Thursday's Supreme Court decision, which sharply curbs the EPA's authority under the Clean Air Act to regulate pollution from U.S. power plants, comes at a surprising moment. Even the utilities being regulated begged the court not to throw out the EPA's flexibility.
This would seem like the perfect moment for even conservatives to embrace a decarbonized energy sector and accelerate the shift from coal, oil and methane to wind, sun and other clean technologies. Hundreds of millions of people in South Asia just endured the hottest April in 120 years, 10 degrees higher than normal, on the verge of making human survival outdoors impossible. Crop failures have already afflicted millions on the Horn of Africa, in Yemen and in Afghanistan. Now Ukraine, the world's breadbasket, has been cut off from global markets by a Russian invasion bankrolled by fossil fuels. Spiking prices of oil and gas, caused in large part by the war, are making affordable fertilizer for the rest of the world an even more distant dream.
