OPINION/COMMENTARY

SCOTUS Emits Scare Pollution The Supreme Court of the United States has arrogantly ruled that the second most vital gas to sustaining life on Earth is a “pollutant.” In doing so, five of nine Justices did the same dirt to climate science last week that twelve OJ jurors did to forensic science in 1995. At issue was the Environmental Protection Agency’s position that it had no power to regulate “greenhouse gases,” such as carbon dioxide, as EPA scientists believed they fail to meet the Clean Air Act’s definition of airborne pollutants. Astoundingly, a majority of non-scientists in robes ruled that they did. In an all-too-obviously politically motivated decision, the Court found [1] that the EPA not only had the authority to regulate “greenhouse gas” (GHG) emissions but actually carried the legal responsibility to do so. And right on cue, judicial ignorance of both the scientific and fiscal pitfalls of the Massachusetts v. EPA ruling incited similar media nescience. Alarmists repeated their erroneous mantra that man’s role in global warming had been “settled,” while the press loudly proclaimed that President Bush’s environmental policies had been properly “rebuked.” But the dire portent of this case far-exceeds the photo-ops it provided gloating greenies. Writing for the majority, Justice John Paul Stevens opined that “air pollutants” include “all airborne compounds of any stripe” and concluded that: "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.” Capacious? That would seem considerably understated, given that the list [2] includes everything from Asbestos to Radon to Hydrochloric Acid, but fails to mention any gases essential to life – until now that is. Nonetheless, the word is so broadly tossed about that the EPA felt it wise to provide “The Plain English Guide to the Clean Air Act” [3] for clarification. There, air “pollutants” are defined as (emphasis added): “UNWANTED CHEMICALS or other materials found in the air. Pollutants can harm health, the environment and property. Many air pollutants occur as gases or vapors, but some are very tiny solid particles: dust, smoke or soot.” In his opinion, Stevens cavalierly declared CO2 to be the “most important species” of greenhouse gases. This, itself, is pure enviro-friendly trash -- most scientists award that honor to water vapor. Nevertheless, as he considers GHGs to be “well within” the CAA’s definition of pollutants, it would follow that CO2 must be “unwanted” in the air. I suspect, however, that huggers of every tree, every blade of grass, and every other form of vegetation on the planet would heartily disagree, as its presence in the air is as essential to the flora as O2 is to us fauna....
Supreme Court Split Decision Opens Door to EPA Power Grab The Supreme Court today, in a 5-4 decision, overturned EPA’s decision not to regulate carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from new vehicles. EPA must now reconsider its original ruling. 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. 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,” said CEI Senior Fellow Marlo Lewis. “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. This should certainly be a surprise to Congress, which has been vigorously debating the issue for years,” noted CEI Director of Energy and Global Warming Policy Myron Ebell. “For an agency as unaccountable as EPA to be deputized in this way is bad news for the future of our country.”....
Newt Gingrich on the Environment The Washington Post makes what it calls a Newt Gingrich-John Kerry "debate on the environment" sound like a clash of ideological opposites, but Newt Gingrich aspired to be a handmaiden of the environmentalists while Gingrich was Speaker of the House. The love was unrequited. The environmentalists attacked Gingrich anyway. (They raise money demonizing Republicans.) In private, though, the environmentalists had more luck getting meetings with Speaker Gingrich than conservatives working on environmental issues ever did. The Gingrich-Kerry "debate" event's announcement itself says the two men will explore "the ways in which Congress might be able to resolve its differences on this long-range issue through institutional change, new analytic techniques, and legislative innovation." I expect a conversation in which Gingrich and Kerry discuss ways of getting around people in Congress who support the Fifth Amendment, sound science, and a government at least a smidgeon smaller than the Earth the gaians worship....
Forget Kyoto Then again, Kerry might want to read up on those environmental records before he starts shaming us all. As guilty as we like to feel in this country, we can hold our head up when it comes to greenhouse-gas pollution. It isn’t just that Europe is failing to meet its Kyoto obligations, having increased emissions since 1993. It’s much better than that. The fact is that, in the years after we elected George W. Bush — a man who would presumably knock his own grandmother into a vat of toxic sludge if it allowed him to contaminate another pristine wilderness area — we have soundly beaten the European Union in curbing emissions growth. This despite our having much more population growth and a much stronger economy. The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that U.S. carbon-equivalent emissions rose by 1.3 percent between 2000 and 2004. During the same period, the U.S. population grew by 4 percent, and our economy grew by 19.5 percent. In the 25 European nations reporting under the Kyoto Protocol, carbon equivalent emissions rose by 2.2 percent during the same period (and by 2.4 percent in the 15 Western European nations). The EU-25 population, meanwhile, grew by 1.6 percent and their collective economy grew by just under 7 percent. Between 2000 and 2004, America had more than twice the population and economic growth of Europe and a little more than half of Europe’s growth in carbon emissions. That’s not so bad, is it? Should we really be looking up to Europe? One would hope that environmental consciousness is not about signing treaties or setting bold goals, but rather about decreasing emissions. That is where we beat everyone....
Mistakes to Avoid in the Global Warming Fight You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows, and the wind is blowing hard in favor of action on climate change. The Bush administration now agrees that human activities are warming the planet, the Supreme Court says the Environmental Protection Agency has violated the law by not regulating auto emissions, and Democrats in Congress are demanding new measures to cut greenhouse gases. How will we address this new challenge? The most plausible answer is: with a lot of command-and-control programs that micromanage various industries on the assumption that the government knows best. In a word, badly. Reducing the output of carbon dioxide and other substances that trap the Earth's heat is not cheap. But there are expensive solutions, and there are astronomical ones. Any new policy should aim at getting the greatest reductions for the least money. That may sound like a hugely complex task for the government, but it's not. The free market is the best system ever created for providing what we want at the lowest possible cost. The way to get affordable amelioration of climate change is to put the market to work finding solutions. To achieve that, we merely need to make energy prices reflect the potential harm done by greenhouse gases....
Why So Gloomy? Judging from the media in recent months, the debate over global warming is now over. There has been a net warming of the earth over the last century and a half, and our greenhouse gas emissions are contributing at some level. Both of these statements are almost certainly true. What of it? Recently many people have said that the earth is facing a crisis requiring urgent action. This statement has nothing to do with science. There is no compelling evidence that the warming trend we've seen will amount to anything close to catastrophe. What most commentators—and many scientists—seem to miss is that the only thing we can say with certainly about climate is that it changes. The earth is always warming or cooling by as much as a few tenths of a degree a year; periods of constant average temperatures are rare. Looking back on the earth's climate history, it's apparent that there's no such thing as an optimal temperature—a climate at which everything is just right. The current alarm rests on the false assumption not only that we live in a perfect world, temperaturewise, but also that our warming forecasts for the year 2040 are somehow more reliable than the weatherman's forecast for next week....
The Global Warming Jihad I am a strong defender of the processes of scientific inquiry. And yet, I am aware that most scientists cling to a faith in conclusions that have been widely accepted within their respective communities, and angrily react against any heresies – however well-documented and reasoned – that arise from skeptical minds. When British biologist Rupert Sheldrake’s book, A New Science of Life, was published, the science journal, Nature, editorially described it as “a book for burning?” Nor did most members of the scientific world openly embrace the views of the brilliant science philosopher, Paul Feyerabend, who challenged the idea that there was “a” scientific method. He was of the view that a variety of strategies – including luck, accidents, dream interpretation, fraud, mistakes, and intuition – had played major roles in scientific discoveries. He advocated a theoretical anarchism in the search for truth, believing that such an approach was more consistent with human nature than was adherence to rigid rules of inquiry. I am equally a defender of speculative thinking, wherein emotions, intuitive insights, and an awareness of the need for inner, spiritual expression, inform our empirically-based searches for “truth” about ourselves and the world in which we live. We spend far too little time examining the epistemological basis for our thinking. The question “how do we know what we know” is rarely taken up even by the more intelligent among us. Most of us prefer the leisurely approach to understanding; relying upon self-styled “experts,” or the outcome of public opinion polls, to advise us of the opinions we are to embrace. Nowhere is this tendency more evident than in the current secular faith in the causes of, and cures for, global warming. Many who eagerly attack the theistically-based religious views of others, have erected their own temporal icons and composed an alternative set of catechisms in furtherance of their creed. The rest of us are expected to accept, without any heretical doubts, that the prophesies of some scientists reflect a core of certainty within the scientific community as firmly grounded as the heliocentric cosmology. Those scientists who doubt the revealed faith, we are told, are but a handful of ignoramuses at such places as Backwater College or Boll Weevil State....
GASOLINE AT $6 VS. WARMING? A recent European Environment Agency (EEA) study reported greenhouse-gas emissions from motor vehicles continue rising due to increased driving, despite heavy fuel taxes that boost prices there above $6 per gallon. Even with gas prices more than twofold that in the United States, Europe falls short of its global-warming goals, says Ben Lieberman, a senior policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation. Consider: * Gasoline taxes were higher in Europe than the United States even before Kyoto (the 1997 multilateral treaty to combat global warming) and average nearly $4 per gallon, pushing the pump price well above $6. * In comparison, gasoline in the United States is subject to federal taxes of 18.4 cents per gallon and varying state and local taxes, for a total of 42 cents per gallon on average -- putting the price for regular gas in the United States around $2.58 per gallon. * The British, Germans, French, Belgians, Dutch and Italians now shell out $6.55, $6.45, $6.21, $6.44, $7.09 and $6.24 per gallon, respectively, for premium gas; yet they are driving more, not less. Joel Schwartz of the American Enterprise Institute believes that despite the costs of owning and operating an automobile, people choose automobiles the world over because no other form of transportation comes anywhere close to providing comparable speed, flexibility, privacy and convenience. Even at $6 per gallon, many Europeans -- whose per capita incomes are lower than those in the United States -- are willing to cut back on other things rather than cut back on driving. Most European Union nations aren't on track to meet their Kyoto targets because of increasing CO2 emissions, and "the main reason for increases between 1990 and 2004 was growing road transport demand," notes the EEA. It expects the upward trend in driving to continue. Source: Ben Lieberman, "Gasoline at $6 vs. warming?" Washington Times, April 9, 2007. For text:http://www.washingtontimes.com/commentary/20070408-103831-5019r.htm