Nixon 1, Dubya 0

Elizabeth Kolbert of The New Yorker reports here on a legal case involving The Clean Air Act, which was signed into law by President Richard Nixon 36 years ago this month. As Kolbert notes, this is the first case involving global warming to reach the Supreme Court, filed pretty much out of desperation (Massachusetts v. EPA – arguments were heard last week). She also notes the following…

The plaintiffs—a group that includes, in addition to Massachusetts, eleven states, three cities, and thirteen environmental groups—hope to compel the Bush Administration to impose limits on greenhouse-gas emissions. If they are successful, the operation of every power plant and factory as well as the design of every new car in the country could potentially be affected.

So what is Bushco’s flimsy defense? This…

The E.P.A., it argues, lacks the authority to limit greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act, because when the act was drafted global warming wasn’t yet recognized as a problem. The “relevant provisions of the law,” it states in its brief to the Supreme Court, are “best construed not to authorize regulation . . . for the purpose of addressing global climate change.” Furthermore, the Administration asserts, even if the Clean Air Act did grant the E.P.A. the power to treat CO2 as a pollutant, the agency shouldn’t—and wouldn’t—exercise it.

Just about anyone familiar with the Clean Air Act can see the White House’s narrow reading of the law for what it is: a deliberate misreading. The act was expressly constructed to allow the E.P.A. to regulate substances known to be dangerous and also substances that might in the future be revealed to be so.

And…

In a friend-of-the-court brief for the plaintiffs, four former E.P.A. administrators—including Russell Train, who headed the agency under Nixon, and William Reilly, who led it under George Bush senior—point out that Congress clearly directed the E.P.A. to “regulate air pollution based on new and changing scientific information.” The four go on to note that the E.P.A. has, many times in the past, used its authority to control pollutants whose dangers could not have been foreseen in 1970; for example, in the early nineteen-nineties, faced with data on ozone depletion, the agency issued a timetable for phasing out chlorofluorocarbons.

And I simply must note this wonderful exchange between plaintiff lawyer James Milkey, the assistant attorney general for the state of Massachusetts, and Antonin Scalia:

SCALIA: I thought that standing requires imminent harm. If you haven’t been harmed already, you have to show the harm is imminent. Is this harm imminent?

MILKEY: It is, Your Honor. We have shown that [rises in] sea levels are already occurring from the current amounts of greenhouse gases in the air, and that means it is only going to get worse as the—

SCALIA: When? I mean, when is the predicted cataclysm?

Tell you what, Antonin; let’s see when the next “Cat 5” comes along and wipes out the Louisiana fishing camp of your friend Wallace Carline as you’re preparing to head down there to go duck hunting again, OK? Maybe then you’ll recognize “the predicted cataclysm.”

And I guess I should allow for the “full mooner” perspective here and note that, as one of his final acts as chair of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee (thank God), Jim Inhofe (R-Wingnuttia) took the best parting shot he could at the global warming “hoax.”

Take a bow, Jim; you’ve done well by your most valued corporate constituents (Mother Jones magazine noted here that Inhofe received $290,000 from oil and gas companies including ExxonMobil in his 2002 re-election campaign…look for the paragraph that starts “Frank O’Donnell, of Clean Air Watch…”).