The Clean Air Act was written explicitly to handle new scientific information about pollutants.
Congress in 1970 literally said “we don’t know everything that harms humans yet, so we’re creating a process to regulate threats as science discovers them.”
Pretending greenhouse gases don’t qualify because Hamilton didn’t know about CO2 is legally absurd and everyone involved knows it. The question isn’t whether the argument has merit (it doesn’t). The question is whether the Supreme Court is brazen enough to say black is white because power no longer requires pretense.
We’re watching institutions abandon legitimacy in real time, and the endangerment finding is just the next tile pulled from a democratic structure already collapsing.
Just about everything will harm humans in the right amount. The dose makes the poison. If CO2 is dangerous per se, do you think we could have life on Earth (as we know it) without it? No.
“Pollution” is basically a religious concept that has done duty in science without having to be rigorously defined, and neither the EPA nor the courts are up to the task. One organism’s pollution is another organism’s meat, and sometimes both at once!
You do know that you exhale CO2 with every breath, don’t you? Calling it a dangerous pollutant is not a good way to approach the problem of reducing human impact on the globe’s climate.
A lot of the scientists I know are leaving the US and looking for places that will provide them with funding to do their work. Or like my husband, he retired and he may do consulting, but from abroad, which is actually his home country. So, here we are. It is devastating to see so many friends having to struggle with their life's work, to solve problems that will help their fellow humans.
The Supreme Court is so corrupt that many members need to be removed and impeached. They are part of Trump's lying cult. Amy Barrett has weird sexual stories in her background, and thus little Haitian children were given into her and her husband's care. It sounded creepy then, and after looking at the Epstein Files, it is even creepier now.
The brain drain happening right now is one of the least visible but most consequential damages of this administration. Scientists leaving isn’t just tragic personally, it’s civilizational damage. Your husband’s situation represents thousands making the same impossible calculation: stay and fight a system hostile to evidence, or go somewhere that still values what you do.
This is the exact opposite of what societies should optimize for. When you defund the work that reduces suffering and saves lives, you’re not just losing scientists. You’re losing the capacity to solve problems that will kill people who never voted for any of this.
The Supreme Court piece connects directly: when accountability mechanisms get captured by the same forces they’re supposed to check, the architecture fails. That requires structural reform, which requires first winning elections they’re also trying to control. The circle is intentional.
Yes Johan. I agree. When my book club read Project 2025 two summers ago, I first read the Dept of Education section. Right away I saw the formula for a third world country.
I lived and taught in a third world country when I first finished grad school, so I had a picture in my mind. I taught in a 2 room school house in the Dominican Republic. It had just started and had a kindergarten and a first grade. My colleague there had been teaching at a private school in New York before that, one where Trump's children went (she had some Ivanka stories), and I had taught in some Spanish speaking public schools in my city while in Grad School. I had a real social education in the DR. I learned that education was not compulsory and only people with money to pay for school could get their children an education.
In any case, looking at the plans for our education system, the only good thing I could see is that implementation would diminish the US so much that
1) No one in power in the US would have much power globally because the US would be washed up.
2) We would be a lot like North Korea, a crazy nuclear power that does not have much social or economic capital.
It would take a while to destroy, but I advised international students to leave the US last winter when Trump went after them first as protesters.
In my US community, which is a University community and draws people from around the world, many of my friends come from other countries. Two couples with whom I am friends are on sabbatical, and I can see them looking for jobs in the countries where they are spending the year. Another two friends who are also from other countries are looking for jobs in Asian countries. From what I know some of these people might be getting Nobel prizes and it will no longer be in the US. Two are considering countries that are not even democracies, but are funding research. Another couple I know moved to France last year. He is older than she, and she got a job outside of Paris, and he is just basically retired, and probably can live for the rest of his life off of selling his house in the US.
I believe AOC brought up the loss of intellectual capital at the Munich Security Conference. A German panelist was telling us that her university in Heidelberg was getting a team of Americans to work on diseases like Alzheimers and Cancer. Lucky for Germany, unlucky for the US she said. AOC went to speak at the Technical University of Berlin on Sunday after leaving MSC, and she spoke to those students with understanding about how they shape the future. I wrote a piece about her talk with a link to the conversation she had with Bundestag SPD member, Isabel Cademartori.
It has always seemed weird to me that a country so in love with new technology that we choose to remain so behind when it comes to power generation. Had we subsidized renewables way back to the time President Carter installed solar panels on the White House, rather than the corporate welfare for the oil business, imagine where we would be today. Instead, China recognized the future profitability of non-oil-based electricity and is advancing rapidly in that area while we continue to embrace 19th century technology at our own peril.
We knew this was bullshit when I was growing up, in the '60's. In a Calypso-tinged protest song, the immortal Tom Lehrer sang "Just go out for a breath of air, and you'll be ready for Medicare. The city streets are really quite a thrill -- if the hoods don't get you, the monoxide will."
Considering the Conservative Justices are weasels, they will quite likely, by the time they get it in front of them, then delay most of a year, decide they can choose to defer to the EPA on this issue. that their striking down of the Chevron doctrine, merely meant the court had a choice in the matter of how to settle such disputes. They may also decide that no one has any standing to sue on this matter.
The only real question I have is, will the EPA decision be 'stayed' and will that stay be sustained on appeals? Then the question becomes, how fast does SCOTUS address the final decision on the issue? Could be they slow walk it until 2029, when the new adminstration drops the case, or they rush it and hasten the consequences of the decision...
As an asthmatic and the mother of an asthmatic, the Trump environmental policies, and those of the half-wits he has gathered around himself in affirmative action for racist, White men, who seem to belong to the Little Girl Sexual Slavery ring with Jeffrey Epstein. So, I find myself living in a place with cleaner air and one where I feel as a citizen I have more agency. I am in Northern Germany.
This weekend I was glued to my screen watching the Munich Security Conference, except for going to a One Billion Rising Dance Demonstration to create community around ending violence against girls, women and LGBTQ+ people. I really enjoyed watching AOC in her panels, and then she spoke to students at the Technical University of Berlin, which was live streamed. I wrote a piece about it, and included a link to the conversation she had. Here it is.
Fascinating analysis that cuts to the chaise time after time and calls out the evil losers who don’t give a shit about the future, including the 6 corrupted Roberts Row of Murderers. Really like this format.
Huge respect for David Robert’s for making complex topics accessible - BUT you are reading Massachusetts v EPA all wrong - not sure where you got your understanding of the court’s decision, but please read it.
The 2006 George W Bush EPA did not assert that the GHG’s were pollutants and the court not give that determination Chevron deference. Quite the opposite, EPA claimed GHGs were not CAA “pollutants” and the Court held that the CAA was so clear that Chevron deference did not apply. According to Justice Stevens’ opinion: “Because EPA believes that Congress did not intend it to regulate substances that contribute to climate change, the agency maintains that carbon dioxide is not an ‘air pollutant’ within the meaning of the provision.. . . . The statutory text forecloses EPA’s reading.”
Also, there was no “trial” at the Supreme Court (SCOTUS trials only happen for disputes between states, almost never).
And the 1970 Congress included “climate” in the definition of impacts to public wellfare.
I know a little but about this, having taught environmental law for thirty years.
I’m all for an energy policy that favors wind and solar, but if you rule that CO2 is a dangerous pollutant, what about oxygen? In high concentrations it causes dizziness and mental confusion, it causes uncountable quantities of destruction of valuable assets through slow oxidation, billions are spent to protect against it by applying protective coatings, billions are lost each year when assets combine in a rapid and uncontrolled manner with it, it is highly inflammable and explosive.
Fact is, it’s hard to define “pollutant.” When a bear shits in the woods, that’s “natural.” When a million people dump their shit in a river, that’s “pollution”.
Better to focus on solving the problem. We don’t tell people not to flush, we build sewage treatment plants. Don’t outlaw CO2 - we exhale it with every breath, and plants need it to produce oxygen for us - just focus on developing wind and solar power which is cheap, clean, and abundant.
This “finding” is a distraction and a bureaucratic nightmare. We need a sane energy policy and not hysteria about climate change.
And to those who say we will never get such a policy without regulating carbon directly, I say, you won’t get it that way for sure.
The Clean Air Act was written explicitly to handle new scientific information about pollutants.
Congress in 1970 literally said “we don’t know everything that harms humans yet, so we’re creating a process to regulate threats as science discovers them.”
Pretending greenhouse gases don’t qualify because Hamilton didn’t know about CO2 is legally absurd and everyone involved knows it. The question isn’t whether the argument has merit (it doesn’t). The question is whether the Supreme Court is brazen enough to say black is white because power no longer requires pretense.
We’re watching institutions abandon legitimacy in real time, and the endangerment finding is just the next tile pulled from a democratic structure already collapsing.
—Johan
Keep pushing and keeping it real
Of course, absurd — logic left the building about 2016.
Just about everything will harm humans in the right amount. The dose makes the poison. If CO2 is dangerous per se, do you think we could have life on Earth (as we know it) without it? No.
“Pollution” is basically a religious concept that has done duty in science without having to be rigorously defined, and neither the EPA nor the courts are up to the task. One organism’s pollution is another organism’s meat, and sometimes both at once!
You do know that you exhale CO2 with every breath, don’t you? Calling it a dangerous pollutant is not a good way to approach the problem of reducing human impact on the globe’s climate.
Lotta words, no solution. Besides, the stock market hit 50,000!
A lot of the scientists I know are leaving the US and looking for places that will provide them with funding to do their work. Or like my husband, he retired and he may do consulting, but from abroad, which is actually his home country. So, here we are. It is devastating to see so many friends having to struggle with their life's work, to solve problems that will help their fellow humans.
The Supreme Court is so corrupt that many members need to be removed and impeached. They are part of Trump's lying cult. Amy Barrett has weird sexual stories in her background, and thus little Haitian children were given into her and her husband's care. It sounded creepy then, and after looking at the Epstein Files, it is even creepier now.
The brain drain happening right now is one of the least visible but most consequential damages of this administration. Scientists leaving isn’t just tragic personally, it’s civilizational damage. Your husband’s situation represents thousands making the same impossible calculation: stay and fight a system hostile to evidence, or go somewhere that still values what you do.
This is the exact opposite of what societies should optimize for. When you defund the work that reduces suffering and saves lives, you’re not just losing scientists. You’re losing the capacity to solve problems that will kill people who never voted for any of this.
The Supreme Court piece connects directly: when accountability mechanisms get captured by the same forces they’re supposed to check, the architecture fails. That requires structural reform, which requires first winning elections they’re also trying to control. The circle is intentional.
Yes Johan. I agree. When my book club read Project 2025 two summers ago, I first read the Dept of Education section. Right away I saw the formula for a third world country.
I lived and taught in a third world country when I first finished grad school, so I had a picture in my mind. I taught in a 2 room school house in the Dominican Republic. It had just started and had a kindergarten and a first grade. My colleague there had been teaching at a private school in New York before that, one where Trump's children went (she had some Ivanka stories), and I had taught in some Spanish speaking public schools in my city while in Grad School. I had a real social education in the DR. I learned that education was not compulsory and only people with money to pay for school could get their children an education.
In any case, looking at the plans for our education system, the only good thing I could see is that implementation would diminish the US so much that
1) No one in power in the US would have much power globally because the US would be washed up.
2) We would be a lot like North Korea, a crazy nuclear power that does not have much social or economic capital.
It would take a while to destroy, but I advised international students to leave the US last winter when Trump went after them first as protesters.
https://lindaweide.substack.com/p/foreign-students-at-a-us-university?r=f0qfn
In my US community, which is a University community and draws people from around the world, many of my friends come from other countries. Two couples with whom I am friends are on sabbatical, and I can see them looking for jobs in the countries where they are spending the year. Another two friends who are also from other countries are looking for jobs in Asian countries. From what I know some of these people might be getting Nobel prizes and it will no longer be in the US. Two are considering countries that are not even democracies, but are funding research. Another couple I know moved to France last year. He is older than she, and she got a job outside of Paris, and he is just basically retired, and probably can live for the rest of his life off of selling his house in the US.
I believe AOC brought up the loss of intellectual capital at the Munich Security Conference. A German panelist was telling us that her university in Heidelberg was getting a team of Americans to work on diseases like Alzheimers and Cancer. Lucky for Germany, unlucky for the US she said. AOC went to speak at the Technical University of Berlin on Sunday after leaving MSC, and she spoke to those students with understanding about how they shape the future. I wrote a piece about her talk with a link to the conversation she had with Bundestag SPD member, Isabel Cademartori.
https://lindaweide.substack.com/p/aoc-had-a-berlin-audience-eating?r=f0qfn
AOC was uplifting and gave hope for the future of the US, and the transatlantic alliance.
It has always seemed weird to me that a country so in love with new technology that we choose to remain so behind when it comes to power generation. Had we subsidized renewables way back to the time President Carter installed solar panels on the White House, rather than the corporate welfare for the oil business, imagine where we would be today. Instead, China recognized the future profitability of non-oil-based electricity and is advancing rapidly in that area while we continue to embrace 19th century technology at our own peril.
The thinking (sic): If you have loads of money (and a gated community), you won’t be affected.
We knew this was bullshit when I was growing up, in the '60's. In a Calypso-tinged protest song, the immortal Tom Lehrer sang "Just go out for a breath of air, and you'll be ready for Medicare. The city streets are really quite a thrill -- if the hoods don't get you, the monoxide will."
Considering the Conservative Justices are weasels, they will quite likely, by the time they get it in front of them, then delay most of a year, decide they can choose to defer to the EPA on this issue. that their striking down of the Chevron doctrine, merely meant the court had a choice in the matter of how to settle such disputes. They may also decide that no one has any standing to sue on this matter.
The only real question I have is, will the EPA decision be 'stayed' and will that stay be sustained on appeals? Then the question becomes, how fast does SCOTUS address the final decision on the issue? Could be they slow walk it until 2029, when the new adminstration drops the case, or they rush it and hasten the consequences of the decision...
As an asthmatic and the mother of an asthmatic, the Trump environmental policies, and those of the half-wits he has gathered around himself in affirmative action for racist, White men, who seem to belong to the Little Girl Sexual Slavery ring with Jeffrey Epstein. So, I find myself living in a place with cleaner air and one where I feel as a citizen I have more agency. I am in Northern Germany.
This weekend I was glued to my screen watching the Munich Security Conference, except for going to a One Billion Rising Dance Demonstration to create community around ending violence against girls, women and LGBTQ+ people. I really enjoyed watching AOC in her panels, and then she spoke to students at the Technical University of Berlin, which was live streamed. I wrote a piece about it, and included a link to the conversation she had. Here it is.
https://lindaweide.substack.com/p/aoc-had-a-berlin-audience-eating?r=f0qfn
Fascinating analysis that cuts to the chaise time after time and calls out the evil losers who don’t give a shit about the future, including the 6 corrupted Roberts Row of Murderers. Really like this format.
Huge respect for David Robert’s for making complex topics accessible - BUT you are reading Massachusetts v EPA all wrong - not sure where you got your understanding of the court’s decision, but please read it.
The 2006 George W Bush EPA did not assert that the GHG’s were pollutants and the court not give that determination Chevron deference. Quite the opposite, EPA claimed GHGs were not CAA “pollutants” and the Court held that the CAA was so clear that Chevron deference did not apply. According to Justice Stevens’ opinion: “Because EPA believes that Congress did not intend it to regulate substances that contribute to climate change, the agency maintains that carbon dioxide is not an ‘air pollutant’ within the meaning of the provision.. . . . The statutory text forecloses EPA’s reading.”
Also, there was no “trial” at the Supreme Court (SCOTUS trials only happen for disputes between states, almost never).
And the 1970 Congress included “climate” in the definition of impacts to public wellfare.
I know a little but about this, having taught environmental law for thirty years.
I’m all for an energy policy that favors wind and solar, but if you rule that CO2 is a dangerous pollutant, what about oxygen? In high concentrations it causes dizziness and mental confusion, it causes uncountable quantities of destruction of valuable assets through slow oxidation, billions are spent to protect against it by applying protective coatings, billions are lost each year when assets combine in a rapid and uncontrolled manner with it, it is highly inflammable and explosive.
Fact is, it’s hard to define “pollutant.” When a bear shits in the woods, that’s “natural.” When a million people dump their shit in a river, that’s “pollution”.
Better to focus on solving the problem. We don’t tell people not to flush, we build sewage treatment plants. Don’t outlaw CO2 - we exhale it with every breath, and plants need it to produce oxygen for us - just focus on developing wind and solar power which is cheap, clean, and abundant.
This “finding” is a distraction and a bureaucratic nightmare. We need a sane energy policy and not hysteria about climate change.
And to those who say we will never get such a policy without regulating carbon directly, I say, you won’t get it that way for sure.