Statement from Rachel Rose Jackson, director of climate research and policy, at Corporate Accountability.
“Like the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling assailing reproductive rights, West Virginia v. EPA was many years in the making. For over half a century, polluting industries have known their business practices were changing the climate, yet they bankrolled politicians, parties, and the promulgation of legal doctrine to avoid accountability for their irreversible harms. The culmination of this industry campaign as underscored by today’s Supreme Court ruling is the dismantling of checks and balances on the polluting powerful instead of ensuring them. Unfortunately, front-line communities, public health and the planet don’t have time for the long-game, as polluting industries did in reshaping the Court and politics as we know it. This decision deals a devastating blow in realizing the rapid and just transition to renewable energy now needed to prevent the worsening of the droughts, wildfires, floods, famine, dislocation, and other challenges we now face. Let this be a call to action not only to elect those who know corporations should be accountable to people, not the other way around…but to hold Big Polluters entirely and increasingly liable for their corruption of our democracy and our most basic rights.”
