' The Supreme Court ruled today, in what amounts to a rebuke of the Bush administration, that the has the authority to regulate carbon dioxide from automobile emissions, and that it has shirked its duty in not doing so. '
' The Supreme Court ruled today, in what amounts to a rebuke of the Bush administration, that the has the authority to regulate carbon dioxide from automobile emissions, and that it has shirked its duty in not doing so. '





actually, a bit more balanced version can be found at
(snip)" The justices, voting 5-4, today said the Environmental Protection Agency didn't follow the requirements of the Clean Air Act in 2003 when it opted not to order cuts in carbon emissions from new cars and trucks.
``EPA has offered no reasoned explanation for its refusal to decide whether greenhouse gases cause or contribute to climate change,'' Justice John Paul Stevens wrote for the majority.
The ruling doesn't necessarily mean the EPA will have to impose new regulations. Still, it adds to growing pressure on the administration, which has resisted mandatory limits on carbon emissions. The decision is a setback for General Motors Corp. and other automakers and for utilities with coal-fired plants, including American Electric Power Co. and Southern Co.
Environmentalists and 12 states, including California and Massachusetts, are seeking to force the federal agency to limit emissions from new cars and trucks. New York is leading a separate state effort to curb power-plant emissions.
The decision also helps efforts by states including California to enact their own climate-change regulations. In fighting those rules, automakers have pointed to the EPA's conclusion that carbon dioxide isn't an ``air pollutant'' subject to regulation under the Clean Air Act. The majority today rejected the agency's interpretation, saying greenhouse gases are air pollutants."(snip)
Ultimately, today's supreme court ruling has created a requirement for the EPA to reassess the scientific evidence available on both sides, and to make an 'official' determination as to whether or not carbon dioxide indeed can "reasonably be anticipated to endanger public health or welfare.''"
and for an equally partisan version there's
(snip)"Because greenhouse gases fit well within the Clean Air Act's capacious definition of 'air pollutant' we hold that EPA has the statutory authority to regulate the emission of such gases from new motor vehicles," the court said.
"While we are still reviewing the case for its regulatory implications, having the authority to regulate C02 as a pollutant and justifying that authority are two different things," Marc Morano, spokesman for Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), ranking member of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, told Cybercast News Service.
"CO2 is not an air pollutant and should not be treated as one," Morano added.
According to the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the court's decision has broad implications ranging from the judicial standing of environmental plaintiffs to America's economic future.
"The decision implies that Congress ratified the Kyoto Protocol in 1977 when it enacted the Clean Air Act's Section 202 regulating auto emissions, but somehow forgot to tell anybody," said CEI Senior Fellow Marlo Lewis. The Kyoto Protocol, drawn up in 1997, requires industrialized countries to cut greenhouse gas emissions by specified amounts. The U.S. did not ratify the treaty.
"The same groups that sued EPA to regulate CO2 auto emissions under Section 202 will now sue EPA to set national ambient air quality standards (NAAQS) for CO2," he added. "However, in previous rulings, the court has forbidden EPA to consider cost when setting NAAQS. As a result, the potential for economic harm is vast."
"The court's decision empowers EPA to take control of America's global warming policy," argued CEI Director of Energy and Global Warming Policy Myron Ebell. "This should certainly be a surprise to Congress, which has been vigorously debating the issue for years."(snip)
(snip)""Unable to convince the Senate to vote upon, let alone ratify, the Kyoto global warming treaty, the left has adopted the Kyoto-by-stealth strategy of asking judges to force its version of science into the pocketbooks of the American people," the group's president, Amy Ridenour, said in a statement.
"We learn from Justice Stevens today that carbon dioxide is 'the most important... greenhouse gas.' Science cannot confirm the Justice's confident statement. The role of water vapor, the most plentiful greenhouse gas, is not yet understood. Nor is the role of carbon dioxide understood," said Ridenour.
"Such uncertainty, among many others, is the reason scientists annually request and spend several billion dollars of funds supplied by hardworking U.S. taxpayer for research into climate change. Can the taxpayers now expect relief? After all, the Justices have spoken; the verdict is in," she added.
"We shall see how many groups on the political left today ask: 'How many peer-reviewed papers has Justice Stevens published?'" Ridenour said.
She added that - as dissenting Justices John Roberts, Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel Alito have said - policies regarding "the alleged threat of global warming should ... be determined by the Congress and the Chief Executive."
"As the dissenting Justices also observed, '[Global warming] is not a problem that... has escaped the attention of policymakers in the executive and legislative branches of our government, who continue to consider regulatory, legislative and treaty-based means of addressing global climate change,'" Ridenour said.
"The Supreme Court should have stayed out of the way. The legislative and executive branches are empowered by the Constitution with the duty of setting environmental policies, and, unlike our rapacious judicial branch, also are accountable to the American people," she added."(snip)
~
Last edited by Melonie; 04-02-2007 at 04:24 PM.
Great...soon, every breath you take will be classified as a pollutant by the EPA.
Global warming is the new religion.
Idealism is fine, but as it approaches reality, the costs become prohibitive.
William F. Buckley, Jr.
Pandora's Box has been opened. We will see a flood of litigation unless Congress
acts to stem it.





HERE is where all of this is heading ... a new 'carbon tax' ...





as well as probable RATIONING of affordable coal fired energy ...
(snip)" Mr. Murray was a coal miner in Ohio who survived two mining accidents and built funds from a mortgaged house into a private coal mining company with more than 3,000 employees. He expresses concern about the proposals in Congress that will ration the use of coal, warning of much worse adverse consequences to Americans than those experienced after the 1990 amendment of the Clean Air Act.
Mr. Murray told me that he had seen the effect of the drastic reductions in coal production, and the wrenching impact on hundreds of communities, as a result of that legislation. In Ohio alone, from 1990 to 2005, about 118 mines were shut down, costing more than 36,000 primary and secondary jobs. These impacted areas have spent years recovering, and some never will. He spoke of the families that broke up, many lost homes, and some were impoverished, because of legislation that the environmentalists call a "success.""(snip)
(snip)" Mr. Murray told me that the Democrats had tried to stop his scheduled testimony on March 20 before the House Energy and Mineral Resources Subcommittee, titled "Toward a Clean Energy Future: Energy Policy and Climate Change on Public Lands." But after Mr. Murray was interviewed by Bloomberg News and by the Wall Street Journal, they relented. The chairman refused to hear his testimony and left Rep. Patrick Kennedy, a Democrat of Rhode Island, in charge.
In his testimony, Mr. Murray explained: " America is dependent on our coal because it is abundant, with some of our best deposits located on public lands; it is affordable; and it is critical to our energy security to protect all Americans from the hostile and unstable governments from which much of our country's energy is currently imported."
Right now about 52% of the country's electricity is generated by coal. In the coastal cities we tend to forget about that because we get most of our electricity from oil, natural gas, and nuclear power plants. But the farms that grow our food and many other industries around the country can't afford these more expensive sources of energy. Manufacturers will outsource jobs to foreign countries that will not subscribe to emission caps and controls. China is building 50 new coal-fired power plants, and Beijing has stated it will not agree to mandatory emission constraints in the post-2012 Kyoto treaty. Why are we being so stupid about this issue?"(snip)
from





well, you're certainly not the only one who holds that opinion ...Global warming is the new religion.
(snip)"Critics are correct in insisting that human enterprises have an effect on climate. What they cannot at this point do is specify exactly how great the damage is, nor how much relief would be effected by specific acts of natural propitiation.
The whole business is eerily religious in feel. Back in the 15th century, the question was: Do you believe in Christ? It was required in Spain by the Inquisition that the answer should be affirmative, leaving to one side subsidiary specifications.
It is required today to believe that carbon-dioxide emissions threaten the basic ecological balance. The assumption then is that inasmuch as a large proportion of the damage is man-made, man-made solutions are necessary. But it is easy to see, right away, that there is a problem in devising appropriate solutions, and in allocating responsibility for them.
To speak in very general terms, the United States is easily the principal offender, given the size of our country and the intensity of our use of fossil-fuel energy. But even accepting the high per-capita rate of consumption in the United States, we face the terrible inadequacy of ameliorative resources. If the United States were (we are dealing in hypotheses) to eliminate the use of oil or gas for power, would that forfeiture be decisive?
Well, no. It would produce about 23 percent global relief, and at a devastating cost to our economy.
As a practical matter, what have modern states undertaken with a view to diminishing greenhouse gases? The answer is: Not very much. What is being done gives off a kind of satisfaction, of the kind felt back then when prayers were recited as apostates were led to the stake to be burned. If you levied a 100 percent surtax on gasoline in the United States, you would certainly reduce the use of it, but the arbiter is there to say: What is a complementary sacrifice we can then expect from India and China? China will soon overtake the United States in the production of greenhouse gases.
At Kyoto, an effort was made 10 years ago to allocate proportional reductions nation by nation. The United States almost uniquely declined to subscribe to the Kyoto protocols. Canada, Japan and the countries of Western Europe subscribed, but some have already fallen short of their goals, and all of them are skeptical about the prospect of making future scheduled reductions. It is estimated that if the United States had subscribed to Kyoto, it would have cost us $100 billion to $400 billion per year.
There is, now and then, offsetting good news. The next report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), we have learned, will be less pessimistic than earlier reports. It will predict, e.g., a sea-level increase of up to 23 inches by the end of the century, substantially better than earlier IPCC predictions of 29 inches — and light-years away from the 20 feet predicted by former Vice President Al Gore.
Meanwhile, the Danish statistician Bjorn Lomborg said something outside the hearing of the outraged columnist. He noted solemnly that any increase in heat-related deaths should be balanced against the corresponding decrease in cold-related deaths. ... We need hope, and self-confidence."(snip)
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