Supreme Court EPA Ruling Is a Blow to Indigenous Communities, People of Color

The chance to reach climate goals set by the United States last year — including the reduction of its greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2050 — just became more remote as the Supreme Court ruled on Thursday that the Environmental Protection Agency would no longer have the authority to broadly limit industrial carbon emissions.

And because extractive industries are generally located in communities with the least power to fight their existence, people who live in areas mostly composed of indigenous people and people of color, among others, are poised to be hit hardest by this new reduction of environmental regulatory authority.

“Our most vulnerable populations will suffer the most from the ongoing climate crisis, with low-income households, BIPOC communities, and young people impacted most,” said a statement by John Greenler, executive director of 350 Wisconsin, a grassroots environmental group that is part of the Stop the Money Pipeline coalition, which targets investors in climate destruction. “This is not just a matter of climate — this is a matter of justice.”

Some climate activists are saying that the court’s ruling is bad, but not catastrophic, and that some media outlets are distorting the blow to regulation. While the court has prohibited the continuation of an Obama-era rule that required the coal industry to transition to the production of renewable energy — which experts call “generation shifting,” — the decision “still “preserves large swaths of EPA authority to regulate greenhouse gases across a range of sources,” Cara Horowitz, a professor at UCLA School of Law, told The Washington Post.

“In some ways I’m actually relieved,” Horowitz said. “With this court we were bracing for almost anything, so this could have been worse.”

But anything that weakens the transition to clean energy will negatively public health, especially the health of people forced to live closest to the pollution produced by the fossil fuel industry.

Xavier Becerra, the U.S. health secretary, said in a statement that unregulated power plant emissions may contribute to various illnesses, such as asthma and emphysema. He called the court ruling “a public health disaster."

Indigenous environmental activists have spoken out strongly against the Supreme Court decision.

Lisa DeVille, a citizen of the Mandan Hidatsa Nation in North Dakota and an environmental activist, said she has been “fighting for stronger regulations to cut emissions and air pollution for more than a decade.”

“Like every other front-line community, I know what weak regulations and lax enforcement do to communities like mine, every day,” DeVille said in a statement. “This decision perpetuates generational harm and once again treats Indigenous communities like mine as a commodity to be extracted rather than human beings in a natural world that both deserve to be protected.”

Dallas Goldtooth, a national organizer with the Indigenous Environmental Network, positions the ruling as yet more “settler violence perpetrated against Indigenous peoples, our lands, our bodies, our nations, and our futures.”

“By circumventing well-settled precedent and statutory law, the conservative court is reaching far beyond its constitutional authority, ‘legislating from the bench,’ and is being used by the right to push a full assault on the working class, BIPOC communities, and tribal nations,” Goldtooth said.