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The Supreme Court building is seen on Wednesday, June 26, 2024, in Washington.
Editor's note: Adam H. Sobel is a professor at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and the Foo School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, and an atmospheric scientist who studies extreme weather and its risks to human society. Sobel is the host of the podcast “Deep Convection” and author of the book “Storm Surge” about Superstorm Sandy. Follow us on Twitter: translation:The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own. See more opinions on CNN.
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The Supreme Court's decision on Friday to overturn 40 years of precedent established in the case Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council is a truly severe blow to environmental protection and climate justice.
By overturning the Chevron doctrine, which required courts to defer to federal agencies when it comes to enforcing broadly written laws, the Supreme Court will make it much harder for the federal government to regulate pollution, including but not limited to greenhouse gas emissions, among many other issues related to health, labor, consumer welfare, and taxation.
I am deeply outraged by the damage this decision will almost certainly do to our environment and the fight against climate change, but more philosophically, I am outraged because it represents a downgrade of science and expertise in government.
In the federal government, agencies possess detailed knowledge about certain complex problems. In a healthy society, agencies have the power to manage those problems. In other words, agencies are entities that know things, and for government to be effective, agencies must be able to get things done.
But this is a situation where principle and practice are not necessarily the same. In principle, the pro-democracy rhetoric behind the Court's decision is defensible: Congress has the power to make laws. Federal agency officials, although experts in their fields, are unelected and generally not directly accountable to the public. The majority's logic in the decision is that when Congress gives agencies broad discretion to interpret and enforce the law, Congress unconstitutionally vests some of its law-making power in the agencies.
What is at stake here is a manifestation, in the context of American government, of a much broader problem that is more complex than many people (including many scientists) realize: there is a real tension between expert judgment, insofar as it is something individuals possess as a result of their education and experience, and a democracy that bestows power through elections.
Legitimate governance requires both to work together.
Conflicts between the claims and demands of different members of society, such as the rights of polluting corporations and the rights of citizens to live a pollution-free life, cannot be adjudicated by science alone: they involve values as well as facts, and so their resolution must involve politics.
In his book The Crisis of Expertise, my Columbia University colleague Gil Eyal gives various examples to show that expertise and electoral politics alone cannot reliably gain public trust, let alone solve complex problems like climate change, which have both scientific and political dimensions. Slogans like “listen to the science” obscure this complexity. So we cannot simply say that, in principle, experts in government agencies should have more than a certain amount of power. But experts need some power. For the system to work in the public interest, experts and elected officials need to work together. The status quo at Chevron was a way to allow that to happen.
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SAN DIEGO – OCTOBER 27: A line of fire from the Cedar Fire moves down a hill near a Walmart in the Lakeside neighborhood of San Diego, California, on October 27, 2003. Fires continue to burn in Southern California, leaving 13 people dead and more than 1,000 homes reduced to ashes. Authorities say winds have died down a bit, but 30,000 homes remain at risk from the fires that have burned more than 400,000 acres. Governor Davis, who has activated the National Guard, estimates damages could run into the billions of dollars.
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Politicians themselves lack the expertise to deal with the new and ever-increasing problems we face in a technologically advanced society — take artificial intelligence as a particularly notable example — and Congress lacks the expertise, capacity, and flexibility to write laws that can anticipate all the problems that will arise.
As another example, is it necessary to pass new laws for each new chemical pollutant that keeps emerging? Even if Congress were willing to do so, could it sort through the complex evidence and determine how to best write those laws? Wouldn't it be better to write broader laws that spelled out some principles about how to regulate pollution, and then give EPA the latitude to work out how to deal with each new hazard?
Not only has the Supreme Court shackled federal agency expertise, but the reality of a dysfunctional Congress makes it nearly impossible to pass meaningful legislation. Republicans have opposed nearly every environmental bill since 1990. After the Chevron decision, it is likely that no new environmental laws will be enacted that meet higher standards, let alone be enacted at all. Instead, countless existing agency rules will be challenged in court. Court judges, like agency officials, are not democratically elected, and like Congress, technical expertise is nonexistent, and many rules will likely be struck down by the same judges who ultimately handed down the decision.
The result would probably be simply a lot less regulation. But regulation is how governments balance the interests of citizens who want to be free from polluting with the interests of corporations that profit from increased freedom to pollute. Regulation is the primary defense for protecting public health, the environment, and other public goods.
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The country would become more toxic and the planet would warm faster, to the detriment of all of us, but polluters and others whose private interests conflict with the public interest would face less regulation. And given the string of anti-environmental decisions by this Supreme Court leading up to this decision, and the underlying free-market fundamentalist ideology of the presidents who appointed the majority, that appears to have been the real objective.
Given the need for government to act to protect the public interest from environmental and public health hazards, we can and should have legitimate, good-faith debate about the role of expertise in government and the balance of power and responsibilities between federal agencies and Congress.
Had the Supreme Court ruled in this way, we would not have found ourselves in a future where the government has had to deal with climate change, pollution, and a host of other dangers to the well-being of its citizens with one hand tied.
