It’s always a pleasure to go downtown to Miller Plaza, listen to the music and watch folks set up booths for a festival. The activity this past weekend began at 5 p.m. I got there a bit early to watch all the preparations. Everyone setting up looked happy, even in the intense sunlight. A few kids even hopped, skipped and jumped around. I admire these younger folks doing their best with a temperature exceeding 90 degrees. We older folks are especially vulnerable to these heat waves — I sweated a lot, even standing in the shade. I’m thinking that climate change deniers and Supreme Court justices should stand with me. Maybe a little heat exhaustion would have them promote laws and projects to protect us.

This isn’t the first time that I’ve written about climate change. How could I not, especially given the heat waves, tornadoes, floods and highways crumbling off mountains? Climate change is neither a joke nor a conspiracy theory. The warming ocean water will bring us an historic hurricane season. And it just started with Hurricane Beryl, the first-ever Category 5 storm this early in a year.

Yes, there are natural causes for our climate situation, such as volcanic eruptions and solar activity. But according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, “The primary reason for this remarkable stretch of recordbreaking warmth around the world is due to human-caused climate change.”

Our country’s dilemma hasn’t gone unnoticed. The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) asked, “Climate change is leading to more intense heatwaves and storms in many parts of the United States, so can some cities provide a refuge from extreme weather?”

It turns out that being a “climate refuge city” is now a thing, and one of the leaders in the trend is Buffalo, New York.

The city’s mayor invited residents of the hurricane-prone Southeast and wildfire-ravaged West to move to Buffalo to escape climate-induced disasters. The “Be in Buffalo” website now promotes protection from unlivable heat and weather-related disasters.

Unless we all want to relocate to climate havens, we should support the EPA in its efforts to protect us. The EPA’s “Good Neighbor” rule restricts smokestack emissions from power plants that send smogcausing pollution downwind.

Of course, there are objections to such regulations from corporations and energy-producing states.

The pushbacks are now officially successful. The Supreme Court just blocked EPA’s interstate air pollution regulation.

This isn’t the first time that the court ruled in favor of polluters. In 2022, the justices limited EPA’s authority to fight air and water pollution with regulations on carbon dioxide emissions from power plants. The so-called logic behind the decision has been to curtail the power of federal agencies.

By also overturning what is known as the “Chevron” decision, other regulations about our public health, workplace safety and consumer protections may go out the window, too.

Back at Miller Plaza, I wondered if the intense sunlight hurt more than my eyes. Did you know that industrial pollutants react to intense sunlight by forming ground-level ozone? Its chemistry can cause respiratory problems and immune system issues. Protection against the downwind of ground-level ozone is now more iffy.

Let’s dare the Supreme Court justices to travel to states downwind from this pollution and stand in the sunlight for a couple of hours. Then we’ll see how many regulations designed to protect us they choose to reject.