Judges Take on Climate Skeptics
Three of the D.C. Court of Appeals’ judges delivered climate-regulation opponents what can only be termed a righteous smackdown last week. Their opinion on the Environmental Protection Agency’s work to regulate greenhouse gases is, as much as any legal opinion can be, a delight to read.
From the barely tempered exasperation in the court’s opening salvo—“We begin with a brief primer on greenhouse gases”—to the impatience with the lines of reasoning called upon by industry and its allies in state government—“This argument is little more than a semantic trick”—this legal document is a salve for anyone sick of the protestations against taking any action, ever, to tackle the looming disaster that is climate change.
The case at hand combined a mountain of complaints about almost every action the EPA has taken to regulate carbon. The agency began the process in 2007 in response to the Supreme Court’s requirement that it consider whether the Clean Air Act covered greenhouse-gas emissions. In 2009, the EPA found that it did. The agency next needed to make rules governing the emission of greenhouses gases by cars and trucks. It made those rules.
Next, the law required the agency to start regulating greenhouse-gas pollutants at power plants, refineries, and other “stationary sources.” Greenhouse gases are emitted at much higher volumes than pollutants like sulfur dioxide or carbon monoxide, and the thresholds set in the Clean Air Act pull much smaller operations into greenhouse-gas regulation. In the short term, the EPA released rules that limited initial regulation to only the largest sources of greenhouse-gas pollution.
Industry groups, along with states from Alaska to Texas to Virginia, objected to every single one of these decisions. The D.C. Court of Appeals told the protesters that on each count, they were either wrong to complain or had no standing to do so.