Supreme Court Says It's OK For Corporations To Poison Us And Kill The Planet

The Supreme Court handed down a decision on Thursday that effectively limits the EPA's authority to regulate carbon emissions from coal-fired power plants. The decision - which was split along ideological lines - will now result in more emissions and more health consequences for American citizens. This Supreme Court is absolutely killing our country, and the conservatives making these decisions seem more than ok with that, as Ring of Fire's Farron Cousins explains.

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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

Yesterday, the United States Supreme Court handed down a decision, basically telling the environmental protection agency that you do not have any real authority. Specifically, the Supreme Court says that the EPA does not actually have the authority to tell coal fire power plants, how much carbon they can pump out into the atmosphere under the clean air act. Because as justice John Roberts said, it's just not plausible that Congress wanted you to have this authority. Here is in his own words from the ruling, what chief justice John Roberts had to say. Capping carbon dioxide emissions at a level that would force a nationwide transition away from the use of coal to generate electricity may be a sensible quote, solution to the crisis of the day, but it is not plausible that Congress gave EPA the authority to adopt on its own such a regulatory scheme.

Except of course, that Congress did via the clean air act specifically give the EPA the authority to do this, as the Supreme Court on two separate occasions has ruled. Like even while Roberts was on that court, that court said the EPA does have the power to do this. And now he's saying the EPA does not have the power to do this because it's not explicitly written in the law that the EPA could do that specific thing. Now, I don't think there's anybody watching this that doesn't understand how badly this is going to affect our environment. People will die because of this decision because of these ambitions coming from coal fired power plants, it's going to lead to more respiratory distress. It's going to lead to more heart disease. It's going to kill people. That's what the Supreme Court just did. They handed down a death sentence to a bunch of anonymous Americans who don't even know it yet.

And of course we have the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. The United States is the second largest emitter of carbon on the planet. And that's not gonna change anytime soon, thanks to this ruling. We all understand that. But what I think people are missing about this story, obviously the environmental impact's number one. But number two, this ruling is going to be used against every single regulatory body in this country. If they do not specifically written in legislation have the authority to do a specific action, whether it's the FDA, whether it's OSHA, whether it's the SEC, it doesn't matter. They can now be challenged on their regulatory authority by people who simply don't wanna be regulated. And they can go and use this exact same argument that the Supreme Court just put forward saying, hey, OSHA doesn't actually have the specific authority to say that we have to give construction workers hard hats.

Or to say that, you know, we don't have to protect people, you know, from having faulty railings and then they fall down the stairs. You know, really it doesn't say we have to do that. So, you know, we don't have to take care of worker safety anymore. Oh, the SEC, it doesn't specifically say that they can investigate Wall Streeter's for this specific crime. So, you know, under the Supreme Court's logic, they wouldn't have the authority to do so. That is the real danger from this ruling. Not just the effects that it's going to have on our environment, but the effects that it is going to have on every single regulatory body here in the United States, thus fulfilling yet another right wing dream of having absolutely zero federal regulations and allowing corporations to do whatever the hell they want.