TICK TOCK THE CLIMATE CLOCK – PART THIRTY-FOUR – AMY CONEY BARRETT

The expected confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett to the seat on the Supreme Court held by Ruth Bader Ginsburg has serious negative implications for America’s response to the global climate crisis.

THIS IS THE DATA

Greenland’s ice is melting faster than at any time in the past 12,000 years, and the melting of the Antarctic ice cap will continue even if the global temperature rises by no more than 2C.  These ice melts are likely to be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to reverse.  The Guardian Greenland

On July 28, 2020, the temperature in Baghdad hit 125.2°F, the highest ever recorded.  Two days earlier, two protesters were shot dead by security forces during demonstrations over the failure of the city’s electricity grid.  WaPo Baghdad

This June, July, and August were the hottest ever recorded in the northern hemisphere, according to US government scientists at NOAA, surpassing the records set in 2016 and 2019. Guardian

By September 24, 2020, over five million acres had burned in California, Oregon and Washington, setting a record.  NYT Fire Season

According to an October report from NOAA, September 2020 was the warmest September since global record keeping began in 1880.  Yale Climate Connections 

According to NYT Rollbacks, the Trump administration has acted to repeal or weaken at least 100 environmental regulations, including a number of Obama-era climate policies that Trump says stifle business.  (Remember that.)

An October 13 report by the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction found a “staggering” rise in climate-related disasters, including extreme weather events (such as the drought in Germany, above), which nearly doubled. The U.N. report blamed human-caused climate change as a significant factor in the increased disasters, and warned,

It is baffling that we willingly and knowingly continue to sow the seeds of our own destruction, despite the science and evidence that we are turning our only home into an uninhabitable hell for millions of people.

Baffling?  Not really.  Read on.

THIS IS THE SOFTBALL BARRETT CLIMATE QUESTION

Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA):  And you have some opinions on climate change that you’ve thought about?

THIS IS BARRETT’S FLACCID RESPONSE

Amy Coney Barrett:  I’m certainly not a scientist.  I’ve read things about climate change. I would not say that I have firm views on it.

NO FIRM CLIMATE VIEWS? 

None that she’s willing to share with those of us around the world who will actually live with her climate views.  Let’s examine the likely veracity of Barrett’s claim.

As this article in the New York Times outlines, Barrett’s father worked as a prominent attorney for Shell Oil in New Orleans and Houston for 29 years, focusing on deep sea exploration and drilling.  He frequently represented Shell before the Department of the Interior on royalty, regulatory, and compliance issues.  He was also an active member of the American Petroleum Institute, the oil and gas industry’s main lobbing group.  According to the Times article, the “A.P.I. has played a critical role in casting doubt on climate science and opposing policies to address climate change.” 

Call me a skeptic, but it’s damn hard to believe that Barrett, who in her opening statement to the Judiciary Committee took great pains to speak at length about her dedication to family, didn’t learn anything from her father at the kitchen table.  Sorry, not buying it.  (Actually, not sorry.)

And consider this.  It was the Federalist Society that proposed Barrett for Ginsburg’s seat, just as it had proposed Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh for theirs.  Three other conservative Justices, Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, and John Roberts, are members of the Federalist Society.  Some of the society’s members, like A.G. Bill Barr, are also members of the conservative Catholic organization Opus Dei, about which I’ve written here:  Signs of Contradiction.  Barrett is also a member of the Federalist Society club and a member of a charismatic Catholic organization, the People of Praise.  Starting to see the pattern here?  But it’s not about religion, or abortion, or same sex marriage.  It’s about money.

Not much is known about the ultimate contributors to the Federalist Society’s coffers, but this is what I was able to find out about its finances for 2016 from the website Influence Watch.  Federalist Society revenue was $26,598,995.  Its expenses were $15,863,052, and its assets were $27,551,950.  According to the Official Website of Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI and a former U.S. Attorney), who sits on the Judiciary Committee that conducted the Senate hearings on the Barrett nomination, the Federalist Society spent $17,900,000 to confirm Neil Gorsuch (below) in 2017.  Its 2016 budget cited above makes that claim credible in that there was plenty of money available for the Gorsuch effort.  

The Federalist Society is reputedly spending $2.2M to put Barrett on the Court.  I guess her nomination is an easier lift.

Where does all this money come from?  As a 501(C)(3) tax exempt organization, the Federalist Society is required by law to reveal its donors; however, we still don’t know who they really are.  Why?  Because the Federalist Society has found a perfectly legal way to frustrate the intent of this section of the tax code, namely, transparency in exchange for a tax exemption.  (Always technically legal, but rarely socially beneficial.  And, yes, that's Justice Scalia below.)

Based on the tax returns for the Federalist Society and some dogged investigative reporting, we know that one of its major donors is a 501(C)(4) tax-exempt organization, Donors Trust.  A 501(C)(4) tax-exempt organization is not required by law to reveal its money sources, unless like Opus Dei members, they want their identity revealed.  Usually, they prefer to remain anonymous, and therefore, the source of the dark money used to place federal judges, including and especially Supreme Court Justices like Barrett, is largely unknown.  You can read more about the anonymous financial conduits that flow into the Federalist Society coffers in this article in The Washington Post, this one in Mother Jones, and this one in Slate, as well as Sen. Whitehouse’s Official Website and this video  of his presentation at the Barrett hearings, which provide some details on how this shadowy donor network functions.  You can judge their veracity and credibility for yourself.

But, when 80 decisions under the Roberts Court—which fall into four categories:  eliminating limits on dark money in politics, decreasing the importance of civil juries, affirming the disenfranchisement of certain (read minority and/or Democratic) voters, and weakening regulatory agencies--were decided in favor of the conservative agenda of Federalist Society donors, by a 5 to 4 conservative, partisan majority (meaning no Justices appointed by Democratic presidents joined), I have to conclude that judicial influence was bought.  And as a lawyer, that is extremely demoralizing, not to say enraging, to me personally.  Influence buying goes well beyond the politicization of the Court, which is to be expected, given how Justices are nominated and confirmed.  Influence buying goes to the commercialization of the Court, and that is a whole other matter.

THIS IS HOW BARRETT WILL UNDERMINE CLIMATE LEGISLATION

Wealthy Republican-leaning individuals and the corporations and industries they lead are among the actual donors to the Federalist Society.  What kind of judges are they buying with their millions?  Don McGahn (below), Trump’s former legal counsel and a member of the Federalist Society himself, put it succinctly in 2017: 

Regulatory reform and judicial selection are…deeply connected.

While McGahn was being candid, he was also being a little cute.  What he really meant wasn’t regulatory reform but deregulation.  Why?  Because, if you take the regulatory brakes off the economy, it surges; it becomes cheaper (by one measure) to do business.  That’s the Trump economic playbook, and that’s why Trump rolled back at least 100 environmental regulations, to juice the economy—or at least the stock market.  Applying the Trump playbook to the climate crisis, if you deregulate fossil fuel industries so as to allow more carbon and methane to escape into the atmosphere, you make the cost of doing business cheaper, which boosts the bottom line, the stock price of a company, and its executives’ compensation.  To quote a certain Congresswoman in an altogether different context, “It’s about the Benjamins.”  

But this shortsighted approach to the cost of doing business ignores the real costs of sending carbon and methane into the atmosphere.  Its focus on a near-term horizon line of the end of the current fiscal quarter at the expense of the horizon line of future generations makes the continued warming of the planet more likely, if not inevitable.   

And it’s precisely the further deregulation of the fossil fuel industry that makes the Barrett confirmation a death knell for any abatement of global heating.  This is where the smart money has put its mouth via the Federalist Society--they're literally banking on a 6-3 majority in favor of weakening regulatory agencies in general and the EPA in particular.  The Barrett nomination isn’t really about Roe v. Wade, the crippling or total dismantling of the ACA, or even Obergefell v. Hodges.  That’s a sideshow for the little people.  This is about the people who count, who are making an investment in their personal portfolios, who see themselves as the ones who actually Make America Great.  It’s about their money, pure and simple, right now, and not about our future.  The planet?  They don’t really care.  The question is, Do U?

Keep it real!  And wear your damn mask!

Marilyn