Category Archives: alternative energy

Merrick Garland Was Accused of Protecting a Judge Charged With Ethics Violations

by MindyDortch906 Posted on March 21, 2016

Mother Jones

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President Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee, DC Circuit Court of Appeals Chief Judge Merrick Garland, is widely respected by members of both parties. His judicial background is largely devoid of controversy over hot-button issues such as abortion or gay marriage. But two years ago, he angered civil rights groups, death penalty lawyers, and other legal observers who accused him and his colleagues on the DC Circuit of protecting a fellow judge accused of serious ethical lapses.

The episode dates back to 2014, when Garland was in charge of ruling on an ethics complaint against Texas Judge Edith Jones of the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals.

A Reagan appointee, Jones is an archconservative darling of the right-wing Federalist Society and a favorite of presidential candidate Ted Cruz, who has pointed to her as the kind of Supreme Court justice he’d nominate. In 2006, the Texas Observer dubbed her one of the “worst judges in Texas,” in part because of her decision to uphold the death sentence for a man whose lawyer slept through the entire trial. She has been especially hostile to sexual harassment claims, once dismissing such lawsuits in a Federalist Society speech as “petty interoffice disputes.” In one case, a woman provided graphic testimony about the severe sexual harassment and abuse she’d suffered at work, saying that a male co-worker had pinched her butt with a pair of pliers and another had pinched her breast. Jones replied to the latter charge, “Well, he apologized.”

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Merrick Garland Was Accused of Protecting a Judge Charged With Ethics Violations

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Gallup Finds Concerns Rising Over Global Warming and Nuclear Energy Solution

by Myrna Posted on March 19, 2016

While some see a tipping point in a sudden surge in worry about global warming, a long steady background rise in concern may be a better metric. More –  Gallup Finds Concerns Rising Over Global Warming and Nuclear Energy Solution ; ; ;

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Gallup Finds Concerns Rising Over Global Warming and Nuclear Energy Solution

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The Head of Jeb’s Super PAC Is Tired of the Endless Conservative Con

by SherryKifarsy Posted on March 19, 2016

Mother Jones

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Mike Murphy is a longtime Jeb Bush friend and loyalist, and he’s also the guy who ran Right to Rise, the Super PAC that blew through $100 million in an epically futile effort to sell Bush to the masses. So it’s understandable that he might be a little bitter about the success of Donald Trump, who almost single-handedly destroyed Bush.

Keep that in mind when you read Matt Labash’s long debriefing of Murphy as he was cleaning up the last remnants of the Right to Rise offices a month ago. At the same time, Murphy is neither a rookie nor a naif, and that gives him a deep perspective on what’s changed over the years in the conservative movement. He acknowledges that Republican voters have grown angrier over the past decade, but he blames a lot of this on Republicans themselves, aided and abetted by a press that barely understands politics anymore and is eager to jack up its ratings by scaring the hell out of people:

He says a lot of the anger is springing from people’s fears and hard realities — the middle class not getting a raise in a decade. Generally pessimistic older white voters see the demographic shifts and don’t like it. The media are incessantly “sticking red-hot thermometers in lukewarm water and saying, ‘Wow, that water’s pretty hot!’ “

….Still, Murphy adds, the problem with our current antiestablishment climate isn’t that people aren’t correctly identifying problems. It’s that the problem-solvers they’re turning to are bigger snake-oil hustlers than the ones they’re turning away from….Let’s think through Trump, Murphy says. “He doesn’t understand the presidency. You don’t call up the head of Mexico and say, ‘Hey, I’m going to build a fabulous wall with first-class gold toilets and you’re gonna pay for it.’…He has no understanding of presidential powers. He has no understanding of Congress. It’s like putting a chimp in the driver’s seat of a tractor.”

….”Then the problem becomes how are we the world’s reserve currency anymore? We get away with a lot of shit because people think we have a stable system….We borrow a lot of f — ing money. Because people think the number one safest instrument in the world is the U.S. Treasury bond. And if we start making reality-show clowns in charge? Run on the American bank. You think the pissed-off steelworker in Akron has trouble now? Wait until we have a financial collapse and they take 25 percent off the dollar. He’ll be serving hot dogs in an American restaurant in China.”

….Murphy starts waxing philosophic….Everything is so postmodern and meta that “nothing means anything, because everything is what the scam is….So many simpleton reporters — whose depth of knowledge extends to whatever they read in the Real Clear Politics polls average that morning. Fly-by-night pollsters feeding the media, which is creating news so that they can report on it.

….I suggest to Murphy that many of these things he’s decrying have been the tricks of his trade. He’s like a magician denouncing the false-bottomed top hat. “I don’t mind technique,” he says. “I can be shameless. I have a long career at this. But when everything is a short con, then there’s never another short con. Because you need trust, and you’ve destroyed it.“….

….The cable-news business establishment who are, whatever they insist, for Trump, since Trump equals ratings….But just as notable, he points out, is the antiestablishment establishment….”Like, Antiestablishment Inc.,” Murphy says. “You can find them at 123 Establishment Lane, Des Moines, Iowa. Often, they’re involved with the postage meter or credit card machine somewhere for small-dollar donations.“

….Take, for instance, he says, the Tea Party — “a racket, though it’s supposed to be a nonracket,” full of faux four-star generals who say, ” ‘You’ve got to pay me because . . . I represent the Nebraska sub-Army 14 of the Tea Party.’ “…Murphy concedes there are lots of voters who “subscribe to a loose set of principles that D.C.’s broken. They’re tired of the establishment. Tired of people in the racket.” But there’s a racket of people sending them letters asking for money. “The poor old lady sends her $25 to defeat Nancy Pelosi, and $22 of it goes to ‘fundraising costs.’ “

Rick Perlstein in particular has written a lot about how the modern conservative movement has largely turned into a machine for swindling people—especially the elderly. There’s Glenn Beck pitching gold as a hedge against nonexistent hyperinflation. Fred Thompson hawking reverse mortgages. The acolytes of direct-mail pioneer Richard Viguerie setting up operations that scare the bejeesus out of old people but use most of the money they raise to pay themselves and their consultants. The talk radio hosts who repeatedly insinuate that Hillary Clinton murdered Vince Foster—and then quickly break for a commercial. Mike Huckabee peddling diabetes cures and Ben Carson praising the glories of glyconutrients to their evangelical fans. The endless production of simpleminded right-wing books as a handy income stream, some of them with more than the usual whiff of corruption.

Even some conservatives have finally started to recognize that the short con—which is elderly enough that it’s become a long con—is hurting the conservative cause. Mike Murphy is apparently one of them, and he considers the rise of Donald Trump little more than just desserts for a party that’s either tolerated or actively encouraged this behavior for decades. In the end, Trump took a look at the conservative movement and decided that they were amateurs. The big con needs more than talk radio or direct mail or scary ads. It needs national TV provided willingly and often—and Trump knew exactly how that game worked. He’s not running his con any differently than conservatives always have. He just knows how to pull it off way better than they do.

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The Head of Jeb’s Super PAC Is Tired of the Endless Conservative Con

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These Right-Wing Groups Are Gearing Up for an Onslaught on Obama’s Supreme Court Nominee

by Donnie6686 Posted on March 19, 2016

Mother Jones

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On Wednesday, President Barack Obama picked Merrick Garland, a federal court of appeals judge with a stellar and moderate reputation, to replace the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. His strategy was obvious: present obstructionist Republicans with a nominee with little or no baggage. But Senate Republicans immediately signaled that the Garland nomination would not change their calculations—that the fight to block any nominee was on. And prior to Obama’s announcement, conservative groups were already gearing up for this crusade, perhaps the last big battle of the right’s war on Obama.

The political players leading this effort are the usual suspects. The Republican National Committee had already announced plans to oppose Obama’s nominee—whoever it might be—and to run ads in competitive Senate races in Colorado, Ohio, Florida, New Hampshire and elsewhere, in addition to targeting Democratic members of the Senate Judiciary Committee. The tea party group FreedomWorks is rallying grassroots voters to the cause. On the other side of political spectrum, liberal advocacy groups such as the Alliance for Justice and People for the American Way are girding for a massive fight.

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These Right-Wing Groups Are Gearing Up for an Onslaught on Obama’s Supreme Court Nominee

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The Enchanting Solo Flight of Singer Aoife O’Donovan

by Mariano8587 Posted on March 19, 2016

Mother Jones

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Jacob Blickenstaff

At 33, singer-songwriter Aoife O’Donovan already boasts a distinguished music career that stretches back 15 years. As a teenager attending the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, her hometown, O’Donovan helped assemble the innovative bluegrass ensemble Crooked Still, which would release four albums between 2005 and 2010. Her warm, earthy voice and musical versatility have made her a go-to collaborator, appearing on 2011’s “The Goat Rodeo Sessions” with high-strata talents such as cellist Yo-Yo Ma, mandolinist Chris Thile (of Punch Brothers fame), bassist Edgar Meyer, and bluegrass multi-instrumentalist Stuart Duncan. O’Donovan (whose first name is pronounced “eee-fah”) also recently recorded and toured with Sarah Jarosz and Nickel Creek’s Sara Watkins as part of the Americana power trio I’m With Her.

This year marked the release of her second solo album, In the Magic Hour—a follow-up to 2013’s Fossils—which moves into more experimental territory. (Both albums were produced by Tucker Martine, whose credits include The Decemberists, My Morning Jacket and Neko Case.) On her latest, O’Donovan surrounds herself with, but is never overshadowed by, a cast of talented collaborators as she forges an intimate path through nostalgia and memory, meditating on death, rebirth, and our magical relationship with nature and the universe.

Mother Jones: What kinds of adjustments are necessary when you go from being part of a group to making music as a solo artist?

Aoife O’Donovan: It’s really nice to have both outlets. I started this record at the end of 2014, when I was still touring with I’m With Her. Having the solace from the band while working on your solo stuff was helpful. I could hunker down by myself and listen closely to mixes, but then to be able to have a sounding board of peers to get advice and feedback. Performing alone—it’s a very solitary experience. When you’re in a band, when something amazing happens on stage you can look at each other, “Yeah! we’re so locked in.” Or if something goes wrong, you can look at each other and shrug and say, “Oops.” If you’re doing it by yourself, you reflect on it in a completely different way. You might not be riding high on a great show for as long because you didn’t have people to share the joy with. Same if you had a bad show, it just rolls off you more easily.

MJ: Lots of your past collaborators have guest roles on this record, and yet you manage to maintain a consistency of message.

AO: I think the consistency comes from the parts. There’s the thread of Eyvind Kang’s viola weaving in and out, and Chris’ mandolin lines on a couple songs. The strings appear on the later half of the album, so it all weaves together and creates a circle. This was such a different process than my first record, which also had many of my close friends on it. The songs came from a more solitary place and I hadn’t played them with many people before recording. So I just added the layers of people who are in my life, and built up the songs with Tucker, who brought in his people to help me make a finished product that I think is greater than the sum of its parts.

MJ: Did you have certain themes in mind before going into the studio?

AO: They presented themselves throughout the process. I had this collection of songs, some of which didn’t make it onto the record, but this was a meditation on solitude and life and death and nostalgia and on looking back to your childhood. I just finished a tour in the UK. At two separate shows, when I sang the line from Magic Hour—”Songs about Old Ireland/songs about being young again/I wish I was young again”—twice people cried. I saw them. That is the whole point of the record: crying, not out of sadness for your loss of youth, but the moment of nostalgia for when we were all kids. And then how the album ends with “Jupiter,” where we all get old and we all die, it’s just what happens.

MJ: “Jupiter” is quite a shift from the intimate perspective of the rest of the album: Zoom! Suddenly we’re floating out in the solar system. How does that song relate?

AO: It comes out of left field in that way. The lyrics make it a post-apocalyptic love song from me to somebody else. It’s what I would say at the end of my life: The world is ending and I’ll be at your side until we’re planets. It’s very cosmic and maybe a little silly, but it is a universal theme of The End. In the first song on the album, “Stanley Park,” there’s a lyric, “See that baby at her mother’s breast/if I could I’d take my rest/back in the belly from where I came.” It all starts over again. The album is partially inspired by my grandfather dying. But within a week of his death, two great-grandchildren were born, so it does start over.

MJ: Did you have a deep connection to him?

AO: It’s more like a deep connection to family than to him specifically. My relationship to all my family in Ireland is more to family as a whole. It wasn’t that we had a very specific one-on-one relationship. He had 27 grandchildren! It was more that he was this figure, and we were all kids running around.

MJ: So, there’s this recurring theme on the album of human to animal transformation, especially birds.

AO: I don’t think I realized it was so prevalent until the record came out. I’ve always been fascinated by flight and the freeness of birds. On the record, as we talk about the life cycle, the cosmos, etc., the idea of coming back as something else fits in with that. I love the idea of birds having human qualities. It’s hard to even get close enough to a bird to imagine that they are having any human thought. But I think all humans want to be birds so we can fly.

MJ: How did Tucker Martine shape this project?

AO: He was hugely instrumental in assembling the musicians and helping me realize what kind of sonic landscape I was trying to create. A lot of the songs were not fully formed. Some weren’t even fully written. So bringing in the bass and drums—Steve Nistor plays drums on everything, and there are two different bass players, Sam Howard who lives in Portland, and Nate Query from the Decemberists—and getting the basic stuff down. Tucker got Tim Young to come up from LA to play guitar, he got Eyvind Kang to play viola, plus Rob Burger on keys. It’s a very cool assembly of people.

MJ: You’re from a background of traditional and acoustic music. How open were you to the rock-oriented and experimental elements that made it onto the album?

AO: Very open. My listening tastes have always included artists like Joanna Newsome or, when I was younger, Suzanne Vega or the Story or Downtown New York jazz like Peter Epstein Quartet—stuff that’s more than just fiddles and banjos.

MJ: You seem so busy with your various groups and solo projects. Where do you encounter this solitude you refer to, and is there an element of loneliness in it?

AO: It’s not as much loneliness as the experience being on the road by yourself for so many hours a day. You wake up in your hotel room, go for a run, have your coffee, eat lunch alone, sit in your car by yourself, you might stop for a scenic view alone. You show up at the gig at five o’clock, and you go out on stage and you’re still alone, even though there’s people out there and you’re having this kind of conversation. It’s a very different head space to get in, and one that I’d never really experienced being from a big family and growing up in a big community and coming up in a band and not ever going on the road totally alone. It really taught me to be comfortable being alone. Even when I’m not on the road, it’s given me a reason to carve out that time. Some people never get to.

MJ: Tell me about the lyric “weighed down with family photographs and relics” from your song “Not the Leaving.” Is there a dark side to your nostalgia?

AO: That song is what I’d imagine to be a love letter my grandfather would write to my grandmother, even though they wouldn’t have used language anything like that. I’m imagining where the song takes place, Inchydoney Beach in West Cork, Ireland. It’s an image I had of walking straight out to sea holding all of your belongings, draped with photos all around your neck, and not so much going under as walking toward the other side. It’s a weird image, but I’ve always wanted to be thrown into the ocean when I die—to be rowed out to sea and thrown overboard into the Atlantic.

MJ: There are a lot of proclamations about your own death on this album.

AO: I know! I really am planning on living to be 100. People ask, “Why are you so depressed?” I’m actually a very happy person. It’s not a morbid thing, but I think I’ve never been afraid of death, which is maybe why I love writing about it. It feels like the beautiful unknown, and I feel like there is all this magic in the world. It’s not that I literally believe in magic or spirits. In my logical life I absolutely don’t believe in any kind of mumbo jumbo. But I do have this belief in the greater magic of the universe. Maybe when I die and I’m thrown overboard, I’ll turn into a mermaid.

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The Enchanting Solo Flight of Singer Aoife O’Donovan

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It’s True: Smart People Would Prefer You Went Away

by glasulmaramuresuluianunturi Posted on March 19, 2016

Mother Jones

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Most people are happier when they have a lot of social contact. But Christopher Ingraham points to a new paper suggesting an exception to this general rule: smart people, true to stereotype, prefer being left alone. But why?

I posed this question to Carol Graham, a Brookings Institution researcher who studies the economics of happiness. “The findings in here suggest (and it is no surprise) that those with more intelligence and the capacity to use it … are less likely to spend so much time socializing because they are focused on some other longer term objective,” she said.

Think of the really smart people you know. They may include a doctor trying to cure cancer or a writer working on the great American novel or a human rights lawyer working to protect the most vulnerable people in society. To the extent that frequent social interaction detracts from the pursuit of these goals, it may negatively affect their overall satisfaction with life.

To put this a little less nicely, average folks don’t really have anything very interesting or enthralling to do with themselves, so getting interrupted by friends represents a net improvement in their daily lives. Smart people do have enthralling—even obsessive—intellectual interests, and social activities take them away from that. So this represents a net loss in happiness.

(Important note for smart, argumentative people reading this: we’re talking about averages here. There are plenty of extroverted smart people and introverted dumb people. But on average, smart people tend to dislike socializing because it takes them away from work they find more rewarding.)

But back to the paper. The authors, Satoshi Kanazawa and Norman Li, have a different theory about all this: the measured difference in social preferences is all due to the way we evolved way back on the savanna. Back then, they say, you had a much better chance of surviving if you had lots of friends, so we naturally evolved to value having lots of friends. Things have changed since then—cell phones, computers, cities, houses, etc.—and even though evolution hasn’t yet had a chance to adapt to a world where social contact isn’t as important, “extremely intelligent” people can use their sheer brainpower to adapt anyway:

“More intelligent individuals, who possess higher levels of general intelligence and thus greater ability to solve evolutionarily novel problems, may face less difficulty in comprehending and dealing with evolutionarily novel entities and situations,” they write….Smarter people may be better-equipped to jettison that whole hunter-gatherer social network — especially if they’re pursuing some loftier ambition.

This odd thing is that this isn’t really an application of evolutionary psychology, even though the authors are evolutionary psychologists. The hypothesis that humans evolved in hierarchical, medium-sized groups that relied on tight social networks for survival is pretty widely accepted. It’s nothing new. What’s new is the suggestion that smart people can overcome the constraints of cognitive evolution more easily than most people. And that’s not really evolutionary psychology. It’s just regular old psychology, or perhaps regular old neuroscience. It’s pretty likely that this has always been true of smart people, but we just don’t know it. Our social science datasets are shockingly inadequate for dates before 20,000 BCE.

Now, I don’t have access to the paper itself, and it’s possible that the authors address this. The abstract doesn’t give any hint of it, though. For the time being, then, I’ll take this as a fairly banal observation: people with intense intellectual interests value them more highly than social contact, and almost by definition, it’s mostly smart people who have intense intellectual interests. As a refugee from the tech world who dealt with a lot of programmers, and as a blogger who gets annoyed at being interrupted in the middle of writing a post, color me unsurprised.

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It’s True: Smart People Would Prefer You Went Away

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Quote of the Day: Since When Is a Sex Tape Not Newsworthy?

by AudryN6748784 Posted on March 19, 2016

Mother Jones

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From Samantha Barbas, a law professor at the University at Buffalo, commenting on the $115 million verdict Hulk Hogan won against Gawker in an invasion-of-privacy case:

For a jury to say that…a celebrity sex tape is not newsworthy, represents a real shift in American free press law.

Ain’t that the truth? It’s hard to believe that a red-blooded American jury concluded that sex tapes aren’t a vital part of our media ecosystem. Maybe our nation really is going down the drain after seven years of Obummer’s leadership.

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Quote of the Day: Since When Is a Sex Tape Not Newsworthy?

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What’s the Deal With Donald Trump’s Mustache?

by whatisthebestcctvdvrsoftware Posted on March 19, 2016

Mother Jones

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The last couple of weeks have been pretty hard on Donald Trump, and he’s showing the strain by turning up the insult meter to 11. His favorite quarry, of course, is Megyn Kelly:

Crazy @megynkelly supposedly had lyin’ Ted Cruz on her show last night. Ted is desperate and his lying is getting worse. Ted can’t win!
Crazy @megynkelly is now complaining that @oreillyfactor did not defend her against me – yet her bad show is a total hit piece on me. Tough!
Highly overrated & crazy @megynkelly is always complaining about Trump and yet she devotes her shows to me. Focus on others Megyn!
Everybody should boycott the @megynkelly show. Never worth watching. Always a hit on Trump! She is sick, & the most overrated person on tv.

Plus there’s been all this in just the past couple of days:

$35M of negative ads against me in Florida…. Stuart Stevens, the failed campaign manager of Mitt Romney’s historic loss…. lyin’ Ted Cruz has lost so much of the evangelical vote…. @WSJ is bad at math….Who should star in a reboot of Liar Liar- Hillary Clinton or Ted Cruz?…. Lyin’ Ted Cruz lost all five races on Tuesday.

@EWErickson got fired like a dog from RedState…. millions of dollars of negative and phony ads against me by the establishment…. Club For Growth tried to extort $1,000,000 from me…. Lyin’ Ted Cruz should not be allowed to win in Utah – Mormons don’t like LIARS!…. Mitt Romney is a mixed up man who doesn’t have a clue.

I’ll grant that Trump has a point about the Wall Street Journal. Their editorial page really is bad at math. The rest is just a sustained whinefest from a guy who judges everyone in the world by the standard of how sycophantic they are toward Donald Trump. His preoccupation with Megyn Kelly prompted this from the normally mild-mannered Bret Baier:

Fox favorite Geraldo Rivera, no shrinking violet, said Trump’s obsession with Kelly “is almost bordering on the unhealthy.” Almost? Fox News itself followed up with a barrage of anti-Trump tweets and this statement on Facebook:

Donald Trump’s vitriolic attacks against Megyn Kelly and his extreme, sick obsession with her is beneath the dignity of a presidential candidate who wants to occupy the highest office in the land….As the mother of three young children, with a successful law career and the second highest rated show in cable news, it’s especially deplorable for her to be repeatedly abused just for doing her job.

So there you have it. It’s Fox vs. Trump yet again. So far, I don’t think Fox has won any of these street fights, but maybe they’re due. I guess it depends on whether they keep it up, or lamely make amends the way they usually do.

Finally, in other Trump news, this is from an interview he did a couple of days ago. What’s with the mustache?

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What’s the Deal With Donald Trump’s Mustache?

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Mitt Romney Announces He’s Voting for Ted Cruz

by AnnettOlmstead Posted on March 18, 2016

Mother Jones

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After condemning Donald Trump in a speech earlier this month, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney took an all-of-the-above approach to stopping the Republican front-runner from picking up the 1,237 delegates needed to secure the nomination. He campaigned for John Kasich in Ohio last week and offered to do the same for Sen. Marco Rubio in Florida.

But although Kasich did win his home state, Romney is now jumping ship. On Friday, ahead of the potentially winner-take-all Utah caucuses, the favorite son is going all-in for Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas.

In a statement on his Facebook page, Romney, the party’s 2012 presidential nominee, announced he would be supporting Cruz not just in Utah, but in all future contests as well. Lest there be any confusion, Romney offered praise for Kasich but indicated the time had come to pick just one candidate to stop Trump. Here’s the statement:

This week, in the Utah nominating caucus, I will vote for Senator Ted Cruz.

Today, there is a contest between Trumpism and Republicanism. Through the calculated statements of its leader, Trumpism has become associated with racism, misogyny, bigotry, xenophobia, vulgarity and, most recently, threats and violence. I am repulsed by each and every one of these.

The only path that remains to nominate a Republican rather than Mr. Trump is to have an open convention. At this stage, the only way we can reach an open convention is for Senator Cruz to be successful in as many of the remaining nominating elections as possible.

I like Governor John Kasich. I have campaigned with him. He has a solid record as governor. I would have voted for him in Ohio. But a vote for Governor Kasich in future contests makes it extremely likely that Trumpism would prevail.

I will vote for Senator Cruz and I encourage others to do so as well, so that we can have an open convention and nominate a Republican.

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Mitt Romney Announces He’s Voting for Ted Cruz

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This Is the Real Reason the GOP Should Worry About Merrick Garland

by JoleneHogg Posted on March 18, 2016

Mother Jones

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Merrick Garland has spent the last decade in the weeds of some of the most contentious clean-air cases in history—and he’s consistently come out on the side of the environment and against big polluters.

Garland, the DC Circuit Court chief judge who is President Barack Obama’s pick to replace Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court, faces a steep climb to confirmation in the face of fierce opposition from Senate Republicans.

But if Garland makes it to the Supreme Court, the battle over Obama’s flagship climate regulations will likely be one of his first big cases. That policy, known as the Clean Power Plan, aims to slash the nation’s carbon footprint by restricting greenhouse gas emissions from power plants. The Environmental Protection Agency built the plan on a provision of the Clean Air Act that allows it to set emissions standards for existing “stationary” sources (i.e., power plants, rather than, say, cars) and then leave it up to each state to choose how to reach that standard. The rule was immediately challenged by two dozen coal-reliant states, which have argued that it oversteps EPA’s legal authority because it applies to the whole electricity system rather than to individual power plants. Shortly before Scalia’s death, the Supreme Court voted 5-to-4 to put the plan on hold while Garland’s current colleagues in the DC Circuit Court weigh its legality.

The climate regulations will likely wind up in front of SCOTUS sometime next year. So, Garland’s record on cases involving the Clean Air Act—which many legal experts see as the world’s single most powerful piece of environmental law—is a helpful guide for how he might rule. Garland once described the Clean Air Act as “this nation’s primary means of protecting the safety of the air breathed by hundreds of millions of people.”

Garland brings a very different perspective to the bench than Scalia, says Pat Parenteau, a former director of Vermont Law School’s Environmental Law Center. Whereas Scalia was famous for his strict, literalist interpretation of the law, Parenteau says Garland tends to focus on the real-world outcome of his cases, an approach that could make him more likely to accept the administration’s Clean Power Plan arguments.

“In a close case, with Garland on the bench, the Clean Power Plan’s chances of winning go way up,” he said.

A review of two of Garland’s recent Clean Air Act rulings sheds some additional light:

White Stallion Energy Center v. EPA: In 1990, Congress amended the Clean Air Act to require that the Environmental Protection Agency research how to cut down on mercury and other toxic air pollutants spewing out of coal- and oil-fired power plants. After more than a decade of false starts, the EPA finally issued a mercury rule in 2012 and was hit with a suit from industry groups charging that the agency hadn’t considered how much mercury controls on power plants would cost. The lead plaintiff, White Stallion, was a proposed coal-fired power plant in Texas that was ultimately canceled but whose name remained on the suit.

Garland joined the majority opinion, in April 2014, upholding the mercury rule. The majority found that, for one thing, the EPA did consider the costs ($9.6 billion per year, by EPA’s estimate, in return for $37-90 billion per year in public health benefits). Regardless, the majority found that the cost to industry was never meant to be a deciding factor when EPA writes air pollution regulations:

For EPA to focus its “appropriate and necessary” determination on factors relating to public health hazards, and not industry’s objections that emissions controls are costly, properly puts the horse before the cart, and not the other way around as petitioners and our dissenting colleague urge.

As Ann Carlson, an environmental law scholar at UCLA, wrote in a recent blog post, the White Stallion case illustrates that Garland shows “significant deference to EPA both in its interpretation of ambiguous language in the Clean Air Act and in its technical determinations about how to craft regulations.” In other words, Garland is inclined to trust that the EPA’s experts know what they’re doing.

Later, Garland stood by the mercury rule a second time. Following the DC Circuit Court decision, the legal battle continued to the Supreme Court, which ultimately sent the rule back to the EPA with instructions to recalibrate the agency’s cost calculations. The rule is still stuck at that stage today, but Garland ruled that in the meantime, the rule should stand—essentially the opposite of how SCOTUS treated the Clean Power Plan.

The rule “wasn’t jettisoned during the bouncing back and forth,” said Pat Gallagher, director the environmental law program at the Sierra Club. “This is the pragmatic sensibility of Garland. He isn’t bringing ideology to the table. He’s not on the war path to show that the EPA is usurping powers.”

American Corn Growers Association v. EPA: In this case, Garland was the lone dissenter when the court threw out regulations from the EPA meant to reduce haze in national parks. This case in particular is a useful proxy for the Clean Power Plan because both regulations follow the same model (the EPA sets a standard and lets states decide how to implement it). In both cases, industry groups objected to how the EPA categorized polluters. In the haze case, Garland once again sided with the EPA.

Garland’s dissenting opinion also showed that he is more interested in helping the executive branch enforce the laws created by Congress than in searching out hair-splitting details that can be used to tie the administration’s hands, Parenteau said: “Garland is going to try to interpret a statute to be consistent with the purposes of the statue.” In other words, like in the White Stallion case, he generally trusts that EPA knows the best way to achieve the ends of the Clean Air Act. And he’s disinclined to second-guess the agency’s methods as long as they seem to accomplish what Congress intended.

“In the Clean Air Act, Congress declared a national goal of restoring natural visibility in the country’s largest national parks and wilderness areas,” Garland wrote. Overturning the haze regulation “will prevent the achievement of Congress’ goal.”

That doesn’t mean he automatically caves to the EPA; in fact, Garland has a record of ruling against the agency when he thinks it hasn’t done enough to enforce the law. In American Farm Bureau Federation v. EPA, he ruled that the agency hadn’t gone as far as the Clean Air Act requires to regulate airborne particulate matter. And in Sierra Club v. EPA, he found that the EPA had tried to let states circumvent the agency’s own regulations on ozone.

“Garland defers to the agency scientists as long as the reasoning looks sound,” Gallagher said. But, “if they are hiding the ball, he will dig in and ferret that out.”

That adds up to good news for the Clean Power Plan.

“It’s not a slam dunk, because EPA is using a provision that wasn’t designed to confront climate change,” Parenteau said. But the Clean Power Plan “is the most carefully crafted and supported plan I think EPA has ever produced. Garland might change the very dynamic of the situation.”

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This Is the Real Reason the GOP Should Worry About Merrick Garland

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