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Justices nix Bush on global warming

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It took a Supreme Court ruling to reaffirm the obvious. The Environmental Protection Agency and the Bush administration were reminded Monday that "protection" is one of the EPA's responsibilities.

In a 5-4 decision, the high court essentially said the EPA should either regulate the emission of greenhouse gases or provide a legal explanation for why it is not doing so.

A suit brought by environmentalists and 12 states said the federal agency should limit greenhouse gas emissions from new cars and trucks that contribute to global warming.

Three University of Arizona scientists and a lawyer had filed amicus briefs, or supporting documents, on behalf of the plaintiffs. "This ruling is a victory for climate science," UA ecologist Scott Saleska said in a statement released Monday. Saleska is the scientist who organized the UA's collaboration for the brief. "EPA ignored what is perhaps the most important finding in climate science in the last decade."

The court's decision hinged on whether the Clean Air Act, which the EPA enforces, includes carbon dioxide and other gases that trap heat in the Earth's atmosphere.

To the dismay of many states and a variety of environmental organizations, for nearly eight years the White House and EPA have increasingly approached enforcement from a political premise rather than a scientific one.

In this case, for example, the court dismissed the administration's statement that, under the Clean Air Act, carbon dioxide and other gases that contribute to climate change were not pollutants.

"As a result of today's landmark ruling, EPA can no longer hide behind the fiction that it lacks any regulatory authority to address the problem of global warming," Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley said.

In the majority opinion, Justice John Paul Stevens, who was appointed to the court by President Gerald Ford, wrote that EPA's steadfast refusal to regulate greenhouse gas emissions presents a risk of harm to Massachusetts that is both "actual" and "imminent." In addition, he said, "EPA identifies nothing suggesting Congress meant to curtail EPA's power to treat greenhouse gases as air pollutants."

In rejecting the plaintiff's request that the agency regulate those emissions, Stevens wrote, EPA employed "impermissible considerations."

But on the issue of global warming, the administration and the EPA it controls have remained intractable.

The evidence that correlates an increase in the burning of fossil fuels with an increase in the temperature of the Earth's atmosphere has been largely viewed as serendipitous by the Bush White House. And the effects of heat-trappings gases like carbon dioxide — the warming of oceans and the changes in weather patterns that result — are dismissed by some skeptics as part of a natural cycle.

Even if there were evidence for that scenario — which there is not — it would not diminish the evidence that vehicle emissions like carbon dioxide are a contributing factor.

In refusing to regulate those gases, the EPA acted in a way that was "arbitrary, capricious or otherwise not in accordance with law," Stevens wrote.

It is sad that a department called the Environmental Protection Agency had to be pummeled with a major Supreme Court decision before it would take the steps that we regard as integral to its mission.

The agency's ultimate responsibility is to help create a healthful environment that will sustain human life. Gases that destroy the Earth's atmosphere in the long run can logically be seen as contributing to ill-health. The Supreme Court, thankfully, has reminded the EPA that it has the authority to acknowledge that, too.