Good morning fabulous citizens of C99.

“Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.”
― Charles Darwin

The Supreme Court's Devastating Decision on Climate

However worrying Tuesday was for the success of xenophobic politics in America, it might have been more worrying for the planet’s climate.

In the early evening, the Supreme Court temporarily blocked the implementation of the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan, a set of Environmental Protection Agency regulations which would limit greenhouse-gas emissions from the power sector.

Issued last summer, the rules are the centerpiece of the White House’s climate-change-fighting agenda, and they play a big part in the recent, tepid optimism about global warming. Without the proposal of the plan, the United States couldn’t have secured the Paris Agreement, the first international treaty to mitigate greenhouse-gas emissions, last December. And without the adoption of the plan, the United States almost certainly won’t be able to comply with that document. If the world were to lose the Paris Agreement—which was not a total solution to the climate crisis, but meant to be a first, provisional step—years could be lost in the diplomatic fight to reduce climate-change’s dangers.

The climate change election: The Supreme Court just underscored the high stakes of the presidential race

Around the time that polls started closing in New Hampshire and Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders became the big political stories of the week, the Supreme Court issued a decision that raised the stakes of the presidential election and injected some uncertainty into one of the most significant developments in the global fight against climate change.

On Tuesday night, the court ruled 5-4 to halt the implementation of the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan until the lower courts can hear challenges to the program’s legality. The Clean Power Plan was announced last August as a centerpiece of President Obama’s Climate Action Plan – it works by setting state-specific goals for reducing carbon emissions from existing power plants and granting states flexibility in devising their own plans for meeting those targets. Fossil-fuel power plants are the biggest emitters of greenhouse gases in the country, which means the Clean Power Plan is a critical tool for curbing carbon emissions. It also lends credibility to the U.S. as a participant in the Paris Climate Accord and as a global leader in the fight against climate change.

The Supreme Court’s decision throws all of that into question. The Clean Power Plan is now frozen in place as it maneuvers its way through the legal system to its inevitable date with the high court. “The court’s announcement doesn’t necessarily shut down the Clean Power Plan,” Wired notes. “But it could send a signal to recalcitrant states, manufacturers, and energy companies that they can keep dragging their feet on climate change.” The more immediate political impact is to make clear that the United States’ success in the fight against climate change, which is critical to the global campaign to reduce carbon emissions, will be determined both by the next president and the Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court puts the Clean Power Plan on hold

AMERICA’S most ambitious effort to cut carbon-dioxide emissions from power plants is in danger. On February 9th the Supreme Court, divided 5-4 along partisan lines, put the brakes on the Clean Power Plan: a move that surprised many. Barack Obama’s flagship environmental policy, the Clean Power Plan forms the core of America’s recent commitments to cut emissions made at UN climate talks in Paris. By staying the rule, the court heeded the concerns of more than two dozen mostly red states and energy companies that oppose it. It is now on hold until the Supremes decide on the legal merits of the case this summer.

Power plants are America’s largest source of greenhouse gases, accounting for just under a third of all emissions. The Clean Power Plan, under the authority of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), gives orders to each state that, when considered together, should amount to removing 870m tonnes of CO2 from emissions by power stations by 2030 (as measured against 2005 levels). The regulations give states some flexibility over how and when to cut emissions. But each one is required to submit plans by 2018 and to show some progress on them by 2022. If the goals are met, the reduction by 2030 will be akin to taking 80m cars off the road—helpful but not revolutionary.

States, utilities and mining companies have declared the Clean Power Plan too much, too soon. And more than half of the Supreme Court justices seem to agree. “We are thrilled that the Supreme Court realized the rule’s immediate impact and froze its implementation,” trilled the attorney-general of West Virginia, one of the states leading the suit, after the court issued its stay. Greener types argue that the delay flies in the face of larger trends toward clean energy: across America far more people already work in the solar industry than do in coal.

Researchers: Exxon, Koch Family Have Powered the Climate-Denial Machine for Decades

Right now, nearly every leader of nearly every country in the world is gathered in Paris for perhaps the most ambitious and meaningful negotiations humanity has ever undertaken. But if you haven’t heard much about it, you’re not alone. Summing up the climate change conference’s first day for the New Republic, Jonathan Katz was understandably dispirited:

That the build-up to these negotiations to assure humanity’s continued survival on Earth were overshadowed in the U.S. by the latest battle between jihadists and everyone else, the interminable presidential primary, Thanksgiving, the college football playoff draw, and on and on tells you a lot about how we got to this point.

Of course, a major reason the world has delayed meaningful action for 21 years has been a single political party in a single country: the GOP.

Sanders: GOP thinks climate change isn't real because of Kochs

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said late Wednesday that Republicans think climate change isn't real because of the billionaire Koch brothers and other big energy interests.

“When you look at the Republican Party today, you know, which is reactionary in so many areas ... most of these guys deny the reality of climate change or they say, ‘we’re not sure,’ ” the Democratic presidential candidate told host Chris Hayes on MSNBC’s “All In.”

“How do you think that happens?” Sanders asked. "It happens because the Republican Party is significantly funded by the Koch brothers and the big energy companies.
“And the day after some Republican gets up there and says, ‘you know, I read this stuff here, I think climate change is real [and] we’ve got to do something,' their funding is gone, and they’re going to be primaried,” he added.

Koch Pledge Tied to Congressional Climate Inaction

When President Obama unveiled his program to tackle climate change last month, he deliberately sidestepped Congress as a hopeless bastion of obstruction, relying completely on changes that could be imposed by regulatory agencies. A two-year study by the Investigative Reporting Workshop at American University, released today, illustrates what might be one of the reasons why he had to take this circuitous route. Fossil fuel magnates Charles and David Koch have, through Americans for Prosperity, a conservative group they back, succeeded in persuading many members of Congress to sign a little-known pledge in which they have promised to vote against legislation relating to climate change unless it is accompanied by an equivalent amount of tax cuts. Since most solutions to the problem of greenhouse-gas emissions require costs to the polluters and the public, the pledge essentially commits those who sign to it to vote against nearly any meaningful bill regarding global warning, and acts as yet another roadblock to action.

The investigative study tracks the political influence wielded by the billionaire Koch brothers, who have harnessed part of the fortune generated by their company, Koch Industries, the second largest private corporation in the country, to further their conservative libertarian activism. Charles Lewis, the Executive Editor of the Investigative Reporting Workshop explained that the I.R.W., a non-profit news organization attached to American University, spent two years focussing on Koch Industries because, “There is no other corporation in the U.S. today, in my view, that is as unabashedly, bare-knuckle aggressive across the board about its own self-interest, in the political process, in the nonprofit-policy-advocacy realm, even increasingly in academia and the broader public marketplace of ideas.” Formerly head of the Center for Public Integrity in Washington, Lewis has focussed for years on the way money affects American politics. “The Kochs’ influence, without a doubt, is growing,” he believes. A spokeswoman for the Kochs declined to comment.

Charles Koch "Expects a Return" on Political Spending, and Gets It

Billionaire mega-donor Charles Koch admitted that the handful of billionaires who bankroll political campaigns are doing it because they expect something in return.

Yet the outsized influence of the .00001% doesn't threaten democracy, he said, as long as a fellow billionaire thinks those big donors have the right intentions.

Koch appeared with his brother David on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" this week as part of a PR blitz to soften the Koch brothers' image ahead of the 2016 elections, where the Koch network plans to spend $250 million on direct electoral activities and a total of nearly $1 billion on broader political work.

The fawning interview followed months of positive Koch coverage from the "Morning Joe" hosts, who attended a Koch donor confab earlier this year and have praised the Kochs as "awesome" and a "godsend." (Neither MSNBC nor the Kochs will say who covered the hosts' travel and other expenses to attend the summit.)

SCOTUS Conservatives Give the Kochs What They Want and Ruled Against Humanity

It is curious that although America generally has pathetically poor voter participation in elections, a couple of state primary elections are more than sufficient to distract the public’s attention from extremely important news. Tuesday night, or Wednesday, were no different and while people were intent on the results of one small state’s primary results, they missed the news that the Koch-surrogates on the Supreme Court issued a ruling that reveals their contempt for the Earth’s population; like typical Koch Republicans.

In a five to four decision, the conservatives on the High Court put an immediate stop to President Obama’s restrictions on new coal plants. The President’s action was an important step toward combatting climate change that experts in several disciplines attest it necessary to preserve the human race. The conservatives’ “orders” were particularly telling about their service, obedience, and devotion to the Koch brothers’ fossil fuel industry because they went outside of normal federal judicial system procedure to give the Koch brothers what they likely paid for during the latest “secret Koch policy seminar.”

Apparently the conservative jurists were not impressed that the EPA’s regulations were intended specifically to, besides ameliorate the effects of climate change, “avoid thousands of premature deaths and thousands fewer asthma attacks and hospitalizations within 10 years and every year beyond.” What likely did impress the 5 Republican justices was that those new regulations are highly regarded as “representing the most significant thing America has ever done to combat climate change.” Since the Koch brothers and their Republican puppets say climate change is a liberal hoax, and campaign vigorously on neutering the Environmental Protection Agency, the Conservative Court stepped in and got proactive for the Kochs and their fossil fuel cohorts.

The High Court’s intervention is contrary to a unanimous panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Washington D.C. Circuit that has already denied several motions to stop the Clean Power Plan. This is following two months of briefings and several weeks of “careful painstaking review of the fossil fuel polluters’ claims.” It is important to consider that the conservative Court’s decision does not, and did not, address the merits of the Clean Power Plan; that is what Court of Appeals is considering, on an expedited basis no less.

In fact, the High Court butted in within a day of the “fossil fuel industry and its allies filing their final legal attacks on reply.” The industry wanted it stopped and no federal Appeals Court was going to interfere with the Koch’s plans leaving the High Court’s Republicans no choice but do exactly what the Kochs tell them to do.

Who put the billionaires in charge?

Here we go.