by Stuart Taylor Jr.

Global Warming: Time for a Court Order

Article Tools

sponsored by:

	E-mail Article
	Printer Format

The Supreme Court seemed split 4-4, with Justice Anthony Kennedy on the fence, during spirited arguments on Wednesday in a potentially momentous case on global warming. Memo to Kennedy's law clerks: The justices should order the Bush administration to come to grips with the need to curb the emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that contribute to what could become catastrophic climate change.

This is not to deny that curbs on emissions might be futile and thus wasteful. The costs of achieving major reductions in the near term might be prohibitive. Meanwhile, soaring greenhouse-gas emissions in China, India, and other rapidly industrializing countries could swamp any government-mandated cuts in America.

But consider the alternative. If the government keeps temporizing on this issue, we may eventually see coastal cities under water, glaciers gone, arable lands turned into desert, massive extinctions of animal and plant species, more killer storms, and other disasters. More to the point for the justices, the Environmental Protection Agency's head-in-the-sand, we-don't-want-to-know posture about the dangers of global warming violates the Clean Air Act.

The Court need not decide how grave the danger is, how much should be invested in reducing emissions, or even whether EPA should regulate them at all. It need only require the agency to take its head out of the sand. Specifically, the plaintiffs—Massachusetts, 11 other states, some cities, and others—ask only that the justices order EPA to make an official, yes-or-no finding, after formal consideration, that answers this question: Are greenhouse gases a kind of air pollution that, by contributing to climate change, may—in the words of the Clean Air Act—"reasonably be anticipated to endanger public health or welfare"?

EPA has already admitted that the most likely answer is yes, given the scientific near-consensus that greenhouse-gas emissions contribute to global warming. But EPA knows that an official "yes" would trigger a Clean Air Act mandate that the agency regulate such emissions. President Bush does not want to do that.

Hence the EPA's we-don't-want-to-know posture about the greatest environmental threat facing the nation and the world. The Clean Air Act should not be so easily evaded.

To be sure, the danger posed by greenhouse gases was unknown when Congress passed the act more than 30 years ago. But it was designed to be adaptable to the need to combat precisely such previously unknown dangers. The plain language of Section 202(a)(1), concerning emissions from new motor vehicles, makes this clear. (The case before the Court involves only motor vehicles. But the decision will also resolve a similar case involving power plants that is pending in a lower court.)

Section 202(a)(1) directs EPA to "prescribe ... standards applicable to the emission of any air pollutant from ... new motor vehicles ... which in [EPA's] judgment cause, or contribute to, air pollution which may reasonably be anticipated to endanger public health or welfare." Another provision defines "welfare" broadly as including "weather" and "climate."

The natural reading is that EPA must limit emissions unless it finds that they do not "contribute to" changes in climate or weather. Even the Bush EPA would have a hard time finding that. The administration claims three escape hatches from the inexorable logic of this language.

"The term 'air pollutant' means any air-pollution agent ... , including any physical [or] chemical substance or matter which is emitted into or otherwise enters the ambient air." All four greenhouse gases—carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and hydrofluorocarbons—are physical or chemical substances emitted into the ambient air. The administration does not dispute this. Instead, it claims that this does not make them "air-pollution agents."

But the definition's grammatical structure says otherwise. So do other Clean Air Act provisions that explicitly lists carbon dioxide as an air pollutant.

The administration also argues that literal interpretation must give way in cases involving issues of great economic and political consequence that Congress has specifically addressed in more-recent laws. But the six-year-old precedent on which this argument rests involved repeated ratifications by Congress of an agency's consistent view over 60 years that it lacked statutory power to regulate tobacco products. In the global-warming case, EPA had found before Bush took office that it did have the power to regulate greenhouse-gas emissions. And Congress has never suggested otherwise.

Today's Headlines From The Atlantic