reform, or post-9/11 security changes (including the embrace of email after Anthrax attacks).

More recently, we saw continuity upgrades accelerated during the pandemic, and Congress is now responding with remarkable haste to responsibly adopt AI tools. Since 2019, a bipartisan modernization effort in the House has produced and implemented over 100 reforms, creating a virtuous cycle in which members, staff, and outside experts work together to improve the institution.

Post-Chevron, these efforts need to be dramatically expanded. This will require not just incremental adjustments but a comprehensive upgrade in resources, staffing, and operations. It will require a major increase to the legislative branch's budget even as the U.S. faces a difficult fiscal outlook. Indeed, while Congress is a mere 0.1 percent of federal expenditures, it has long been a salient and politically expedient place for politicians to make cuts.

One key area where Congress will need to improve is its regulatory monitoring and oversight. AEI scholars Kevin Kosar and Philip Wallach proposed a vehicle for this change: a new "Congressional Regulation Office" (CRO). The CRO would undertake critical tasks such as conducting benefit-cost analyses of significant agency rules, performing retrospective reviews to assess the effectiveness and impact of existing regulations, and identifying redundancies or conflicts across the regulatory landscape. Another approach would be to build this function inside of an existing agency, such as the Government Accountability Office or the Congressional Budget Office.

In addition to building a new regulatory support function, Congress will need to bolster its staff capacity and technology resources, with a particular focus on committees with substantial regulatory jurisdiction, as well as support agencies.

Unfortunately, to date, we are unaware of any major hearings or other efforts in Congress to address this challenge. Meanwhile, court watchers see that an upheaval to Chevron is coming. Regardless of where you come down on the merits of the case, it's crucial to get ready. While most will be focused on the November election throughout 2024, some of the biggest changes coming to Congress may soon be decided by nine votes.

[sustainabilitythoughts]

Recently I was talking to a friend about vampire energy, which is the electricity used by many devices to maintain a standby condition.  Many of these devices use small amounts of electricity even when sleeping or turned off.  Devices with clocks and internal thermostats to maintain a specific temperature as well as many “smart” electronic products use vampire energy.  My friend was interested in knowing how much power is used worldwide for this vampire energy, so I went looking for a number.  According to the article below, “Studies from the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) have found that more than 100 billion kilowatt-hours are wasted every year because of vampire energy, costing American consumers over $19—about $165 per US household on average—and 50 large (500-megawatt) power plants’ worth of electricity.”  “Cutting vampire energy consumption in half, in the US alone, would be the equivalent of turning off the carbon emissions of a medium-sized country, like Jordan or Lebanon.”  The article points out that “at the industrial level, 21 percent of all electricity consumed by buildings is wasted”.   Most of us are not in charge of industrial facilities, but when at work we can at least turn lights off and unplug our phone chargers before we go home.  Other things to consider:  

Plug electronic devices into an easily-accessible power strip so that you can turn the power completely off at night or when you are not using the device.  Choose settings that put the device into a low-power sleep mode after a short period of non-use. 

Unplug devices such as digital clocks in a guest bedroom.  You can plug them back in when guests are expected. 

Don’t leave chargers plugged in when they’re not actively charging your device.  All those smartphone, laptop, and personal care device chargers use electricity even when not connected to the item they are intended to charge.

[azspot]

The Supreme Court fundamentally altered the way that our federal government functions on Friday, transferring an almost unimaginable amount of power from the executive branch to the federal judiciary. By a 6–3 vote, the conservative supermajority overruled Chevron v. NRDC, wiping out four decades of precedent that required unelected judges to defer to the expert judgment of federal agencies. The ruling is extraordinary in every way—a massive aggrandizement of judicial power based solely on the majority’s own irritation with existing limits on its authority. After Friday, virtually every decision an agency makes will be subject to a free-floating veto by federal judges with zero expertise or accountability to the people. All at once, SCOTUS has undermined Congress’ ability to enact effective legislation capable of addressing evolving problems and sabotaged the executive branch’s ability to apply those laws to the facts on the ground. It is one of the most far-reaching and disruptive rulings in the history of the court.

Elena Kagan is horrified by what the Supreme Court just did. You should be too.

[progressivepower]

#SCOTUSISOWNED “By a 6–3 vote, the conservative supermajority overruled Chevron v. NRDC, wiping out four decades of precedent that required unelected judges to defer to the expert judgment of federal agencies.” https://ow.ly/UoSo50Ss9xX http://dlvr.it/T8wK6Y

[odinsblog]

The Supreme Court fundamentally altered the way that our federal government functions on Friday, transferring an almost unimaginable amount of power from the executive branch to the federal judiciary. By a 6–3 vote, the conservative supermajority overruled Chevron v. NRDC, wiping out four decades of precedent that required unelected judges to defer to the expert judgment of federal agencies. The ruling is extraordinary in every way—a massive aggrandizement of judicial power based solely on the majority’s own irritation with existing limits on its authority. After Friday, virtually every decision an agency makes will be subject to a free-floating veto by federal judges with zero expertise or accountability to the people. All at once, SCOTUS has undermined Congress’ ability to enact effective legislation capable of addressing evolving problems and sabotaged the executive branch’s ability to apply those laws to the facts on the ground. It is one of the most far-reaching and disruptive rulings in the history of the court.

In Chevron, the court unanimously announced an important principle of law that governed the nation until Friday: When a federal statute is ambiguous, courts should defer to an agency’s reasonable interpretation of it. Why? Congress delegates countless important calls to agencies—directing the EPA, for instance, to limit harmful benzene emissions, rather than providing the precise formula to determine what level of benzene emissions is harmful to humans. Congress writes statutes broadly because it expects these agencies to respond to new facts and adjust their enforcement accordingly.

Crucially, these agencies are staffed with experts who have deep knowledge and experience in the area where Congress seeks to regulate. Such experts can understand and execute regulations more proficiently than federal judges, who are, at best, dilettantes in most fields of regulation. For example, an EPA scientist is unlikely to confuse nitrous oxide (laughing gas) with nitrogen oxide (a smog-causing emission), as Justice Neil Gorsuch did in a Thursday opinion blocking an EPA rule. Moreover, most agencies are staffed with political appointees whom the president can appoint and remove at will. That makes them far more accountable to the citizenry than federal judges, who are guaranteed life tenure no matter how badly they butcher the law.

Since 1984, federal courts have applied Chevron in about 18,000 decisions in every conceivable area of the law: energy policy, education, food and drug safety, labor, the environment, consumer protection, finance, health care, housing, law enforcement—the list is pretty much endless. It has become the background principle against which Congress enacts all legislation.

That all ends now.

(continue reading)

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Todd Beeton at The Big Picture:

We’re more than halfway through June, and the Supreme Court has hardly made a dent in the release of major opinions from this blockbuster term.

Each year, the Supreme Court’s term begins on the first Monday in October and ends with a recess starting at the end of June or beginning of July. With this self-imposed deadline fast approaching, the Court has just 2 weeks left to release decisions in the remaining 23 cases out of the 61 total cases they heard this term.

We should expect a firehose of decisions coming this week and next, with the most newsworthy cases of the term among them. And perhaps that’s by design from a court with a distinct PR problem.

[...]

January 6th

By far the most eagerly anticipated Supreme Court decision of the term is the one the Justices heard last: Trump v U.S., which is described by ScotusBlog as:

Whether and if so to what extent does a former president enjoy presidential immunity from criminal prosecution for conduct alleged to involve official acts during his tenure in office.

This case relates to Donald Trump’s appeal of a February 6 decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, which thoroughly rejected Donald Trump’s claims to immunity in the four-count criminal indictment brought against him by Special Counsel Jack Smith in the January 6 case.

[...]

Abortion

In its unanimous decision last week to reject the challenge by a group of doctors to the FDA’s approval of Mifepristone, a safe and effective drug used in most medical abortions in the U.S., the Supreme Court did not rule on the merits of the case but rather threw out the challenge based on the plaintiffs’ lack of standing (finding that the plaintiffs in the case were unable to demonstrate any harm brought to them by the FDA’s Mifepristone approval.) 

Justice Kavanaugh’s majority opinion in FDA v. Alliance For Hippocratic Medicine was widely seen as leaving the door open to overturning the FDA’s approval of the drug if the right case—i.e., the right group of plaintiffs—were brought in front of this virulently anti-choice SCOTUS majority.

But the case was not the only abortion case the Court heard this term, with Moyle v. U.S. still yet to be decided.

At issue there is whether Idaho’s near total abortion ban can override the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA), a federal statute on the books since 1986 designed to “ensure public access to emergency services regardless of ability to pay.” 

[...]

Guns

Last week, in a remarkably radical decision, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 along ideological lines to overturn a Trump era ban on bump stocks, devices that gun safety advocates argue convert semi-automatic weapons into machine guns. 

[...]

There is, however, one Second Amendment case still to be decided this term: U.S. v. Rahimi, which SCOTUSblog describes as a dispute over

Whether 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(8), which prohibits the possession of firearms by persons subject to domestic-violence restraining orders, violates the Second Amendment on its face.

[...]

The Administrative State

As we saw with the bump stock case, this Supreme Court is fond of imposing its own will over the expertise of federal agencies, what Trump and the right derisively refer to as the “deep state” or the “administrative state.” Now the Court may be poised to hugely undercut the power of all federal agencies to interpret congressional statutes when it finally rules on Relentless v. Department of Commerce in the coming weeks.  In a 1984 case, Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council, the Court established the Chevron Doctrine, which basically said that “courts should defer to an agency’s reasonable interpretation of an ambiguous statute.”

[...] And in Securities And Exchange Commission v. Jarkesy, it could very well “strip the SEC of a major tool in fighting securities fraud.”

With 23 cases left to have opinions released in the Supreme Court later this month and possibly early next month, Todd Beeton writes in The Big Picture a summary of the key cases left to be decided.

Key cases left:

Trump v. United States: Presidential immunity

Moyle v. United States: EMTALA and abortion.

United States v. Rahimi: Guns and domestic abuse.

Relentless Inc. v. Department of Commerce: Chevron Doctrine and regulatory power.

SEC v. Jarkesy: regulatory power.

[macmanx]

The biggest offenders were toilet paper brands from companies Procter & Gamble, Kimberly-Clark, and Georgia-Pacific.

“[They] continue to make these flagship brands almost entirely from forest fiber, which is driving harmful consequences for the climate, biodiversity, and communities that depend on these forests,” said Ashley Jordan, who authored the NRDC report.