Punitive damages are meant to punish the offender.  If the offender has committed an especially egregious offense such as destroying an ecosystem and killing wildlife but can easily afford the amount of punitive damages, the punishment is far too mild to have any deterrent effect.

As in Rollerball, everyone now please stand for our corporate anthem.

the pistol that blows up a large pine tree
losing the 14th century from the computer library

(from wikipedia)
'In the film, the world of 2018 is a global corporate state, containing entities such as the Energy Corporation, a global energy monopoly based in Houston which deals with nominally-peer corporations controlling access to all Transport, Luxury, Housing and Food on a global basis.'

Only 10 more years to go.  Which corporate anthem will you stand for?

There's no easy answer to your question.  The purported ideas were:

1. To have a separation of powers, because absolute power corrupts, etc.

2. The theoretical role of the courts is to interpret the law.

3. Federal judges and justices are appointed for life and can only be removed if they are impeached by the Senate.  This is supposed to remove any political pressure from their decisions.

Given all that, what's needed is a major restructuring of the U.S. governmental system.  The issue of whether to elect or appoint judges and whether they should serve for life is a bit of a red herring, because there are pros and cons to any of these systems.  However, one of the major problems with the U.S. form of government is that the president has far too much power and that the Senate is nothing but our version of the House of Lords and should be eliminated.  If a House of Representatives, elected with solely publicly funded campaigns and in a system of proportional representation with free and equal TV time for all candidates, were to appoint federal judges, we'd at least have judges who are far more representative of the general population.  So, what you can do is work to change our current system and move it in a more representative direction.

As to writing federal judges, while they might read letters, because they're appointed for life, they're free to rule based on their own politics despite what the public thinks or says.  Even California judges, who must stand for election once in awhile, have ruled contrary to letters that overwhelmingly supported parties in some cases.  I really can't think of what can be done given in the context of the highly unrepresentative system in the U.S.

I remember the powerful scene when the elegantly dressed young women are shooting trees and converting them to giant torches.  I do not at all remember the bit about losing the 14th century from the computer library.  (Bye bye, Dante!  Farewell, Chaucer!)

But I gather that in this dystopic future, each of the great cities of the world is now governed by one or another of a small number of globalized industries.  Houston, James Caan's city, belongs to Energy; Chicago is a food city; New York belongs to either transportation or communications, I forget which.

And there should be no surprise that recent governmental decisions, from all three branches, which are so obviously favorable to big corporations, over against the interests of private citizens and the environment, should inspire such a story as "Roller Ball."  That is how dystopic science fiction works, after all: take something sinister in the present real world, make it bigger, and create hell.

Of course, the decision to limit Exxon's punitive damages so radically is consistent with the US government's pro-corporate bias with origins in the 19th century.

As for the argument of the majority of the Justices, that in maritime law, there is a strong precedent that punitive damages tend not to be larger than compensatory damages, well, I do not know what to make of that.  But I agree with Wolverine, that in this case, following that precedent seems to defeat the very purpose of punitive damages.  The court's decision should have sent the message to corporations, that they are NEVER going to be able to afford being so destructively neglectful in the future.  Instead, they got the message that all they have to do is allow for possible punitive damages in any project's budget.

As for the actual members of the Supreme Court, we see that a future President Obama has the real chance to mess things up for decades to come, if he is not smart.  The three Justices who apparently are ready to retire, Baeder-Ginsburg, Souter and Stevens, are all on the liberal side, often if not always opposing Roberts, Scalia, Thomas and Alito.  With Obama in the White House, the former three will feel all the more comfortable about retiring.  But then, he has to do his part, and choose suitable liberal replacements.

Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.