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Now instead we will have judges deciding between industry paid experts and the regulators over every single regulation like how much poison it's acceptable to p

• ryathal 2y ago
  This is explicitly not what this ruling means. The Judicial branch will rule is an agency has the power to regulate a limit for X in the water. The limit would still be set by an agency.
• lolinder 2y ago
  And why not? They have background in interpreting the law and in listening to and evaluating expert testimony. Why is direct rule by short-lived experts appointed by an executive who cycles out the rules every four years better than rule by legislation and the interpretation thereof by judges as informed by experts?
  • newzisforsukas 2y ago
    Won't it lead to wildly different environmental laws in different states? One state can pump waste it considers safe into a river that is shared with another state who considers that waste harmful? Factories on borders of states can pollute the air in ways they do not agree upon, etc?
    • lolinder 2y ago
      In the short term maybe. The whole point is that Congress should actually write the laws they want implemented instead of writing the politically expedient extremely vague thing and just hoping we don't end up with the law changing every four years with the administration.
      • falcolas 2y ago
        So how do you get congress to write thousands of such laws yearly which will properly cover every potential outcome for decades? Our current congress barely passed 27 laws last year.
        • pdonis 2y ago
          > how do you get congress to write thousands of such laws yearly which will properly cover every potential outcome for decades? You don't. You force Congress to obey the Constitution, and if that means the scope of the law has to be drastically scaled back so that Congress can manage it the way the Constitution says it's supposed to, good. We have far too many nanny state laws anyway that do much more harm than good.
          • falcolas 2y ago
            This might work if we were still living in the 1700's, where companies were held in check by the communities they served. Today, they're happy to do the bare minimum required (required today, not in the world you're advocating for) to avoid poisoning the air, water, and their customers.
            • pdonis 2y ago
              Poisoning the air, water, and customers is bad for business. Companies who actually have to survive in a free market won't do it for that reason. The reason companies do nefarious things is government interference in markets, insulating companies from competition. And then the government tries to "fix" the problems it had itself caused by doing that with further regulations. Which still doesn't really work because of regulatory capture. If companies did nefarious things a lot less in the 1700s, it was because of the absence of government interference with free markets.
              • cyberax 2y ago
                > Poisoning the air, water, and customers is bad for business. Is it? What if your profitability depends on using a polluting substance, like PFAS, and not cleaning up after yourself? > Companies who actually have to survive in a free market won't do it for that reason. Bullshit. We have _many_ examples of the opposite. Remember the whole leaded gasoline hearing, for one. Or the resistance to lead and asbestos phaseout. Moreover, the "free market" _forces_ companies to do that. After all, suppose that you're a responsible company, and you spend money on installing expensive scrubbers for your wastewater to remove PFAS. Your less-responsible competitors will then outcompete you because their product is cheaper-priced. That's why you need laws that force _everyone_ to become equally less competitive by not poisoning people.
  • jorblumesea 2y ago
    Would you trust a doctor to execute on a large distributed systems project? If they had some advice from a Meta engineer? Background in one space does not translate at all. We absolutely do not want judges to be on the same level as experts in any field. They are not, and will never be, equivalent to people who are educated in a given space. People spend years and decades of their lives becoming experts in a given space, they cannot be replaced.
    • megaman821 2y ago
      Hear, hear. This is why we need to listen to education expert Betsy DeVos, she knows what's best for our education system. Let her set all the rules.
  • rtkwe 2y ago
    > They have background in interpreting the law and in listening to and evaluating expert testimony They don't have expertise in evaluating scientific studies or the fields those studies cover at all. At best they can decide who they believe more and there's an endless well of industry backed experts available to preach the company line. It's also far less predictable because the outcomes will be massively different depending on the judge involved. It'd be circuit split city if all the cases we're going to be filed in the 5th which is wildly pro business. > short-lived experts appointed by an executive who cycles out the rules every four years That's not what happens though, the rules are relatively stable and have legislatively required notice and comment periods where industry can challenge and prepare for coming rules. And once in place they generally remain the same because there's the same process for removing the rules as creating them. Congress also has the ultimate power over these as they can directly write new laws addressing over reaches as they find them.
    • curt15 2y ago
      The Supreme Court didn't need a background in programming to decide Google v Oracle. The lawyers arguing before the court weren't programmers either. But you can bet that they were briefed by people who could bridge programming and copyright law.
      • rtkwe 2y ago
        Oracle v Google was at it's heart just a copyright case with relatively simple facts far from the chore of evaluating if a scientific study has valid evidence for it's claims and conclusions when you've got a bank of experts on either side.
  • falcolas 2y ago
    What makes the judges - who are also frequently appointed by an executive and who often hold the position for life regardlesss of their performance - better? It's not as if judges are bound by expert testimony.
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  • cyberax 2y ago
    > They have background in interpreting the law and in listening to and evaluating expert testimony. Listen to one of the Flat Earth videos on Youtube. Flat Earthers have very persuasive arguments, and they can be very personable. Now imagine that the opposing side is a tongue-tied bureaucrat who is afraid of public speeches. In other words, exactly somebody who would want to work as an expert for a government agency. And imagine that it's not the Flat Earth that they're discussing, but a boring point about alpha-helixes in peptides, or PFAS in drinking water. How would it go? And we don't even have to imagine that. The infamous leaded gasoline hearing in 1925 went exactly like that.
• deleted 2y ago
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• _heimdall 2y ago
  Nothing stops Congress from included in law that the executive branch agency specifically has the authority required to define and enforce specific metrics. The problem Chevron crested was the situation where congress effectively just approves an agency with broad powers to protect the environment, and from there the EPA does basically whatever they want with little to no accountability. Neither extreme is ideal. What we should really have is congress passing laws that specify scope of authority and agencies that have been granted enough leeway to do the job effectively without having the power to effectively create law completely outside the balance of powers.
• beej71 2y ago
  They can't be bribed, luckily. They can only be given gifts in thanks for past decisions.