High court hijacks climate policy

The U.S. Supreme Court made an Olympic leap into new territory this week with a ruling that the Environmental Protection Agency has the authority to regard carbon dioxide emissions as a "pollutant" under the Clean Air Act.

The 5-4 ruling makes federal regulation of such pollutants a near certainty, according to many pundits, and it firmly inserts the judiciary into the climate change debate.

If the EPA doesn't take the matter upon itself through administrative authority, the Democratic controlled Congress now has additional backing from the Supreme Court to force it to do so.

Writing for the court majority, Justice John Paul Stephens justified the decision with climate change concern: "A reduction in domestic emissions would slow the pace of global emissions increases no matter what happens elsewhere."

Maybe that is so, but it doesn't change the fact that the Supreme Court is not supposed to make policy. Whether or not the outcome of the ruling is fortuitous should not affect the court's reasoning; it must base its rulings on the law, not on its hopes and wishes.

The court's majority also doesn't account for the big question that must be considered in any level-headed policy debate about global warming: How much in the way of carbon emission controls can the U.S. economy afford?

The problem here is not the hypothesis behind climate change, or the debate over it. The problem is the hysteria that is increasingly driving the debate over what to do about climate change.

That hysteria is now aided by the high court, even though a growing number of scientists, many of them adherents to climate change, are expressing concern about how alarmist voices are driving the debate over best ways to respond to climate change. Those voices are pursuing an agenda that is clearly bent on imposing strict CO2 emissions caps, the economy be damned.

This newspaper has been getting e-mail press releases and bulletins for months in a concerted campaign driven by environmental groups. Those same groups are now salivating over the Supreme Court decision.

We marveled in amusement a few weeks back that an environmental attorney cited global warming as a reason not to remove Yellowstone grizzly bears from protection under the Endangered Species Act. We suggested that the ESA and the federal government aren't likely to reverse any grizzly bear habitat changes that might result from GLOBAL warming, as long as countries like China and India are free to spew as much CO2 as they choose.

But maybe we were wrong, because the Center for Biological Diversity is now trumpeting that the court decision has "enormous implications for polar bears." Polar bears?

Well, folks at the Center have taken the ruling to mean that "federal agencies" - not just the EPA - can now regulate greenhouse gases.

And the Center has been seeking protections for polar bears under the ESA because of shrinking habitat as a result of global warming.

The group says the court's decision should make the Bush administration "think twice about attempting to bar the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service from addressing greenhouse gases under the Endangered Species Act."

A spokeswoman for the group added for good measure, "White House global warming policy seems limited to ordering more fiddles while the world burns."

Hysteria? What hysteria? Lions and tigers and bears … are melting! Oh my! That kind of rhetoric is replete in waves of climate change campaign materials disseminated to media outlets across the country.

It's incredible how climate change alarmists are craving carbon emission controls to a degree that absolutely will have wide-ranging economic costs. And those costs will trickle down to the average Joe who drives a car, buys gas, uses electricity at home or happens to work for an energy consuming employer who might find the bottom line would pencil out better in another country without emission controls.

That much-needed, level-headed consideration of economic impacts may be beyond hope. Thanks to the Supreme Court, we can now expect a barrage of litigation from those hell-bent on CO2 "pollution" controls that will have lasting economic effects and may very well change our lifestyle more than all the CO2 in the world.