Gutting Chevron to protect fossil fuels

SCOTUS has given right wing fanatics in black robes the green light to deploy junk science, consult their navels, or review the Old Testament to arrive at their preferred conclusion in climate cases.

Photo by Greenpeace Robert Meyers

Just as parts of the world are becoming uninhabitable and nearly half the U.S. is under an extreme heat advisory, extremists on the Supreme Court have decided they know more about climate change than scientists and meteorologists.  

Granting the wishes of private industry, particularly the fossil-fuel industry, the Supreme Court in Loper Bright Enterprises vs. Raimondo effectively gutted the administrative state, overturning the Chevron doctrine that had guided federal agencies and federal law for four decades. Under Chevron, courts deferred to a federal government agency’s professional expertise in interpreting ambiguities in federal legislation. Those agency interpretations were developed over years and relied on the professional expertise of scientists, doctors and engineers. So long as agencies’ expert interpretation made sense, comported with Congress’ intentions, and was reasonable, courts accepted it.

Trump supporters and organizations like the Heritage Foundation pushing Trump’s Project 2025 have obsessed over Chevron and sought to dismantle the “deep state” for years. Their lobbying efforts and massive dark money campaigns focused on judicial appointments of zealot judges committed to weakening the federal government, largely to promote Christian Nationalism and protect corporate profits threatened by federal regulations.

The dangerous gutting of Chevron

After Trump packed the Supreme court, extremist justices finally achieved a sufficient majority to deal a death blow to federal agency administration. In the recent Loper decision, Justice Roberts wrote outrageously that federal agencies “have no special competence in resolving statutory ambiguities. Courts do.” Loper overturned the longstanding Chevron doctrine by ruling that judges should substitute their own opinions for scientific expertise in interpreting federal statutes.

The absurdity of letting self-impressed men like Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch substitute their personal, lay opinions for those of trained scientists, engineers and experts is worse than partisan-- it’s suicidal. Justice Thomas recently shot down the AFT’s expert opinion that bump stocks keep firing the trigger like a machine gun, while Justice Gorsuch repeatedly confused an air pollutant with laughing gas when gutting EPA protections for the environment.

The prospect of Trump-appointed judges deciding for themselves how many pounds of toxic emissions our forests, farms and lungs can handle is terrifying. Think of Aileen Cannon from the Southern District of Florida slow-walking Trump’s straightforward documents case, or Matthew Kacsmaryk from the Northern District of Texas imposing a nationwide mifepristone ban. 

SCOTUS has now given all right wing fanatics in black robes the green light to deploy junk science, consult their navels, or review the Old Testament to arrive at their preferred conclusion in climate and other science-dependent cases. 

This is how rightwing plaintiffs succeed

 Deep pocketed right-wing plaintiffs, like the anti-abortion doctors who challenged mifepristone even though they don’t administer the drug and have nothing to do with it, often fund lawsuits to challenge policies they dislike, and they know how to forum shop. 

As the ACLU notes in the case involving mifepristone, for example, plaintiffs filed the case in Amarillo, Texas, “where they could guarantee it would be heard by a Trump-appointed district court judge with a record of hostility to abortion. That district judge rubber-stamped all of their requests, and the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals largely did the same – overriding the consensus of the FDA and every leading national medical authority in order to impose medically unnecessary restrictions on mifepristone.” 

As the climate heats up and people lose their homes and livelihood to extreme weather, Big Oil will accelerate its challenge to barely-there climate legislation and EPA regulations. Congress won’t be able to keep up even if it wants to, as it dissembles into sophomoric antics in a Trump-divided country. 

When they legislate at all, Congress often passes ambiguous legislation, knowing that agencies will tap professional expertise to fill in the gaps to effectuate Congress’ meaning. But under Loper, when an already dysfunctional Congress fails to map out every law with scientific specificity, more extremist judges will be invited to rely on their own personal opinions, drawing from their own personal bias.

 Conflicted justices should recuse from all climate cases

Climate advocates challenging fossil fuels are also becoming more aggressive as lives, livelihoods and habitats are threatened. Fossil fuel cases are already among the most expensive to litigate, because they threaten the richest defendants in the world. 

More troubling, in terms of whether the human race will survive its biggest threat, is that zealots on the current Supreme Court have solid ties to the fossil fuel industry.

As Politico reported, Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s father was a “highly active and respected member of the American Petroleum Institute for more than two decades,” raising concerns about Barrett’s participation in climate cases.  During her confirmation hearing, she testified, “I don’t think that my views on global warming or climate change are relevant to the job I would do as a judge... I’m not really in a position to offer any kind of informed opinion.” 

Her decision in Loper says otherwise.

Meanwhile, Justice Alito’s family leases more than 100 acres of land for oil and gas development, yet he failed to recuse from the case hobbling the EPA’s ability to regulate carbon emissions. It has also become known that Justice Thomas, who has accepted over $4 million in “gifts” from conservative donors, has been in fossil fuel investor Harlan Crow’s pocket for years.  

Aside from obvious personal conflicts presented for Coney-Barrett, Alito, and Thomas due to their ties to fossil fuel wealth, all six conservative justices belong to the Federalist Society, and have ties to the Heritage Foundation. Both organizations are backed by fossil fuel money, in particular, Koch money. 

The Heritage Foundation is a network of conservative organizations financed by the Koch brothers largely to promote climate change denial, and in particular to lobby against the government’s climate change efforts. Justice Thomas has listed the Heritage Foundation on his disclosure forms, and the Heritage Foundation vetted lists of judges and current conservative justices for Trump appointments. 

Koch and its subsidiaries also support the Federalist Society, which is focused on shifting federal power to gerrymandered and Republican-controlled states. Koch is the second largest private corporation in the U.S., with $115 billion in annual revenue, operating in oil and gas exploration, pipelines and refining, and chemical and fertilizer production. Greenpeace describes Koch as  “the oil and gas industry's top lobbying spender, one of the top polluters, a massive funding source to climate-denial front-groups, and major force fighting against clean energy policies.” 

Meanwhile, the heat is terrible, and getting worse

More than just uncomfortable for humans and animals, extreme temperatures are dangerous. In the face of Congressional inaction, the world’s oceans have surged to record levels of warmth, threatening marine life and the global food supply. 

Rising temperatures are also causing more extreme and frequent weather events. Deadly hurricanes used to begin in October; last week, Beryl was the earliest Category Five hurricane ever recorded as deadly hurricanes are predicted to double and intensify this year.

Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies wrote in Nature that, “For the past nine months, mean land and sea surface temperatures have overshot previous records each month by up to 0.2 °C — a huge margin at the planetary scale. A general warming trend is expected because of rising greenhouse-gas emissions… We need answers for why 2023 turned out to be the warmest year in possibly the past 100,000 years. And we need them quickly.”

Drill baby, drill

It’s a safe bet that any politician who calls climate change a hoax is profiting from it.

Trump’s Project 2025 should be required reading for every American who cares about climate change. Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation and chief antagonist against the “deep state” destroyed in Loper, has acknowledged the potential for violence in pursuing Project 2025’s extremist, authoritarian objectives, including the protection of fossil fuels. 

Just as the first Civil War was fought to protect slavery wealth, the MAGA confederacy is protecting fossil fuel wealth with the Supreme Court’s help, even though the base doesn’t understand the connection. Trump voters won’t realize they have done the bidding of the industry destroying their homes until it is too late.