Obama team backs power companies at high court
The Obama administration may eventually get something done about greenhouse gases via the Environmental Protection Agency or, if there is a second Obama term, Congress.
Meanwhile however it is fighting an ongoing attempt to allow states and activists to sue the likes of Constellation Energy and Exelon to reduce their CO2 output. Arguments are today at the Supreme Court. The case is American Electric Power Co. v. Connecticut. Constellation and Exelon are not parties but they would be affected if the high court were to allow such suits.
From the Christian Science Monitor:
Fed up with the slow pace of government efforts to address global warming, a group of conservationists and state attorneys general filed lawsuits in 2004 asking a federal judge to order five major US power companies to cap and then reduce their emissions of carbon dioxide.Seven years later, the case arrives at the US Supreme Court, where the justices must decide whether concerned citizens and state officials have the legal power to force suspected polluters to cut their alleged level of pollution – though the federal government itself has not yet taken action on carbon emissions.
Comments
The global warming pollution / fossil fuel industry today is much like slavery in the early 1850's-- a technically outdated, morally bankrupt system that persists on inertia and ever-more-massive corruption to prolong its unavoidable collapse. Blood money sloshes the coffers of the old, rich and powerful, buying ever more death and suffering for the powerless--in this case today's youth and their descendants. Like President Buchanan in the 1850s, Obama, hoping to buy peace between diverging States, has intervened on the side of a corrupt and foundering status quo. It seems neither the first Black president nor today's cowardly Court will heed the lesson of the 154-year-old Dredd Scott: when the future sues the past, pick the future, or be judged by history.
Posted by: Fredo | April 19, 2011 2:54 PM
Funny, considering Obama never even mentioned the climate CRISIS in his state of the union speech.
There is now a solid grass roots effort by the masses of former believers to have the leading scientists and leading news editors be subjected to criminal charges for knowingly sustaining the false CO2 death threats to billions of children for the last 25 years of the climate blame mistake.
Stay tuned. We missed getting Bush for his false war and a wave of former believer rage will make this right.
Posted by: mememine69 | April 19, 2011 5:07 PM
It is somewhat misleading to state that the Obama Administration is "backing the power companies." Technically, that is true. But the Justice Department takes a longer view of cases before the Supreme Court.
In this case, the issue before the Court concerns the doctrine of federal preemption. That is a doctrine that touches and affects an extraordinarily wide area of policy concerns dealing with virtually any area in which the federal government is promulgating regulations.
I rather suspect that the Justice Department took the position that it did because of its concern that the preemption doctrine might be undermined rather than out of any desire to back polluters or increase atmospheric carbon.
Posted by: Stuart Levine | April 20, 2011 1:03 AM