NEWS

Time for Congress to address global warming

04/05/2007

Time for Congress to address global warming

Kennebec Journal

The Clean Air Act was passed in 1970, during the height of public agitation over the degraded condition of our nation's skies. At the time, whole cities suffered from unhealthy brown hazes brought on by unregulated industrial pollution. And over time, the Clean Air Act changed this nation's landscape, from one that featured huge smokestacks belching toxic clouds into the skies to one where the air was vastly cleaner and more healthy to breathe.
The Act was originally designed to regulate the pollutants of the time, from carbon monoxide to ozone and sulfur dioxide. In subsequent years, as scientists and policymakers understood better just what could harm our environment, amendments added new pollutants to the list of those the federal government controlled.

For the last five years, the Bush administration's Environmental Protection Agency, which administers the Clean Air Act, put the brakes on regulating the things that harm our environment. As the dangers of global warming became more evident, the agency asserted that the Clean Air Act did not give it the authority to regulate greenhouse gases—those carbon dioxide emissions that came from cars, trucks and other vehicles and which are known to be a significant contributor to global warming.

In 2003, the EPA refused to respond to a petition specifically requesting that they regulate greenhouse gas emissions. That provoked a number of states—Maine among them—to sue the EPA, claiming the agency was ignoring the Clean Air Act. They said the act allowed the agency to regulate any pollutant that can be determined to "cause, or contribute to, air pollution which may reasonably be anticipated to endanger public health or welfare." Greenhouse gases, they said, fit that definition.

On Monday, the Supreme Court ruled that the EPA did indeed have the authority under the Clean Air Act to regulate auto emissions that cause greenhouse gasses.

The strongly worded decision was a decisive rebuke to the Bush administration, which it accused of employing a "laundry list of reasons not to regulate," and using the agency's discretion as a "roving license to ignore the statutory text."

We won't dwell on the Supreme Court's common sense in reaching this conclusion. The important issue is that with this ruling, it removed the paralysis afflicting the federal government on climate change.

Until the court ruled in this case, federal action was not forthcoming, despite being sorely needed. Instead, the action in this country on global warming shifted to the states. Maine has joined nine other states in a regional compact, for example, to regulate greenhouse gases using a market-based cap-and-trade approach; the program was designed to serve as a model for federal action once the Supreme Court swept away the administration's specious arguments.

That moment has arrived. But as much praise as we have for the foresight embodied in the Clean Air Act, it's also true that it would be a lot easier to regulate greenhouse gas emissions if Congress now moves to pass amendments that will specifically target those emissions. A lot of legal contorting would need to be done to cram greenhouse gas regulation into the existing contours of the act. It will be a lot easier, and a lot better, if Congress now chooses to deal directly with the most crucial environmental threat of our time, global warming.

To that end, Maine has a lot to offer; the cap-and-trade approach in the regional initiative that our state helped pioneer would serve well if put to use on a federal level. We urge the state's congressional delegation to press for these changes and to go even further than simply regulating auto emissions that contribute to greenhouse gases. Industrial carbon emissions need the same regulatory approach, and—demonstrating how the Bush administration was way behind even the polluters—leaders of those industries have already said in public they want to work on such a scheme to lower their emissions.

There are no more excuses; it's only the flat-earth crowd who believe that global warming isn't a problem that we must try to control. It's time to get to work.