With the US Environmental Protection Agency's "endangerment finding" on greenhouse-gas emissions (GHGs), the politics of global warming reveals its tyrannical core.
EPA obviously scheduled its Dec. 7 announcement for maximum coercive effect. International leaders were meeting in Copenhagen to negotiate an agreement to follow the Kyoto Treaty. And the US Senate had delayed into 2010 its work on legislation to limit GHG emissions. By assuming responsibility for GHG regulation, the EPA scored diplomatic points in Denmark and raised pressure on Congress.
Seizing control
It also seized control of energy consumption, business practice, and thus much of American life. Nothing in the politics of climate change is more important than shifts, such as this, of economic choice from people to state. When EPA declared GHGs threaten public health and therefore should be regulated under the Clean Air Act (CAA), it wasn't just leveraging current affairs. It was grabbing power.
A juridical response is certain; the Competitive Enterprise Institute promises a lawsuit. Others will follow. And a political backlash is inevitable—if not now, when the power transfer remains conceptual, then later, as freedoms shrink and costs bite.
Deconstruction of this unfinished history is in order. Logically and legally, EPA could not have decided by itself that CAA authorizes it to regulate GHGs. The CAA addresses air pollutants, substances known to degrade human health. The GHG for which humanity is most responsible, carbon dioxide, doesn't fit the description. It's essential to life. It degrades human health only if it intensifies natural greenhouse warming dangerously—and then not for many years. The proposition that it does so is controversial. Seeing a reason to treat CO2 the same as ground-level ozone and airborne toxics requires expansive reading of the CAA.
But the Supreme Court made such a reading in 2007. In a decision related to legal language rather than science, the court said EPA could regulate CO2 and other GHGs under CAA if it determined they endangered people. EPA now has made the determination and claimed the authority.
The case on which the high court ruled wouldn't have been filed if no one feared that a buildup of GHGs in the atmosphere threatened the planet with disastrous warming. But the fear is widespread. It results from relentless propagation of the message that observed warming is unprecedented and destined to become extreme, that it comes mainly from human activity, and that humans need to change behavior radically to prevent catastrophe.
That message grounds itself in predictions of computer models developed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a large group of scientists working under auspices of the United Nations. The IPCC published the discredited "hockey-stick" graph that was supposed to have shown how global average temperature leaped along with use of fossil energy after centuries of little change. The IPCC famously declared that people bear responsibility for most recent warming. And the IPCC embodies the "consensus of scientists" adduced in support of the activist climate agenda.
While the IPCC's work is important, it's not the whole of climate science. Its reliance on computer models, sophisticated as they are, has come under question as climate observations stray from model predictions. Also questioned is IPCC's focus on an imperfect correlation between GHG emissions and apparent warming; some scientists think natural factors, such as variation in solar intensity, have stronger influence.
Political armor
Shots at IPCC findings, however, have tended to ricochet off the group's heavy political armor—until recently. Data fundamental to IPCC conclusions come from the Climate Research Unit at East Anglia University in the UK. Last month, e-mails stolen or leaked from the university's servers showed scientists, some of them political celebrities, destroying or manipulating data and scheming to delegitimize contradictory science.
So a federal agency has extended its regulatory reach under authority of a court ruling in a lawsuit flowing from a belief grounded in work of a politically grounded group the scientific soundness of which has become doubtful. As the basis for a major expansion of government, this chain is far too brittle.
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