As seen the Washington Post, the Supreme Court has handed down a ruling on the EPA’s declining to regulate CO2 emissions from vehicles.
The case dates from 1999, when the International Center for Technology Assessment and other groups petitioned the EPA to set standards for greenhouse gas emissions for new vehicles. Four years later, the EPA declined, saying that it lacked authority to regulate greenhouse gases and that even if it did, it might not choose to because of “numerous areas of scientific uncertainty” about the causes and effects of global warming. Massachusetts, along with other states and cities, took the agency to court.
The court majority said that the EPA clearly had the authority to regulate the emissions and that its “laundry list” of reasons for not doing so were not based in the law. “We need not and do not reach the question whether on remand EPA must make an endangerment finding. . . . We hold only that EPA must ground its reasons for actions or inaction in the statute,” Stevens wrote.
In other words, a majority of Supreme Court justices are saying to the EPA, “you can’t play ’see no evil / hear no evil / speak no evil’ unless specifically permitted by statute.”
Nice.