Tuesday, July 7, 2009

Is the Supreme Court anti-environmental?

Lately the Supreme Court of the United States has sided exclusively with industry, observes Barbara O’Brian:
For environmentalists, the recent Supreme Court term was a shutout — 0 for 5. That is, all five of the “green” cases argued before the Court this term were decided against the environmentalists’ positions.
The defeats were especially painful in that all five decisions reversed lower court decisions in favor of the “greens.”
One decision which the court overturned -- "riverkeeper" -- was by Sotomayor (I blogged about that here), another concerned the Court's support for the navy's use of sonar (here), and in a third, the court decided a mining company could poison an Alaskan lake (here).

In the fourth case (described in some detail by O'Brien), the court ruled Shell was not responsible for paying for the cleanup of wastes it sold to another company even though it had known that the waste was not being properly disposed of (so much for "corporate citizenship"). In the fifth case, the high court ruled "that environmental groups lacked standing to challenge certain U.S. Forest Service regulations."

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