Environment Groups Find Less Support on Court

New York Times ^ | July 3, 2009 | Adam Liptak

[reaganaut1]

The Supreme Court heard five environmental law cases in the term that ended Monday, and environmental groups lost every time. It was, said Richard J. Lazarus, a director of the Supreme Court Institute at Georgetown University Law Center, “the worst term ever” for environmental interests.

The court allowed Navy exercises using sonar that threatened whales off California. It limited the liability of companies partly responsible for toxic spills. It made it harder to challenge Forest Service regulations and easier to dump mining waste into an Alaskan lake. And it allowed the Environmental Protection Agency to use cost-benefit analysis to decide how much marine life may be killed by cooling structures at power plants.

Business groups expressed measured satisfaction with the decisions.

“The court does seem to be bringing more common sense back to environmental law,” Robin S. Conrad, a lawyer with the United States Chamber of Commerce, said at a recent news briefing.

In the past 40 years or so, ever since environmental law emerged as a separate field based on major statutes enacted in the 1970s, the Supreme Court has been reasonably receptive to cases brought by environmental groups.

That seems to have changed under the court of Chief Justice [Roberts].

“It has taken a little while, but we are finally seeing how much the changes in 2005 and 2006 moved the court in important areas, including in environmental law,” said Douglas Kendall, president of the Constitutional Accountability Center, a liberal research organization and law firm. Chief Justice Roberts joined the court in 2005, and Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. in 2006.

Last term’s environmental decisions are consistent with larger trends at the court, which has leaned to the right recently and seems poised to make significant moves in a conservative direction in important areas of the law.

[reaganaut1]

If Obama gets several Supreme Court appointees, he could reverse this positive trend.

[wbones8765]

We need to go back to the supreme court on carbon. The pollutant finding must be challened. As their is dissent within their own organization, on endangerment. It might make the court more receptive to rehearing this arguement.

[Thebaddog]

Kennedy is the only justice he needs to replace for it all to go to hell again.

[libstripper]

As I remember, when the Court decided the carbon case, much of the scientific dissent from the Gore position had not been fully articulated. It is being more and more articulated now, indeed to the point that it's intellectually irresponsible to say that there is any real “consensus” on what the science is. Since the original majority based its decision on what it thought the science was, Kennedy, at least, might be persuaded to change his view about the science and, thus, to change the Court's view.

[wbones8765]

What was used was the IPCC finding as evidence. That position has been challeneged lately. They used outdated data for this study. Much of what was in that report has been disproven. There is more science, and less political science being used at the moment.
Mr. Hansen’s Goddard Institute did not recalculate the worlds temps until after this case was decided. 2006 is not the hottest year ever, it was 5th hottest. Most of the hottest were more than 60 yrs ago. Time for science and not ideology.

[wbones8765]

challenged