While Republicans have control of Congress and a mandate to change things, they should heed the new administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency and remove carbon dioxide from the political witch list. Doing so would help rescue climate change-and the economy-from extremism.
The Supreme Court steered climate mitigation toward futility with its 2007 decision in Massachusetts v. EPA. The ruling authorized EPA to regulate CO2 as a pollutant under the Clean Air Act if the administrator found the substance endangered public health or welfare. Under Barack Obama, the agency made that finding an early item of business. Its crusade against CO2 tested constitutional limits and ignored aspects of public welfare unrelated to warming of the atmosphere, such as the cost of energy.
Legal opinion
Massachusetts v. EPA was a legal opinion, not a scientific determination. It nevertheless helped create The Science: an imagined certitude about CO2 and global warming that activists cite to smother opposition. But where was this concern for science when the political dragon became "carbon pollution?" Does "dioxide" make activist slogans too clunky? Does "CO2" contain too many numbers for activists to keep straight?
Massachusetts v. EPA accelerated a US slide toward endless cost rationalized by extremist propaganda wearing shiny armor emblazoned with The Science. And climatological dogma became knee-jerk opposition to projects associated with oil and natural gas.
President Donald Trump has moved quickly to repair damage at the policy level-proposing, for example, a scorched-earth budget for the renegade EPA. But Congress should act, too.
Scott Pruitt, the combative new EPA administrator, invited lawmakers to the intellectual battle in a Mar. 9 CNBC interview in which he suggested CO2 might not be the scourge portrayed by activists and their media parrots. "Nowhere in the continuum, nowhere in the equation, has Congress spoken," he said of regulating CO2 as pollution. "The legislative branch has not addressed this issue at all."
That needs to change. A Congress pressured to rein in government should recognize how Massachusetts v. EPA helped climate myopia distort policy-making. It should see how the empowerment came to challenge constitutional limits while undermining scientific and democratic processes. And it should want to repair the damage. It can do so by exempting CO2 and other greenhouse gases from Clean Air Act regulation.
Destigmatizing CO2 has legal and scientific supporters.
"A pollutant is a subject that is harmful to human beings or to animals or to plants," Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, a Massachusetts v. EPA dissenter, told the Claremont Institute last month. "Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant. Carbon dioxide is not harmful to ordinary things, to human beings, or to animals, or to plants. It's actually needed for plant growth. All of us are exhaling carbon dioxide right now. So if it's a pollutant, we're all polluting."
Scientific support came recently from Prof. Emeritus Richard S. Lindzen of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
"There is good and growing evidence that increased atmospheric carbon dioxide is environmentally helpful to food crops and other plants that nourish all life," Lindzen said. "It's plant food, not poison."
Guardians of The Science won't like that. They treat doubters like Alito and Lindzen as lonely voices divorced from wisdom and goodness.
One version
Yet Lindzen, an atmospheric physicist and longtime critic of climate extremism, made his statement while announcing a petition calling on the US and other governments to withdraw from the United Nations Framework on Climate Change. That's the foundation of international collaboration on the subject. At last count, more than 300 scientists had signed Lindzen's document.
While the petition is politically radical, its signature list refutes any claim that it comes from the scientific fringe. Declassifying CO2 as a pollutant would be far less drastic than dismembering UNFCC but still greatly helpful in restoring integrity to scientific and political discourse. Activists would howl. But they only know The Science. Single-version science isn't science at all.
