“The stakes here are high,” Justice Elena Kagan claimed in her dissent from the Supreme Court’s climate-related ruling last week. But the stakes aren’t high. They are the opposite of high unless you imagined the court had interrupted a concerted international effort to do something about CO2 emissions.
The Environmental Protection Agency, whose plan was scuttled last week, was never going to affect the climate with its scheme to usher a few more coal plants into retirement. President Biden and his climate czar John Kerry have said as much: Nothing the U.S. government does, both have acknowledged, matters if China and others don’t reduce their rapidly growing CO2 releases.
