In the same week large swaths of the US were under extreme heat warnings, Joe Biden’s Justice Department filed its most recent motion to dismiss a landmark climate case by arguing that nothing in the Constitution guarantees the right to a secure climate.
Then possibly something needs to change - add a new Amendment or something. But to claim that old laws written with an old understanding of how the world works needs to somehow carry the semantic weight of something it was never written to do seems a bit much.
Wouldn't that be the EPA's job? I do wish they had more power or were more strict when it came to climate change measures. I did find this though: https://www.epa.gov/climate-change
I mean, they're right. Nothing in the constitution says anything about the climate.
In this case I don't think "It's not a constitutional right" means "so I guess we're going to do nothing". It's just that some legal groundwork needs to happen.
I don't think there is a constitutional right to not get hit by giant meteors either.
I think the need to peg action to constitutional rights is a very uniquely American thing. In most other countries a simple addition to the legislature might suffice, whereas here if it's not in a constitution written many years before climate change became a popularly known thing, suddenly nothing can be done.
I mean, that's correct. There is in fact nothing about a stable climate in the US constitution. The courts need to have at least a pretense of interpreting existing laws rather than dictating what the laws ought to be.
The Declaration of Independence is not technically a legal document. But even if we ignore that, it would still quite a stretch to go from a general right to life to a right to some particular environmental policy. It's unreasonable to expect the government to always take the course of action that prevents the most deaths (or else the government would be required to ban driving, unhealthy lifestyles, etc.) and once we accept that reasonable tradeoffs between "life" and other policy goals are acceptable then we must (IMO) concede that Congress (and agencies empowered by Congress) have the authority to make these tradeoffs except when there are specific Constitutional directives to the contrary.
I would go even further and argue that a policy intended to reduce global warming is not necessarily the one that best defends the right to life (or rather the American right to life) as opposed to a policy of burning more fossil fuels now in order to build a stronger foundation for American security in a world destabilized by global warming.
Obtuse would be interpreting that phrase to include a responsibility for the federal government to preserve the global climate as it was in the particular time in which the constitution was written.
Many of my countrymen seem to think if it's not a problem written down on some dusty old piece of paper, at least 1-2 centuries old, it isn't a problem now.
There's no chance of that happening. There have been no amendments in over 30 years. And no amendments that weren't a joke in over 50 years. You won't get 3/4 of the states to agree to anything the least bit controversial.
(You won't even get "just" 2/3 of the House and Senate to agree to even propose the amendment.)
Yeah, no, we shouldn't have a constitutional amendment for that. We cannot and should not try to control the climate, we can merely control our contributions to global pollution. And contributing to global pollution isn't Constitution territory, but regulation territory.
i love how you frame this is some how a thing only the dnc does. especially when the republicant party has done the same and part of it is still trying for the 77 year old russain spy.
Russia has nothing to do with anything, it's a great scapegoat for the failure of Democrats to actually carry out any of their goals. If the DNC runs Biden then I'm voting third party, I don't want a white trash racist boomer as my President