Your personal opinion is the Constitution?

Towards the end of last year, we watched The Daily Show's Trevor Noah interviewing Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor.  It was a delight to watch her and listen to her.  

Among many things, Sotomayor talked about the Court and the landmark Roe V. Wade decision, which made abortion legal in the US.

When Sotomayor said that the court's decision was not a narrow majority but a 7-2 split, I was shocked.  I had no idea; I had always assumed it was a close 5-4 or a 6-3 decision.  But, 7-2?

Sotomayor then said something else that made a deep impact.  She said that while we might get all charged and upset about a decision that doesn't go our way, or celebrate when it is a win for us, it would do us all good if we read the opinions.

Now, of course, Sotomayor is a unique justice in that we the public are her audience when she writes her opinions.  She writes in a way that anybody with average intelligence can understand her opinion and the logic behind it.  I have been a huge fan of hers, and she would become the Chief Justice in my alternate universe:

#SCOTUS no longer a #Roberts court.
It is a #Thomas court.
If Roberts really cares about the legitimacy of the institution and how history will record him, he would resign in 2021#Biden then elevates #Sotomayor and adds a replacement.https://t.co/UPFL5GiWiQ #Barrett

— Sriram K (@congoboy) October 27, 2020

The recent leak of the draft opinion of the majority of the Supreme Court, which is on the verge of tossing out the Roe V. Wade decision, confirms my suspicion that the Court is now firmly in the hands of Thomas, his allies, and his wife.

I decided to take up Sotomayor's directive to read the Court's decision in 1973 that made Roe V. Wade a phrase with which we have become familiar.

Right in the beginning, the 1973 decision notes:

We forthwith acknowledge our awareness of the sensitive and emotional nature of the abortion controversy, of the vigorous opposing views, even among physicians, and of the deep and seemingly absolute convictions that the subject inspires. One's philosophy, one's experiences, one's exposure to the raw edges of human existence, one's religious training, one's attitudes toward life and family and their values, and the moral standards one establishes and seeks to observe, are all likely to influence and to color one's thinking and conclusions about abortion.

In addition, population growth, pollution, poverty, and racial overtones tend to complicate and not to simplify the problem.

Those sentences are true today too.  It is foolish to pretend otherwise, which is why I, like many, practically laughed when Justice Roberts said at his nomination hearings that his job was merely to call balls and strikes like a baseball umpire would:

Judges are like umpires. Umpires don’t make the rules, they apply them. The role of an umpire and a judge is critical.  They make sure everybody plays by the rules, but it is a limited role.  Nobody ever went to a ball game to see the umpire.

On matters that reach the Court, "One's philosophy, one's experiences, one's exposure to the raw edges of human existence, one's religious training, one's attitudes toward life and family and their values, and the moral standards one establishes and seeks to observe, are all likely to influence and to color one's thinking and conclusions" to quote from the Roe V. Wade decision.

Much later in the opinion, the Court notes:

Texas urges that, apart from the Fourteenth Amendment, life begins at conception and is present throughout pregnancy, and that, therefore, the State has a compelling interest in protecting that life from and after conception. We need not resolve the difficult question of when life begins. When those trained in the respective disciplines of medicine, philosophy, and theology are unable to arrive at any consensus, the judiciary, at this point in the development of man's knowledge, is not in a position to speculate as to the answer. 

It should be sufficient to note briefly the wide divergence of thinking on this most sensitive and difficult question.

Almost 50 years later, we are back to arguing the same set of issues!

Don't you agree with the 1973 opinion that "One's philosophy, one's experiences, one's exposure to the raw edges of human existence, one's religious training, one's attitudes toward life and family and their values, and the moral standards one establishes and seeks to observe, are all likely to influence and to color one's thinking and conclusions"?

Unearthing the future

The evidence of lignite mining in Neyveli was visible to us if we stepped outside our compound.  From the gate, towards the far end of the road, we could see a small brown sandy hill, which was the overburden from the mines. Years later, the mining area expanded.

What if the lignite hadn't been mined?

The answer to that question is pretty simply that without the mines, there wouldn't have been a thermal power station.  The electricity generated at Neyveli was (and is the case today too?) critical for the state's economic activities.

Mining permanently transforms the terrain and the entire ecosystem.  But, without the essential mining like at Neyveli, there is no economic progress either.

Such a tension between nature and economics is played out all over the world.  As students learn in ECON 101, there's no free lunch.  Something gotta give.

We face those tradeoffs when it comes to "green" energy options too.  In the race to power the world without fossil fuels, we have come to realize the importance of a lightweight: Lithium.

The International Energy Agency named lithium as the mineral for which there was the fastest growing demand as the world transitions from oil and gas to a green energy grid. If the world is to meet the global climate targets set as part of the Paris Agreement, at least 40 times as much lithium will be needed by 2040 compared with today.

We need lithium.  We need lots of it.  We need it now.

Lithium has to be mined.  And, mining has problems.  The problem has reached my neighborhood, to so speak.  There is plenty of lithium in a vast area near the Oregon-Nevada border, in the McDermitt Caldera.

Source

In addition to the impacts on the environment, the mining activity will happen on ancestral lands of Native American tribes.  It will be a vast open-pit mining operation, similar to lignite mining in Neyveli.

The 18,000-acre Thacker Pass mine would reach into ancestral lands of the Fort McDermitt Paiute and Shoshone Tribes, the Burns Paiute Tribe, Reno Sparks Indian Colony and the Shoshone-Paiute Tribes of Duck Valley Indian Reservation.

Several of the tribes, along with environmental groups and others, say the mine would wreck their land, resources and culture, depleting or poisoning water supplies, destroying sacred sites, degrading wildlife habitat and leaving behind hazardous waste.

“They will never ever be able to repair this area. It will never look the same. It will never be reclaimed. It has irreparable harm,” [Daranda] Hinkey said. “What we see here is destruction of the lands, contamination of the water and complete cultural genocide to the Indigenous people here.”

To recap, on the one hand, we have a rapidly growing demand for lithium, which is needed for the transition away from fossil fuels that is screwing up the global climate.  On the other hand, ... Estimates are that about 79% of lithium that can be mined in the US are within 35 miles of Native American reservations. 

So, how would you resolve this tension?

Meanwhile, lithium is not the only metal that we will need in plenty in order to go forward into a renewable energy future.  Recall this issue about cobalt, which is one hell of an expensive item in the lithium-ion battery?

The root problem will be obvious to anybody who thinks through all these.  The root problem is our consumption.  We want nice homes, climate controlled indoors, good food, great entertainment, fabulous clothes, travel to see the world, and more.  Of course, I am no exception; I want them all!  But, this collective consumption, for which there is no seeming end, means that we cannot ever get away from the difficult tradeoffs that we need to make.  Remember, there's no free lunch!

How would you unearth the future?

The Theocratic States of America

In Afghanistan, the Taliban are back to their old ways of treating women:

The Taliban government decreed Saturday that Afghan women must cover themselves from head to toe, expanding a series of onerous restrictions on women that dictate nearly every aspect of public life. 

The decree, by the Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice,  drew condemnation from women’s rights advocates and the United Nations, which described it as another bald betrayal of Taliban pledges to respect gender equality. The ministry suggested the burqa as the preferred garment for covering a woman’s face, hair and body. But it did not mandate wearing the garment as long as women otherwise cover themselves with a hijab.

The government provided helpful clarification about what could happen if a woman did not follow those rules.  Her male guardian will be warned.  But, if the violation is repeated:

The second time, the guardian will be summoned [by Taliban officials], and after repeated summons, her guardian will be imprisoned for three days ... And male guardians found guilty of repeated offences “will be sent to the court for further punishment”

Yes, men ruling over the lives of women.  That surely cannot happen here in the United States of America.

Of course, I want to point out that the burqa rule in Afghanistan is not that far removed from our lives here.  That is merely one end of a continuum along which we are slightly better off.  While we don't tell women what to wear when they are out and about, and though we don't require them to have male guardians, the Supreme Court is on the verge of telling women that their bodies will be regulated by lawmakers in the states where they live.

We make fun of the Taliban when they regulate women's lives based on their religious beliefs.  After all, those are some barbaric Islamic beliefs, unlike life that is governed by highly civilized Christian beliefs, in which the fertilized ova are vessels for the souls that god has already created.  We then regulate women's lives in order to carry out god's direction, and will make it the law of the land in a liberal democracy.  The Supreme Court is not at all like the Taliban; come on, unlike the Taliban, there is a woman in the majority of judges who want to tightly circumscribe women's lives!

The Scientific American has plenty of issues with the regulation of women's lives in the US.

Regardless of how they legally justify their ruling, the justices of the Supreme Court who choose to strike down abortion rights are telling the American public that science doesn’t matter, that evidence can be ignored. High courts have similarly said as much in striking down mask and vaccine mandates during the COVID pandemic. The logic of Alito’s draft—the right to an abortion is not in the Constitution—could apply to all reproductive health, including the Griswold v. Connecticut Supreme Court decision that overturned a law banning birth control.

If only the editors of SciAm paused to ask ourselves why the religious fanatics in the Supreme Court or the Taliban would worry about science when it is god that they answer to! 

The pro-life crowd ought to simply recognize the Taliban as comrade-in-arms engaged in a crusade (or jihad) to cleanse the world of infidels like me.