A group of US trade associations has launched a righteous counteroffensive against a stealthy attempt to implement the Kyoto Protocol on climate change.
On Oct. 20, 1999, a coalition of groups called the International Center for Technology Assessment petitioned the Environmental Protection Agency for regulation under the Clean Air Act of emission of greenhouse gas from new motor vehicles.
This week, 26 trade groups filed comments opposing the petition. The groups include American Petroleum Institute, National Petrochemical and Refiners Association, and National Ocean Industries Association. Other industries represented include automobile manufacturing, aluminum, agriculture, forestry, iron and steel, cement, trucking, railroads, shipping, electricity, rubber, and fertilizer.
The groups say EPA lacks congressional authority to regulate greenhouse gases, which haven't been established to be pollutants under statutory definitions.
Regulating greenhouse gas emissions, they say, would conflict with congressional and executive branch policy. And it would amount to implementation of the Kyoto treaty, which Congress has refused to ratify and the Bush administration opposes.
The groups further complain that EPA representatives held an unofficial meeting with members of the petitioning group without keeping adequate records and without inviting potential dissenters to attend.
"The prior administration's failure to put a record of that meeting in the docket-or to offer an equivalent opportunity to meet with parties opposed to the petition-created an appearance of potential partiality and secrecy that is inconsistent with EPA's usual standards of open and impartial consideration of such rulemaking requests," the group of trade associations says.
In its argument against regulating greenhouse gases as pollutants, the group cites an April report of the National Research Council casting further doubt on the need for hasty response to observed warming.
The report weakens the argument that an increase in disease makes the need urgent for warming precautions.
Relationships between climate and disease are poorly understood, the report notes. Disease behavior is subject to numerous influences unrelated to climate, such as sanitation and public health services, population density, and travel patterns.
Variables such as those confound efforts to predict how warming might affect disease.
"The potential exists for scientists one day to be able to predict the impact of global climate change on disease," noted Donald Burke, professor of international health and epidemiology at Johns Hopkins School of Public Health and chair of the committee that wrote the report. "But that day is not yet here."
Thus withers another of the alarmists' reasons to tax the use of fossil energy into oblivion. Not long ago, temperature records were shown to overestimate observed warming by 40%. And doubts have arisen, even among the alarmists' early leaders, that warming, if it exists at all, has much to do with human emissions of greenhouse gases.
So the trade groups are fighting the good fight. Regulating greenhouse gases as pollutants would be costly and pointless. It might even degrade the environment's capacity to sustain life.
The politics of global warming travels too far on simple but doubtful notions about complex phenomena. Where pressure to regulate greenhouse gases as pollutants is concerned, this blind faith gives way to extremism.
The challenged petition is an attempt by extremists to sneak Kyoto past congressionally expressed better judgment. EPA should reject it.