Monday, June 29, 2015

Justice Scalia sides with saving Big Energy Money, rules against bigger Savings protecting American Lives.

The Supreme Court ruling, by the conservative activist justices, struck down Obama’s new EPA clean air standards.

Let's start with the first problem: Republicans always weasel out of answering questions by refusing to address “hypothetical's.” In this case though, Justice Scalia turned the tables.

In another Salvador Dali moment of logic, Justice Scalia came up with a hypothetical that’ll blow your mind: What if wind and solar did more harm than burning coal? He really said that.
Scalia: "The government concedes that if the agency were to find that emissions from power plants do damage to human health, but that the technologies needed to eliminate these emissions do even more damage to human health, it would still deem regulation appropriate. No regulation is 'appropriate' if it does significantly more harm than good."
But it doesn’t? It was a wretched twist of reality.

It’s an argument that defies logic, and is never addressed by the press either. Republicans have always said environmental standards must balance the cost to business with the cost to human health and lives.


Not even close, right, who would not try to save lives by cleaning up energy production? The fact that most utility companies are already moving in the clean energy direction anyway makes this whole question a moot point.  But not to our clueless conservative jurists stuck in the 20th century.

The cost to energy company’s vs peoples worthless lives? That’s easy for Scalia. Saving lives…is unreasonable:
Just in case you didn't see this...
"We hold that EPA interpreted unreasonably when it deemed cost irrelevant to the decision to regulate power plants," Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in the court's majority opinionThe Obama administration argued that the costs were only a fraction of the industry's profits. The EPA eventually did (look at the costs) and determined that the benefits far outweighed the costs.

The new regulation could add almost $10 billion in annual costs. But the EPA countered that the economic benefits could reach as much as $90 billion per year, based on health benefits and saved lives. The plaintiffs countered that the maximum benefit could reach no higher than about $6 billion.
There was no mention of saving lives. And you wonder why the national debt keeps going up; Republicans won’t let it come down unless it has a tax cut tied to it.
In a fiery dissent, Justice Elena Kagan said the EPA acted "well within its authority" in imposing regulations that could save "many, many lives."
Saving many, many lives is such a "liberal" thing. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell flipped reality inside out about the actual cost of doing nothing:
"Middle-class families in Kentucky and across our country … are often the first to suffer." 
From Republican policy, yea. 

4 comments:

  1. So to save lives shouldn't we immediately ban the use of any fossil fuel burning? Why would we be willing to accept any pollution generated through the use of fossil fuels against the value of human lives? I assume you no longer drive a car with an internal combustion engine and that you charge your Leaf or other electric car only from solar or a wind turbine and not off the coal fired electric grid right? We need to ground all air transportation until they develop solar powered engines. We need to convert all ships back to sails or some type of solar powered engine. We need to shut down all nuclear, gas, and coal power plants immediately. Think of all the lives saved right?

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  2. So, to stop car accidents, lets ban all cars?

    Or do we make cars safer and/or use mass transit more.

    I hate silly exaggerated right wing lazy "don't solve problems" responses.

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  3. How much pollution are you willing to live with? Short of banning the use of these fossil fuels there is no way to completely eliminate the pollution. So in admitting that you are ok with some pollution you agree that it is ok that some people die because of it. Now that would turn the discussion to how many people is it ok to kill with the pollution. So what would be an acceptable death total to you?

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  4. Did you want to stop car accidents or did you want clean air?

    Don't change the subject.

    Who is this "we" you keep talking about? Are you doing any of the actual work or are you just compaining about Republicans??

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