Image / BBC

By Guillermo Alvarado

Relations between the U.S. Supreme Court, where there is a large majority of justices who were appointed by Republican administrations, and the current head of the White House, Joseph Biden, are increasingly stormy and hostile.

In the last few hours, the highest court in the country dealt another blow to Biden's work program, when it decided that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) does not have the power to issue national regulations on climate change.

With this ruling, the environmental protection project, one of the pillars of Biden's electoral campaign, is practically in a vacuum and it will be very difficult for him to fulfill his commitments, both domestically and in the international community.

The Supreme Court did not completely annul the EPA, but it forces it to require that from now on Congress must explicitly approve its decisions, something that is not going to happen because relations with the Legislative Branch are very bad.

It is not for nothing that Biden himself described the judges' ruling as devastating for his work on this issue.

Thus, with the customary 6 to 3 vote, a lawsuit filed by 19 states, which are among the biggest polluters of the northern power, and a group of businessmen who feared the prohibition of the use of coal on a large scale, was judged in favor.

The case also has a global impact, since the United States alone emits 14 percent of the planet's total polluting gases, a remarkably high figure.

And it is not that Biden has so far done much in the fight against global warming, beyond returning the country to the Paris Agreement, from where Donald Trump had taken it.

Despite being the richest nation, no concrete steps have yet been taken to finance the fund that would allow the less developed to face the consequences of climate change and accommodate the necessary transformations to save our common home.

A recent report by UN experts indicates that the impact of effective policies against the increase in global temperature, which continues its upward trend, is not being felt.

However, the Environmental Control Agency was a tool that, if well used, could give positive results, which now will be practically impossible because it is more important to protect a few tycoons.