The environmentalist Left is freaking out over the end of Chevron deference, as though that legal doctrine was the only thing standing in between clean air and water and unmitigated pollution and filth. It is yet another illustration of the delusions of grandeur progressives have about government power to suggest that changing one legal doctrine that the Supreme Court has not even used since 2016 will suddenly plunge the country decades backwards on environmental standards.
It also gets the timeline wrong on how this stuff played out. To give one example, the last pollution-caused fire on the Cuyahoga River was in 1969. That’s 15 years before the Supreme Court decided Chevron v. NRDC.
There are many reasons the Cuyahoga River is cleaner today than it was in 1969. Some of them have to do with government regulations. But the biggest reasons are technological advances leading to more energy-efficient methods of production and the gradual shift from a predominantly manufacturing economy to a predominantly services economy. Those two factors have allowed the U.S. economy to continue to grow and provide a higher standard of living while polluting less.
U.S. per capita carbon emissions peaked in 1973, eleven years before Chevron. Total annual carbon emissions peaked in 2007. Per capita carbon emissions today are about the same as they were in 1937. That means the same amount of carbon emissions per person as at the end of the Great Depression allows us to live in then-unimaginable material abundance today. That’s great news.
It has nothing to do with the Chevron doctrine. The Chevron doctrine said that when statutory language is ambiguous in cases on administrative law, courts must defer to the agency’s interpretation of the statute. It was small businesses and individuals, often with cases that had nothing to do with the environment, who were pushed around by administrative agencies without being able to get relief from a federal judge. Now they will have a chance at relief because courts will be able to interpret the law, as the Constitution and the Administrative Procedure Act say they must.
That doesn’t threaten the environment. It just threatens arrogant government agencies.