The Most Important Environmental Law Case
I recently received a poll asking me what I thought was the most important environmental case that ever came out of the United States Supreme Court. About thirty cases were listed, but my pick wasn’t anywhere among them. My write-in vote? Bush v. Gore.
You remember the Bush case. It was about that pesky election in 2000 where we just couldn't make up our minds. The country was learning that more than just the weather can get hot in Florida. Eventually, the Supreme Court came to the rescue and found, by a 5-4 vote, that enough of that silly counting had been done, and that Mr. Gore had missed it by just that much (actually it was by .0092%).
As is the winner's prerogative, the new president and empowered Congress began to apply Republican ideals to environmental regulation. Not surprisingly, the beneficiaries of this action were environmental interest groups, who did not find it difficult to argue that Republican politics were isolationist, dangerous and destructive. For eight years, George W. Bush, and a Republican Congress, would swell the ranks of environmental groups across the country. All because of one vote from Robstown, Texas.
But the importance of Bush v. Gore didn’t just rest with an increase in environmental group participation. After all, that phenomenon has displayed itself during every Republican administration since Ronald Reagan.
No, the real importance of Bush v. Gore was that it put Al Gore out of a job.
Just think about it. Eight years as vice-president -- prime of life -- more than half the country voted for him and then . . . poof . . . gone.
Outward appearances were that Mr. Gore sat around for a while and then began to work up an idea that would later be know as “An Inconvenient Truth.” Had Mr. Gore prevailed in the election, he would have spent eight years of fits and starts trying to get Republicans in Congress to consider that global warming might exist. Maybe he would have been able to advance an environmental agenda . . . but I doubt it. At least until the mid-term election of 2006, he would have been lucky to sign a bill that had the word “environment” in it. But it doesn’t really matter because, in the end, he lost.
So eight years sooner than would otherwise be the case, we get “An Inconvenient Truth.”
I make this observation because the history of environmental regulation in the United States has been substantially aided by events that raised public fear levels: Cuyahoga River Fire, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Bhopal and Exxon Valdez , for example. When these kinds of events happen, the public reacts and when the (voting) public reacts, politicians tend to listen. That’s what “An Inconvenient Truth” did -- it scared a lot of people. In one fell swoop, the debate over the scientific basis for global warming was essentially over. Right or wrong, it was over and all that was left was to pass a law to do something about it.
The timing couldn’t have been better. Barack Obama is elected, successfully bypasses any serious debate on global warming, and, in six months, goes straight to a cap-and-trade proposal. I would suggest that this would not have been possible without the heavy lifting having already been done by the movie.
Further, I think that "An Inconvenient Truth" will be a catalyst for change in multiple areas of environmental regulation. Obviously air regulation, CO2 emissions and global warming are directly affected, but concerns about water, hazardous waste releases and natural resource destruction will also be impacted. It was, after all, a very scary movie. Not in the Freddy Krueger sort of way but more in that Indiana-Jones, Arc-of-the-Covenant, flesh-melting-because-you’ve-loosed-the-demons-of-hell sort of way.
Certainly it can be said that many Supreme Court cases have resulted in important environmental decrees on one topic or another. But Bush v. Gore, rather than deciding a particular point of environmental law, started the chain of events that led to a major change in environmental activism. Now that is a significant environmental law case.
(And you thought it was just about hanging chads).
Related Post: Monkeys and Science, Part Deux: Putting Climate Change On Trial
