The Supreme Court has dealt a huge blow to our ability to combat climate change.

Editor’s note: Adam H. Sobel, a professor at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and the Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science at Columbia University, is an atmospheric scientist who studies extreme events and the threats they pose to human society. Sobel is the host of the podcast “Deep convection” and author “Storm surge,” a book about Superstorm Sandy. Follow him on Twitter: @profadamsobel. The opinions expressed in this comment are his own. View more opinions on CNN.

The Supreme Court’s decision on Friday to overturn the 40-year-old precedent set by Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council is a truly devastating blow to environmental protection and climate justice.

By invalidating the Chevron Doctrine, which required courts to direct federal agencies to implement sweeping regulations, the Supreme Court will make it much more difficult for the federal government to regulate pollution – including, but not limited to, greenhouse gas emissions – among many other issues related to health, labor, consumer welfare, taxes, and so on next.

I am deeply concerned about the damage this decision will almost certainly do to our environment and to the fight against climate change. But on a more philosophical level, this decision is also depressing because it represents a degradation of science and expertise in government.

In the federal government, agencies contain detailed knowledge of specific, complex issues; in a healthy society, they would have some authority to manage those issues. In other words, agencies know things, and if the government is to be effective, it should be able to do something.

However, this is a situation where principle and practice are not necessarily the same. In principle, the pro-democracy rhetoric behind the court’s ruling is defensible. Congress has the power to make laws. Employees of federal agencies, although experts in their fields, are not elected and are generally not directly accountable to the public. The majority’s logic in this decision is that when Congress gives agencies wide latitude in interpreting and implementing the law, it is unconstitutionally granting them some of its lawmaking authority.

This is a specific manifestation, in the context of American government, of a larger problem that is more complex than many—including many scientists—admit. There is a real tension between expert judgment, because it is exercised by individuals based on their education and experience, and democracy, which confers power through elections.

For government to be legitimate, both of these things must work together.

Science cannot independently resolve conflicts between the claims and demands of various social groups, such as the rights of polluting companies or the rights of citizens to a pollution-free life. Since these conflicts concern both values ​​and facts, their resolution must require the involvement of politics.

My Columbia colleague Gil Eyal, in his book The Crisis of Expertise, uses a series of examples to show that neither expert knowledge nor electoral politics alone can reliably secure public trust or solve complex problems like climate change, which have both scientific and political dimensions. Slogans like “listen to the science” obscure this complexity. So you can’t just say, as a matter of principle, that experts in agencies should have a certain amount of authority and no less. But they do need to have some power; experts and elected officials need to work together to make the system work in the public interest. The status quo under Chevron was the way to do that.

Politicians alone do not have the experience to deal with the rapid onslaught of new problems that confront us in our technologically advanced society. Consider artificial intelligence as a particularly hot example. Congress does not have the experience, ability, or flexibility to create laws that can anticipate all the problems that will arise.

As another example, new chemical contaminants are constantly emerging; do we need to pass a new law for each one? Could Congress really look through the complex evidence to decide how best to write these laws, even if it wanted to? Wouldn’t it be better to write broader laws that set out some principles about how to regulate pollution and give the EPA some latitude in figuring out how to deal with each new threat?

Not only has the Supreme Court paralyzed the experts in our federal agencies, but the reality of our dysfunctional Congress means that passing any meaningful legislation is nearly impossible. The Republican Party has opposed nearly all environmental legislation since 1990. After the Chevron ruling, there will be no new environmental regulations that meet a higher standard of specificity, but none at all. Instead, countless existing agency rules will be challenged in the courts—where judges are no more democratically elected than agency staff members, where technical expertise is no more present than in Congress, and where many rules will likely ultimately be struck down by the same judges who issued the ruling.

The likely result will simply be much less regulation. But regulation is a way for the government to balance society’s interests in freedom from pollution with the interests of corporations that would benefit from greater freedom to pollute. This is the fundamental defense we have to protect public health, the environment and other public goods.

The country will become more toxic, and the planet will heat up faster, to the detriment of all of us. But polluters and others whose private interests conflict with the public interest will face fewer constraints. And given the series of anti-environmental decisions of this court leading up to this one, and the underlying free-market ideology of the fundamentalist presidents who nominated the justices in the majority, it seems that was the real goal.

There can and should be a reasoned, honest debate about the role of expertise in government and the balance of power and responsibility between federal agencies and Congress, given the need for government action to protect the public interest from threats to the environment and public health.

If we had that in the Supreme Court, we would not be here facing a future in which our government will have to deal with climate change, pollution, and a host of other threats to public well-being behind its back with one hand.

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