I mean, that is in fact not a US constitutional right
But proclaim the fucking emergency anyway!
this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2023
117 points (92.7% liked)
Climate - truthful information about climate, related activism and politics.
5237 readers
662 users here now
Discussion of climate, how it is changing, activism around that, the politics, and the energy systems change we need in order to stabilize things.
As a starting point, the burning of fossil fuels, and to a lesser extent deforestation and release of methane are responsible for the warming in recent decades:
How much each change to the atmosphere has warmed the world:
Recommended actions to cut greenhouse gas emissions in the near future:
Anti-science, inactivism, and unsupported conspiracy theories are not ok here.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
The suit filed “claim to a fundamental constitutional right to be free of CO2 emissions.”
Free of CO2 emission. That’s both beautiful and wildly impractical. If you file a lawsuit with foolish demands you should expect to get resistance. IIRC there’s something like a Trillion dollars set aside in the IRA for emissions/ghg reduction strategies - directly or indirectly- across the board.
Then we need to try again with better definitions.
Yea, the founding fathers in the late 18th century didn’t anticipate that coal burning would alter the atmosphere that they barely knew anything out. And cars/oil wouldn’t be a thing for over a century, of course they didn’t put a stable climate in the constitution.
That does not mean that we can’t add that as an amendment now that we know of these things. Instead, our government representatives are choosing to kill large portions of future populations so they can be rich now
Boomers know they won't have to endure the consequences and care only for themselves and maybe one generation of offspring. And the ones who don't have progeny are making the logical conclusion that this is the best thing for them, flat out. Why vote against themselves. Selfish assholes.
Folks in the comments are making assumptions about what's in the Constitution, so I decided to go take a look. If I were the petitioners, I'd point to section 1 of the 14th Amendment:
No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
Depriving someone of clean air to breathe is depriving them of life. The medical conditions from being exposed to unclean air threaten property through medical bills in a country without universal healthcare. And finally, liberty cannot exist without life.
And since a lot of folks are going for the technically correct legislative analysis, remember that bad air causes autoimmune disorders, and thus abridge the immunities of the citizens of the United States. A stretch, but I'd say it qualifies if you're analyzing the law from a purely textual standpoint.
Can I just say I absolutely love the 14th amendment? It's not the Declaration of Independence, but it does a lot of heavy lifting for it in the Constitution.
Montana's young people have set a precedent. We can build on this and demand the same on a federal level.
They built their case around a clause in the state constitution which guarantees the right to a clean and healthful environment. It takes something more to win at the US federal level where there isn't a clause like that.
While technically correct,
I'm old enough to remember when we were all gonna get cancer and die by being fried with UV rays because we were making huge holes in the ozone by dumping metric fucktons of CFCs into the atmosphere. I also remember there being a huge push that we stop doing the thing that was causing the problem, you know before we all die from cancer.
Saving the ozone, and therefore climate wasn't in the constitution then either, but we (at least as far as the US's involvement) did it because it was the right goddamn thing to do.
We shouldn't have to have children essentially begging the government to make decisions to protect their future. Who keeps electing these assholes?
I thought about the hole in the ozone just this week and was so baffled. It was a really big deal when I was a kid. There is a hole in the ozone and CFC is the problem so the solution was to ban CFCs, the hole repaired itself and we all survived.. 30 years later and climate change if gonna fuck us, the problem is burning too much fossil fuels, the solution.. donno, say climate change isn't real and hope for the best?
What you're missing is that the CFC ban, and environmental regulations to stop acid rain, and similar government actions in the '80s and '90s, hurt profits. And businesses learned from that.
Big Oil especially saw the writing on the wall. It knew global warming was real and environmentalists were going to come after CO2. So they brought together teams of PR experts and MBAs, they consulted with tobacco lobbyists who fought government regulation for decades, and asked them "how can we prevent governments from regulating fossil fuels before they start?"
And the answer was "make environmental science partisan, get one political party on our side, and as long as you can keep a bipartisan consensus from forming you can keep government from doing anything effective".
And it's been stunningly effective.
Frankly, if the link between smoking and lung cancer was only identified today, there's absolutely zero chance smoking would be banned or regulated nationwide. Tobacco industry lobbyists would be funding pro-smoking public service announcements as aggressively as the dairy industry does milk ads. Republican politicians would hand out cigars at rallies. Tucker Carlson would have whole shows dedicated to the idea that vaccines cause lung cancer. Every newspaper opinion piece saying smoking is harmful would be countered by another opinion piece saying the science isn't settled and we can't take away American's freedom based on uncertain science. Conservatives would be chain smoking to own the libs. Yeah, individual blue cities and blue states might be able to regulate smoking. But half the country would believe the link between smoking and lung cancer was invented by communists to steal Americans' freedoms. And no effective collective response would be possible.
The difference between the '80s and today is corporate America is much better at controlling the political narrative to prevent collective action. And without collective action we can't do shit.
The US has milk ads ... in traditional media? Strange.
Well said. Nothing corrodes my hopes and dreams like the responses to coronavirus and Sandy Hook. The Merchants of Doubt have been busy.
Assholes.
People who are saying "this is technically correct" forget that The 9nth amendment says this
"The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."
Which is to say, Just because a right isn't explicitly enumerated in the constitution does not mean the people don't retain that right. I would think the right to not have the planet not be destroyed by Fossil Fuel Companies would fall under that, along with clean and and water and all the rest.
And they are correct.
That seems like a problem
I think it's okay that the constitution doesn't cover natural climate change. But human made climate change is a whole other story to me.
Aside from the fact that "Joe Biden's" DOJ is correct here, the fact that both this case and this argument were originally established in 2015 under the Obama administration is what truly makes this article outrage clickbait.
It's my understanding that their constitution was intended to be regularly updated, with things being added, modified or replaced as the needs and sensibilities of the times changed.
When it was written, nobody could have fathomed that one might need to specify the right to a stable climate, because humans couldn't modify the climate.
Now, we can, and have, in horrific ways.
So, it's reasonable to consider adding this right to their constitution, unless you don't think people have a right to, well, life. As the climate changes, a great many things change to make simply staying alive more and more difficult, not to mention trying to have a functioning life at the same quality level, in the midst of extreme and more regularly occurring climate change caused wildfires, droughts, floods, etc etc.
They could literally just step aside and let the courts determine that right, but no the admin of the "21st century FDR" has gotta expend energy on this fucking hell