• Rottcodd@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    Interesting strategy there…

    The exact and only point of overturning Chevronis to make it so that corporations (and apparently branches of the government?) will be free to destroy the environment in order to generate more wealth for the c-suite and the investor class, but it isn’t going to happen all by itself. It’s necessary for someone to make this specific challenge, so that then the wholly corrupt and compromised supreme court can rule in their favor, then the corporations will be free to pollute to their hearts’ content.

    That isn’t a slam dunk though. The plutocrats have to be careful about who files the challenge, since a particularly egregious or unpopular corporation will likely draw too much attention to the scheme and generate opposition, which in turn will spotlight the brazen corruption of the supreme court.

    So it’s an interesting strategy to not even use a corporation at all, but a branch of the government itself. On the one hand, it not only sidesteps the risk of the opposition it could face if it was a corporation with a poor reputation - by having it not be a corporation at all, it will potentially distract from the underlying fact that the whole thing is being done primarily to benefit corporations at the cost of the health and well-being of people, and of society as a whole. But on the other hand, as a branch of government, it could all be irrelevant, since it’s not necessary for the EPA to have enforcement authority - there are other mechanisms by which the Air Force can be held liable for the pollution for which they are self-evidently liable.

    And maybe that’s the point. The Air Force can serve as the test case that will establish the desired precedent that the EPA doesn’t have the authority to enforce environmental law or to hold polluters accountsble for the harm they’ve done, but can then potentially avoid the demonization a corporation would rightly face for being the point organization in this blatantly destructive and self-serving and short-sighted scheme by going ahead and at least carrying out some token effort to rectify the situation, under some other authority. It’ll potentially serve as a way to minimize the clear threat - of making it seem to casual observers that eliminating EPA authority won’t make it so that polluters will be entirely free to destroy the environment, in spite of the fact that, in cases other than a branch of government that’s subject to other lines of authority, that’s exactly what it will do, and in fact exactly what it was intended to do.

    Dastardly…