High court rulings on pollution are not about science

June 28, 2013
The US Supreme Court’s June 24 decision not to consider a challenge to the Environmental Protection Agency’s E15 waiver serves as a reminder that their honors have the final say, usually, on law but never on science.

The US Supreme Court’s June 24 decision not to consider a challenge to the Environmental Protection Agency’s E15 waiver serves as a reminder that their honors have the final say, usually, on law but never on science.

Trying to accommodate impossibly ambitious requirements for ethanol in gasoline, EPA is raising the blending limit to 15% from 10%. Fuel and engine makers fear they’ll catch blame for damage caused by the extra alcohol, warnings about which they say EPA has ignored.

American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers sued EPA, challenging its authority to raise the ethanol cap. A lower court said the industry group lacked legal standing.

While the Supreme Court’s refusal to hear the case on appeal is strictly a legal opinion, politics will give the judgment authority beyond its scope.

Politics works that way. In the pivotal case Massachusetts v. EPA, for example, the court enshrined the view that carbon dioxide, because it contributes to atmospheric warming, is noxious pollution.

In that 2007 ruling the court compelled EPA to regulate CO2 as a Clean Air Act pollutant if it determined that an accumulation of the gas endangered public health. It said the statute takes a “capacious” view of what makes something a pollutant.

The lately hyperactive EPA of course made the endangerment finding and has been on an anti-CO2 crusade ever since, treating the gas as equivalent to sulfur dioxide or precursors of ozone. Its job would be easier if everyone just quit breathing.

Now, expedient abbreviation makes elemental carbon a pollutant. In his climate-change speech June 25 at Georgetown University, President Barack Obama used the phrase “carbon pollution” 30 times.

The fourth most abundant element in the universe by mass thus merits scornful regulation. And nearly one fifth of the human body is—by ruling of the Supreme Court, presidentially interpreted—pollution.

So people don’t just pollute by breathing; they literally embody pollution and deserve, under trendy sentiments about environmental justice, to have their cars’ engines disaggregated by E15.

(Online June 28, 2013; author’s e-mail: [email protected])