Letter: Companies have unfair impact on climate issues

The Supreme Court decided to limit the Environmental Protection Agency's authority to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from power plants, saying Congress should have this power. It was a 6-to-3 decision, with the six justices in the majority appointed by Republicans.

Corporations, including fossil fuel companies, make hundreds of millions of dollars of political contributions to elect sympathetic politicians. These politicians, along with the same big donors, support the nomination and confirmation of sympathetic judges, including Supreme Court justices.

Corporations spend millions more on advocacy groups that push their agendas before the politicians and judges they helped put in office. This is the first of many cases in the pipeline funded by these corporations and being brought by Republican attorneys general who are also corporate funded. Congress, with a sparse record of acting on climate change, has delegated this decision making to the EPA, which has the required expertise.

Despite the overwhelming consensus of climate scientists, including Exxon's own climate scientists and the clear increase in frequency and severity of disruptive climate events, federal action against climate change could be in limbo, helping only fossil fuel companies.

Ordinary people make no or small political contributions. Fossil fuel companies single mindedly focus on their profitability, even when it threatens our planet's habitability. They have a hugely outsized influence on elections and policy through unlimited contributions which were allowed by the Supreme Court's precedent-overturning 2010 Citizens United decision also decided by Republican appointees.

The United States is the only western nation whose mainstream conservative party is in denial about climate change. It is also the only such nation that permits unlimited political contributions, which is fully taken advantage of by the Koch group, which has a history of out-fundraising the Republican Party.

As Sen. Mark Hanna famously said in 1895, "There are two things that are important in politics. The first is money, and I can't remember what the second one is."

If we want decisions to be based on merit and a habitable planet, we must replace big money with public funding of elections.

Richard Barsanti

Western Springs