Impermanence Is Swift

It fortunately appears that yesterday's spike in the average number of new covid cases in Georgia was a data anomaly after all.  Today, the Times is reporting an average of 4,017 new cases in Georgia for July 28, and have revised the number for the 27th down from 6,811 to also be 4,017 new cases. Still, even the revised numbers are higher than all but the peaks of the January 2021 wave, the August 2021 delta wave, and the January 2022 omicron wave.

The pandemic hits close to home: Wednesday, an ambulance arrived at a neighbor's house and took away the 92-year-old matriarch of the family. Those of us in the neighborhood initially thought she had died in her home, but we later learned from one of her daughters that in fact she started displaying symptoms of covid.  They called a medic, he administered a test, and then called the ambulance to come take her away.  When the ambulance left without lights flashing or a siren wailing, we all assumed the worst.

We're obviously relieved to be wrong, but the odds are not favorable for a 92-year-old woman in the hospital for covid.  They're certainly better than they were two years ago, but she still faces an uphill struggle.  I don't know her vaccination status, but they seem like the kind of family that keeps up with their vaccines and boosters. 

This all goes to show the need for continued diligence in mask-wearing and social distancing, especially if one shares a home with the elderly.   

Next month will mark the 18th anniversary of my move into this pile of bricks on a hill.  The now hospitalized matriarch is one of the few remaining neighbors who was here when I moved in, and by my estimate if she doesn't return I will then be the second-oldest person in this 'hood.   

The Covids

Whether it’s a one-off data anomaly or the start of a more worrisome trend, the average number of new covid cases per day in Georgia virtually doubled overnight, increasing from 3,734 cases per day on July 26 to 6,811 cases per day on July 27. The numbers were higher only during the crests of the January 2021 wave, the August 2021 delta wave, and the January 2022 omicron wave.

Let’s be careful out there!

We're Doomed

The Democratic Republic of Congo, home to one of the largest old-growth rainforests on earth, is reportedly auctioning off vast amounts of tropical peatlands, reserves that store vast amounts of carbon, keeping it out of the atmosphere and from contributing to global warming. The oil and gas blocks, which will be auctioned in late July, extend into Virunga National Park, the world’s most important gorilla sanctuary. 

Oil exploitation in these areas will likely exacerbate the global climate catastrophe.

Tosi Mpanu Mpanu, the DRC’s lead representative on climate issues and an adviser to the minister of hydrocarbons, said Congo's sole goal is to help the struggling nation reduce poverty and generate badly needed economic growth. “Our priority is not to save the planet,” Mpanu said in an interview last week.

Ola Szmidt

A part of nearly every day in my post-retirement life is what I call my musical "deep dive."  I browse and follow links through Spotify, Bandcamp, and YouTube to try and hear new music I never heard before - ideally, I try to find new music I never even conceived existed before. My holy grail is to find a track on Spotify with a single-digit number of plays. Results have been mixed, but the process is always interesting.

Today's discovery is Polish singer-songwriter, musician, classically trained flautist, and producer Ola Szmidt.  Compared to my single-digit number-of-plays goal, Szmidt is wildly popular - C Tactile Afferent has a whopping 19,737 number of plays on Spotify.  Now based in York, England, Szmidt says the track was "Inspired by touch, skin hunger, the nervous system and my admiration of C Tactile Afferent nerve fibres which respond to slowly moving, gentle touch, like a caress. Music can affect these receptors and if it resonates with us, it feels like it is tickling and gives us shivers. Touch and music are so therapeutic."

"What happens when we are deprived of touch?", she asks. "Skin hunger. It is a condition caused by absence of touch from others. In this pandemic a lot of people are suffering from it and I send my love and light to everyone." I would love to hear a collaboration between Ola Szmidt and like-minded Norwegian musician Jenny Hval.

C Tactile Afferent is from Szmidt's EP3.  You can buy EP3 and her previous EPs on Szmidt's Bandcamp page, or you can stream her on Spotify and boost her number of plays.

Rough Draft/Finished Product

In the "wish-I-had-said-that" department, I saw guitarist Marc Ribot and his band Ceramic Dog perform at The Mill & Mine in Knoxville, Tennessee as part of the Big Ears Festival back in 2018.  Memorably, his set included the marvelously unhinged rant above. I believe that raspy "Yeah!" you hear at the very end of the video is my voice.

Last September (2021), Ribot released a new album, HOPE, on Northern Spy Records, including the song The Activist, which obviously is the polished version of his rant.

Wish I had said that.

I'll Be Black

Back in the early 1990s, I was "disciplined," meaning given a strict talking-to, for playing reggae and dub music in my office as I was catching up on work on a Saturday afternoon.  Unbeknownst to me, some co-worker also came by the office that day, and was "upset" and frightened by the strange and "satanic" music she heard coming from my office down the hall.  She reported the "incident" to HR, but the manager didn't really know what to chastise me for (playing music that someone else didn't like?). "What were you thinking?," she asked me about the episode.  I told her I was thinking that some Black Uhuru might help pass the time as I voluntarily worked some unpaid overtime on an otherwise perfectly fine day.  I suppose the incident is still in my "permanent file" somewhere.

Trojan Records is an old-school Jamaican record label, the reggae OG, producing ska, reggae, and dub music since 1967.  If you need proof of Trojan's credentials, they were the label that first released The Wailers' song Stir It Up as a 45-rpm single in 1968. And they're still at it - I'm pleased to note that they've already released 11 LPs so far this year, even if they are all compilations and anthologies of earlier releases. 

Back in the 2007, as part of their 40-year anniversary, they commissioned several musicians to curate anthologies of their output.  Compilation CDs were produced by the band Super Furry Animals, Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead, the producer/DJ Fatboy Slim, and their own artist Lee "Scratch" Perry. They also released a two-CD set by Dr. Alex Paterson, aka the English ambient house band The Orb, titled I'll Be Black.

The I'll Be Black compilation met near universal acclaim.  Virtually every review I've seen of the album was overwhelmingly positive.  The LP mixes classic deep cuts from the Trojan catalog, and ably demonstrates Paterson's obvious familiarity and deep knowledge of vintage Jamaican music. The album also features some new collaborative tracks by Trojan's own Mad Professor and The Orb, credited as "Madorb." I understand that a Madorb album was in the works but somehow the project got shelved and only the tracks on I'll Be Black survive today. But sadly, the album is now out of print and unavailable. Second-hand copies are listed on Amazon and Discogs for around £100 each, give or take about 20% depending on condition.  The album is nowhere to be found on Spotify, although a few of the Madorb tracks are posted to YouTube.

I once had a digital copy of CD-1 (only) on an old hard drive, but lost it when that drive catastrophically crashed a few years back.  I also burned myself a CD copy of the disc, but it has become increasingly unstable over the years, and progressively skips more on more on the later tracks, rendering the disc all but unlistenable today.

So lemonade from lemons, today I went and assembled a Spotify playlist of all the songs on the two CDs based on track lists I found online (this ROM has a lot of spare time on his hands).  I can't say the playlist is quite the same as the I'll Be Black experience - I couldn't include the Madorb tracks or a couple of the Trojan cuts from the original, and the mix isn't as skillful as Paterson's fluid editing on the album.  But it's close - as long as you're not intimately familiar with the precise sequence and timing of the original and the segues between songs, the playlist is a pretty good approximation.  

If you've got some time on your hands or if you just want a laid back and occasionally trippy soundtrack to your day, I would encourage you to give it a listen.  If you like the music, you might want to also check out the Spotify playlist titled Dub - Society Tearing Itself Apart compiled by David Byrne. It says something about the breadth of this music and the volume available that these two playlists of classic dub tracks - The Orb's 43-song list and Byrne's 7-song compilation - don't include any two of the same cuts.

Traitor!

"Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) continues to fight his subpoena from a grand jury in Fulton County, Georgia, that wants to hear from him about at least two phone calls he made to Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger to talk about the 2020 election. As of tonight, a judge has stayed the subpoena and on July 20 will hear arguments on whether to reject it.

The editorial board of the Charleston, South Carolina Post and Courier today ran an editorial titled: 'Just testify, Sen[ator] Graham.' It says Graham’s claim that the calls were about election procedures 'never made sense.' Now his lawyers say that he was talking about elections to do his job as the chair of the U.S. Judiciary Committee—a top-ranking committee, by the way—which makes even less sense. The board says it doesn’t think Graham did anything illegal, but asserted that it is the duty of every U.S. citizen to 'comply with a subpoena to testify.' 

'We expect and deserve better from our senator,' it concluded.

And that’s just it, isn’t it? We are hearing now, 18 months after the fact, that our president tried to overturn our democracy, forcing his own will onto unwilling voters. And, at the time, no one in the White House said anything to the public or to our law enforcement officials to stop this deadly attack.

Worse, it appears that a number of our lawmakers were complicit in the attempt to overturn our democracy. The committee has named at least ten representatives who conspired with the president, and another, Representative Barry Loudermilk (R-GA), who gave a tour through the Capitol complex on January 5, but there have been hints that others knew something was up as well, and that some might have been helping with the scheme." - Heather Cox Richardson, July 13, 2022 

I exercised my constitutional right to vote in 2020, as I do nearly every year, but out-of-state forces in South Carolina, in Texas (Sen. Ted Cruz objected to certification of Georgia's election results on January 6), and even in the Federal government have conspired to dismiss my and other Georgia voter's ballots. I take that personally.  You don't get to nullify my vote, Lindsey.  You don't get to dismiss my vote, Ted.  And you most definitely don't get to ignore the consent of governed, Donald!

I will continue to exercise my right to vote and my right to free speech until all of these motherfuckers are out of office and are correctly understood to be the treasonous traitors that they are.

Danielle?

A week after making their joint debut, Tropical Storm Colin has fizzled out but Bonnie, bless her heart, is still hurricaning out in the Eastern Pacific.

But after several day of inactivity, all of a sudden, without any warning, a decaying frontal boundary has materialized over northern Georgia, i.e., Atlanta, i.e., where I live.  The only tropical disturbance over the entire North Atlantic basin and it's right above my house.  The chance of the system developing into a tropical storm is low - forecasters put it at less than 20% - but not zero.   

At least that explains the week we've had of hot, humid weather here in Atlanta.  

Who Voted For This Supreme Court?

Yesterday, I posted a song, Bonnie and Clyde, by the 60s French pop singer Serge Gainsbourg.  For those unfamiliar with Gainsbourg's oeuvre, here's a mixtape of some of his songs recorded between 1959 and 1983.  My personal favorite is Ford Mustang, which starts just after the 16:00-minute mark. A complete track list is published on the FACT website.

In response to last week's awful Supreme Court decision striking down the EPA's ability to regulate carbon emissions from power plants and thereby address climate change, the radical right has embraced the latest misleading talking point instead of considering the actual issue.  

And it says a lot about the current conservative-controlled Supreme Court that I had to be so specific as to which awful decision I was referring. The overturn of Roe v Wade?  No, not that one.  Striking down New York City's 100-year-old ban on concealed weapons in public places? No, not that one either.  The continued erosion of the wall separating church and state? No, all of those are terrible decisions which will make this beleaguered country that much shittier, but the specific one I'm talking about today is West Virginia v Environmental Protection Agency, the one that ruled, in essence, that the Environmental Protection Agency isn't allowed to protect the environment.

The EPA has been under attack by the right wing for years now, pretty much since its inception.  That opposition has been funded, in no small measure, by the fossil-fuel industry and the Koch brothers using many of the same techniques, including many of the same specific lobbyists, that the tobacco industry once employed to make people think there was no harm in smoking. By deliberately blurring the lines between unregulated industrial discharges to air and water with individual, personal freedoms, they have attempted to make opposition to the EPA into a libertarian issue.  

So never mind that West Virginia represents a major victory by big business in their decades long struggle to reduce their expenses by allowing harmful substances to be pumped into the air and water without restriction.  Never mind that millions of dollars were spent by oil and gas, coal, and power interests on campaign contributions to those who nominated and confirmed the right-wing cabal of judges.  No, that's not what the West Virginia ruling was all about, Republicans will tell you.  

"We don't want unelected career bureaucrats making laws! Only Congress, the legislative branch, can write laws," they argue. "The SCOTUS ruling is simply affirming the Constitutional balance of powers by stopping executive branch agencies from writing their own laws."

Oh, bless your hearts!  Were that it were that simple.  As someone once said, all complex and difficult-to-understand problems have simple, straight-forward, and completely incorrect answers.

"No executive branch agency should be making any laws," they proclaim. "Not the EPA. Not the FCC, FAA, FDA, IRS, OSHA, or any alphabet-soup agency."  Since virtually every regulatory agency is in the executive branch, which after all is charged with carrying out the laws created by the legislative branch, what they're calling for is what Steve Bannon once called "the deconstruction of the administrative state."

To be clear (for those of you who never took civics in high school), EPA or any "alphabet soup" agency doesn't create laws.  Congress writes laws, and that process takes agreement of both the House and the Senate (no small feat there) and Presidential approval.  Due to the complexities of the many issues involved, from understanding of financial systems to environmental science, many of the laws created by Congress require specific agencies staffed by technical experts to create standards and regulations on how those laws will be enacted.

For example, way back in 1970, Congress passed the Clean Air Act, saying that industries could not discharge pollutants or harmful substances to the air without a permit.  The Clean Air Act also directed the newly formed EPA to create standards establishing the amount of emissions that the permits will allow, and how the permit process will be managed.

The EPA is not writing air-discharge laws, they are writing regulations and establishing standards as directed by Congress for those laws and acts created by Congress. While regulations may effectively have the same effect as laws, regulations don't have the same broad authority as laws and acts. The law written by Congress applies to everyone - no one can discharge pollutants to the air without a permit.  The regulations created by the EPA apply only to those who seek a permit.

Those opposed to "unelected alphabet-soup agencies" still maintain, nonetheless, that only Congress should write these regulations, as elected representatives are accountable to the will of the people. Unelected bureaucrats don't have the same public accountability as those in Congress. It's undemocratic to allow career bureaucrats to write the laws, even if you call them "regulations."

Again, bless your uninformed hearts. There is accountability in the agencies, even if you don't understand how it works. The Administrator of the EPA, for instances, is appointed by the elected President and serves at the President's pleasure.  If the President  thinks the EPA is going too far, or not far enough, he or she can replace the Administrator with a new individual and a mandate to change direction.  In addition to Executive Branch appointments, the EPA is subject to Congressional oversight and review.  If Congress doesn't like what EPA has done, you better believe they'll call one of those hearings and reviews that you occasionally have seen televised on CSPAN, and direct the agency to more closely follow the mandate they were given.

And all of EPA's proposed regulations are first published for review and comment in the Federal Register, and if any segment of the public doesn't like the way their comments were addressed, there's always the option of lawsuits.  New lawsuits or legal settlements are announced almost daily in the Federal  Register.  For christ's sake, what is West Virginia v Environmental Protection Agency if not a challenge to EPA by a state, a check on the regulations written by "unelected bureaucrats"?

And do you really want Congress writing these regulations?  Really? Think about it - senators and representatives are more interested in getting reelected than anything else.  They're not likely to write tough regulations unpopular in some sectors, or weak regulations unpopular in others.  They'd most likely be paralyzed by an inability to balance those two pressures.  

Should the acceptable level of lead in drinking water, for instance,  be less than the current 15 ppm?  If a congressperson agrees, industrial groups will protest, and campaign contributions from industry will disappear.  Should it be greater than 15 ppm? If he or she agrees to that, they'll be confronted at their next Town Hall meeting by mothers of learning-disabled children, and branded as "child-killers" and accused of environmental racism in the press. Should they keep it at 15 ppm?  If so, both groups will protest.  There's no winning.

Besides, have you seen Congress?  They can't even budget the money they already spent the previous year!  They can't pass common-sense laws on gun control or reproductive rights despite overwhelming public support.  Hell, I'm amazed that half of them can even find their own congressional office each morning, but I guess that's what aides are for.

Have you seen Louie Gohmert? Do you want him to develop the algorithm to determine the number of additional cancer deaths per one million people due to exposure to vinyl chloride in drinking water?  Do you want Ron Johnson developing minimum sanitation and sterilization procedures for surgical equipment?  Do you want Marjorie Taylor Green assigning and managing radio frequencies for air traffic control towers to incoming flights?

Now, I recognize that I've picked on all Republican representatives in the examples above.  To be fair, Hank Johnson (D-GA) was concerned that the island of Guam was going to tip over and capsize from too many troops stationed there.  Do you want him determining load-bearing capacities of four-lane bridges over Interstate Highways?

While some of those examples might be amusing to watch, I hope we can all agree that's not the best use of our "greatest and brightest" elected officials.  So that leads us to today's problem.  In the West Virginia ruling, SCOTUS said that Congress didn't explicitly authorize EPA to develop regulations on carbon emissions from power plants.  At least the 1970 Clean Air Act didn't have those exact, precise  words, just something about "harmful emissions from stationary and mobile sources."  The court decreed that Congress either needs to write those rules themselves, or explicitly authorize EPA to do so.

Simple enough task on the face of it.  Congress can either just agree to the regulations already written by EPA - it's all already there, written down on paper and everything - or they can amend the 1970 Clean Air Act to make sure it includes a reference to carbon emissions from power plants. Easy as pie. Easy as 1, 2, 3.

But way too difficult a task for this partisan Congress.  The Republicans would be leery of anything that even resembles a recognition of the existence of a climate-change problem, and the Democrats would fight among themselves that the legislation is either too far reaching or not far-reaching enough.  It's telling that no one is even seriously suggesting that Congress try to adopt the regulations or to amend the Clean Air Act. No one thinks them capable of that! This complex and difficult-to-understand problem has a simple, straight-forward, and impossible-to-implement solution.

The bottom line here is that the "unelected-bureaucrats-writing-laws" talking point is just a smoke screen for what's really happening here - the Court is continuing to fulfill decades-long efforts to abolish environmental regulations in order to increase the profit margin of big industries at the expense of the health and welfare of the planet.  The Court knows full well that Congress can't and won't adopt the rules themselves, and the radical right-wing cabal of activist judges is seizing the opportunity to take America back to a time before the EPA and the 1970 Clean Air Act, just like they're trying to take us back to before 1973's Roe v Wade decision and to some imaginary 1950s prayer in public school timeline.

This will not end well for America.

Bonnie & Colin

And just like (snap!) that, we now have Tropical Storms Bonnie and Colin.

Tropical Storm Bonnie is currently crossing Central America near the Nicaragua/Costa Rica border and is expected to continue traveling west. Gradual strengthening to hurricane-force winds is forecast after Bonnie emerges over the eastern Pacific later this morning and should continue through Tuesday. Bonnie will then move offshore of but parallel to the coasts of El Salvador, Guatemala, and southern Mexico today through Tuesday. Bonnie will continue to produce heavy rain across portions of Nicaragua and Costa Rica through today. This rainfall is expected to result in life-threatening flash flooding and mudslides in Nicaragua and Costa Rica.  

Tropical Storm Colin is located over South Carolina. The center of Colin is expected to move northeastward along or just inland of the North Carolina coast through Sunday, and then emerge over the western Atlantic Ocean late Sunday. Colin will continue to produce locally heavy rainfall across coastal portions of the Carolinas through Sunday morning. This rainfall may result in localized areas of flash flooding. Colin is expected to dissipate over the western Atlantic on Monday.

The evidence of human-induced climate change is all around us.  The need to take action and reduce carbon emissions is urgent, and yet the Supreme Court, in a decision strictly along partisan lines, decided that they don't think the EPA asked "Mother, may I?" of Congress properly or sufficiently.  But instead of chastising EPA and requiring proper authorization be issued, the Court instead shut down EPA's ability to limit carbon emissions from power plants, jeopardizing the U.S.'s ability to meet carbon-reduction goals and imperiling the planet. The only ones benefitting from the decision are the coal industry and the conservative bona fides of the six conservative judges (two of whom were improperly seated).

Criminals. Bonnie and Colin, Bonnie and Clyde. Boney Carrot and Kegstand.  May their houses decrease and sink back into the swamp from which they arose.

SCROTUS

As previously noted, in yesterday's West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency ruling, the so-called "Supreme" Court limited the U.S. EPA’s ability to control releases of greenhouse gases from power plants. The court argued that when Congress passed the Clean Air Act in 1970, it did not intend to give the EPA broad authority to issue regulations that would push fossil-fuel producers toward clean energy. 

The trouble is that climate change presents such an enormous threat to the world — and the need to reduce the pace of warming is so urgent — that any ruling that makes the task harder is worrisome. Extreme storms, heat waves, floods, droughts, and wildfires are already becoming more common. Many species are facing potential extinction. Glaciers are melting, and sea levels are rising. 

(If you need any further evidence, Potential Tropical Storm Two is now officially Tropical Storm Bonnie.  On its forecast track, Bonnie will move across the southwestern Caribbean today, and cross southern Nicaragua or northern Costa Rica tonight with maximum sustained winds near 40 mph and even higher gusts.  On Saturday, the storm will emerge over the eastern Pacific, where it is expected to re-strengthen and develop into a full hurricane.)  

(Also, satellite and radar images along with surface observations indicate that a low-pressure system has formed off the coast of  Savannah, Georgia. This system will drift northeastward along the southeast coast during the next day or so, producing heavy rains which could cause flash flooding across portions of southeastern Georgia and the Carolinas through tonight and into Saturday.)

Yet Chief Justice Roberts, writing for the majority, only glancingly alluded to the harms caused by climate change. Justice Elena Kagan, on the other hand, began her dissent with a long passage detailing the devastation the planet faces, including famine, coastal erosion, mass migration, and political crises. 

The court's ruling is the latest sign that the Republican Party is unconcerned about climate change. The six justices in the majority were all Republican appointees; the three dissenters were all Democratic appointees. It should also be noted that three of the six justices in the majority were appointed by a President (you know, the Orange Guy) who did not win the popular vote, and the timing of the appointments of two of those justices (Gorsuch and Barrett) was controversial. Gorsuch was only appointed after the Republican-led Congress refused to even consider President Obama's nominee for a year on the grounds that a President shouldn't be able to nominate a justice in an election year, and Barrett's appointment was rushed through Congress even as early and absentee voting was already underway to replace the Orange Guy.  Two of the other six justices were appointed by another President who did not win the popular vote in his First Term, but appointed the justices during his Second Term. The sixth and final majority justice was appointed way back in 1991. It's hard to argue that the decisions of the current court are indicative of the will of the people.

Despite the risks associated with climate change, the U.S. has made only modest progress combating the crisis through federal policy in recent years. The Trump administration largely denied the problem and reversed Obama administration policies intended to slow global warming. Because of uniform Republican opposition and Democratic infighting, the Biden administration failed to pass its ambitious climate agenda, including a major proposed rule requiring electric utilities to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, essentially forcing them to replace coal and gas-fired plants with clean forms of electricity, like wind, solar and nuclear power. Now the Supreme Court has made the job even more difficult.

But the court had agreed to hear the West Virginia case despite the fact that the rules being challenged had been abandoned, suggesting they were determined to make a point. That point seems to be to hamstring federal regulation of business. 

The argument at the heart of the decision is called the “nondelegation doctrine,” which says that Congress, which constitutes the legislative branch of the government, cannot delegate legislative authority to the executive branch. Most of the regulatory bodies in our government are housed in the executive branch. So the nondelegation doctrine would hamstring the modern administrative state.

As recently as 2001, the Supreme Court unanimously rejected the nondelegation argument in a decision written by Justice Antonin Scalia, who said the court must trust Congress to take care of its own power. Instead, in the majority ruling, Chief Justice Roberts modified the nondelegation argument with the “major questions doctrine," used by the court for the first time. That doctrine holds that Congress must not delegate “major” issues to an agency, saying that such major issues must be explicitly authorized by Congress. 

Justice Kagan’s dissent noted the hypocrisy of the Republican justices claiming to be constitutional originalists when they are, in fact, inventing new doctrines to achieve the ends they wish. “The current Court is textualist only when being so suits it,” she wrote. “When that method would frustrate broader goals, special canons like the ‘major questions doctrine’ magically appear as get-out-of-text-free cards. Today, one of those broader goals makes itself clear: Prevent agencies from doing important work, even though that is what Congress directed.”

Abuse of the filibuster by Republican senators means that the explicit congressional authorization required by Roberts stands no hope of passing Congress. Thus, the Supreme Court has essentially stopped the federal government from responding as effectively to climate change as it must. This decision made it less likely that the U.S. will reach the climate targets set in the Paris Accords. And if the U.S. misses its targets, the world will likely miss its targets, too.

The decision will likely apply not just to the EPA, but to a whole host of business regulations. More lawsuits may be coming. Many of the plaintiffs from this climate case have brought another case trying to keep the EPA from moving the nation toward a greater use of electric vehicles. Corporations in other industries will likely use this ruling to argue that some of their own regulations should also be blocked. 

The EPA still has some authority to regulate power plants after this ruling, but more narrowly than before. Although one obvious way to significantly reduce greenhouse emissions from power plants is to shut down the plants and replace them with something cleaner, that’s now off the table. But the agency can still push power plants to become more efficient.  The agency can still regulate greenhouse gases from vehicles, the nation’s largest source of such emissions — although the ruling and the potential for future lawsuits may make the agency more cautious than it otherwise would be.

Climate change can still be addressed in other ways, too, including federal rules applying to newly built power plants, federal rules on leaks from oil and gas production, and private sector efforts to become more energy efficient. Cities and states are trying to fill the gap, with local governments accelerating their efforts to cut greenhouse gas emissions, in some cases bridging partisan divides.

In the dissent, Kagan argued that Congress had, in fact, properly given authority to the EPA to act, recognizing that agencies need to be able to respond appropriately to new and big problems. “Congress knows what it doesn’t and can’t know when it drafts a statute; and Congress therefore gives an expert agency the power to address issues—even significant ones—as and when they arise.” She noted that the "Clean Air Act was major legislation, designed to deal with a major public policy issue.” 

“This is not the Attorney General regulating medical care, or even the CDC regulating landlord-tenant relations. It is EPA (that’s the Environmental Protection Agency, in case the majority forgot) acting to address the greatest environmental challenge of our time." 

She concluded, “The Court appoints itself—instead of Congress or the expert agency—the decision-maker on climate policy. I cannot think of many things more frightening.”