 | | Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/Pool/Getty Images |
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| Today is the final day of questioning of Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett by the members of the Senate Judiciary Committee. It’s a good time to reflect on the underappreciated role the courts play in shaping environmental and climate policy.
In the past few years, the judiciary branch has served as a check on the Trump administration’s manic deregulating spree. In July, a federal judge in California ruled against the Bureau of Land Management’s attempt to weaken restrictions on methane emissions from drilling on public land. In August, a federal judge in New York struck down the administration’s absurdly loose interpretation of the 1918 Migratory Bird Treaty Act, which would have allowed huge numbers of birds to be killed without federal fines so long as corporations could prove it wasn’t intentional. Earthjustice estimates that the organization has won over 80 percent of the lawsuits it has helped initiate during this period: “In one court ruling after another, federal courts have blocked the administration’s attempts to reverse environmental protections.”
That’s not to say the courts are necessarily environmental champions. In a piece published this morning, The New Republic’s Kate Aronoff lays out the ways in which conservative groups and foundations that have frequently funded climate denial have also funded a pipeline of conservative lawyers to the bench. |
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Charles Koch, better known for funding climate denial and efforts to kill climate policy since the 1990s, has also been a major donor to the Federalist Society, which Barrett and countless other conservative jurists have cycled through. His advocacy group Americans for Prosperity has led well-funded charges in support of all of Trump’s Supreme Court nominations, including Barrett. The same donors and dark money outfits that have funded climate denial—the Searle Freedom Trust, Sarah Scaife Foundation, and Mercer Family Foundation—have given generously to the Federalist Society, too. Right-wing donor-advised fund DonorsTrust has been a major benefactor of bodies like the Judicial Crisis Network, which organize a flood of amicus briefs to put cases in front of the Supreme Court. Seeded by a munitions and chemicals empire, the Olin Foundation has been central to the Federalist Society’s success and instrumental in backing a movement within law schools known as “law and economics,” to ensure that laws protect efficient markets above all else. The Olin Foundation also funded the fellowship position Barrett occupied at George Washington University Law School, and it previously helped fund a striking series of seminars: A paper last year from economists Elliott Ash, Daniel Chen, and Suresh Naidu found that widely attended “Manne Seminars”—two-to-three-week boot camps starting in 1976 and funded by the Olin Foundation and corporations including Standard Oil of Ohio and U.S. Steel—substantively pushed judges’ rulings to the right. Those who attended were less likely to rule in favor of union and environmental regulations; the paper’s authors attributed between 28 and 42 percentof the rise in judicial conservatism to the seminars alone. Barrett’s critics have tended to focus on her potential to help a newly 6–3 conservative majority restrict reproductive rights or demolish the Affordable Care Act, and some have expressed concern over how her Catholic beliefs might drive her decision-making. But the courts in future years are likely to decide not just on matters of health care and personal autonomy but on laws aimed at saving society from the cataclysmic results of decades of corporate pollution. And Barrett’s religion seems less relevant in this context than the fact that she is a staunch conservative, as evidenced by her past statements and affiliations and her promotion by the right-wing legal movement.
On Tuesday, Senator John Kennedy, a Republican from Louisiana, asked Barrett whether she has thought about climate change. “I’ve read about climate change,” Barrett said. “I’m certainly not a scientist. I mean, I’ve read things on climate change. I would not say I have firm views on it.” Hardly a reassuring response.
| —Heather Souvaine Horn, deputy editor |
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| That’s the ratio of people “alarmed” about climate change to those who are “dismissive” of it, according to a new poll by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication. |
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 | | State-of-the-art solar is now the “cheapest … electricity in history,” says the International Energy Agency. |
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 | | Almost half a million workers in the clean energy sector are currently unemployed due to the pandemic-related recession, and stimulus bills haven’t targeted this sector in particular for help. |
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Last Wednesday, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America published a fascinating op-ed from a group of scientists and activists that not only links Indigenous land management to greater biodiversity but links the preservation of Indigenous languages to greater biodiversity. Focusing on five case studies, the op-ed is tough to summarize and worth a full read, but here’s an excerpt: Indigenous-controlled lands represent only 6% and 13% of the territory in Canada and Brazil, respectively, and 52% in Australia. Still, these indigenous-controlled lands typically contain much higher biological diversity than that found in non–Indigenous-controlled areas, both protected and nonprotected, in the same countries. Languages and cultures from Indigenous and Traditional Peoples are of critical importance, because they carry with them alternative yet equally valid ways of knowing and interpreting biodiversity.…
Nellim is a small Inari Sámi Indigenous community located in the boreal region in northeastern Finland, next to Lake Inarijärvi. Inari Sámi is an extremely endangered language amongst the Sámi languages.… Whitefish (Coregonus lavaretus sp.), with its range of subspecies in the Lake Inari catchment, is an iconic species that holds meaning for the Nellim community, which is reflected in a nuanced knowledge of the sub-Arctic fish stocks. Because subtle changes to the keystone species can have cascading effects with both ecological and social impacts, the Inari Sámi vocabulary about the whitefish is very detailed.
• “šapšâ” = overall concept for whitefish
• “kyeli” = whitefish in colloquial conversation
• “rijgá” = old and thin whitefish
• “sáávjáš” = a small whitefish
• “riäská” = a dwarf whitefish endemic to the lake Inarijärvi
• “reevâ”s = another dwarfed stock of whitefish endemic to the lake Inarijärvi |
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