What matters to me today is War Abroad, Deregulation at Home.
The escalating conflict involving Iran is already being invoked domestically to justify extraordinary federal intervention in the ordinary operation of environmental law. The clearest example is this week’s meeting of the Endangered Species Committee—the so-called “God Squad”—to consider suspending Endangered Species Act constraints that would otherwise impede oil and gas activity in the Gulf of Mexico/America.
The same pattern is surfacing in California. Federal officials have reportedly directed renewed offshore production by Sable’s facilities off Santa Barbara pursuant to a federal emergency order under the Defense Production Act, despite California’s aggressive efforts to resist that restart. Those efforts are not abstract. They arise in the shadow of the 2015 Refugio oil spill and include enforcement by the California Coastal Commission, with Governor Newsom publicly aligned against resumed production absent state compliance and environmental safeguards. The state is challenging the emergency order in court.
What is striking is not simply the federal-state conflict, but the legal rationale emerging beneath it: that energy insecurity tied to geopolitical instability can warrant rapid displacement of legal constraints that, until yesterday, were treated as fixed. National security is increasingly being positioned as a basis to suspend or sideline environmental protections when domestic production is seen as strategically necessary.
That is not a political judgment. It is an observation. If Iran’s actions in the Strait of Hormuz materially drive energy prices upward, the pressure to subordinate environmental law to energy supply concerns may only intensify.
That’s what matters to me today in 250 words or less. What matters to you? I’d really like to know.