Al Gore’s First (and Probably Last) Q&A

via: climatechangefraud

Polar bear populations growing, despite year-old endangered species finding.

Before President Obama won his Nobel Peace Prize, the real signal that the Norwegian Nobel committee had become politicized was its 2007 prize to Al Gore, largely for his global warming film “An Inconvenient Truth.”

For a public figure, Mr. Gore has been strangely reluctant to answer questions or debate the more controversial parts of his work. But over the weekend, he deigned to take a few questions during a meeting of the Society of Environmental Journalists in Madison, Wisconsin.

Irish documentary filmmaker Phelim McAleer was in the line. A former Financial Times journalist, his new film, “Not Evil, Just Wrong,” is a direct refutation of Mr. Gore’s thesis and warns that rushing to judgment in combating climate change would threaten the world’s poor. When his turn came, Mr. McAleer asked Mr. Gore about a court case in Britain in which a parent had objected to “An Inconvenient Truth” being shown to British schoolchildren because it was largely propaganda, not science.

Mr. Gore swatted away the question by claiming the judge had found in favor of his film. He also briefly addressed one of the objections to his film by scoffing at claims that polar bears weren’t an endangered species. Mr. McAleer tried to follow up by pointing out that polar bear populations were increasing, but his microphone was quickly cut off. Organizers insisted that several other people were waiting with questions and they had to move on.

In fact, Mr. Gore didn’t answer Mr. McAleer’s question and was wrong on the facts. The British court found that An Inconvenient Truth “is a political film” riddled with scientific errors. The judge also held that requiring the film to be shown in schools would be a violation of law, unless accompanied by “guidance” pointing out its errors. The judge concluded that the claimant who objected to the film “substantially won this case by virtue of my finding that, but for the new guidance note, the film would have been distributed in breach of sections 406 and 407 of the 1996 Education Act.”

As for polar bears, Mr. McAleer was correct: Surveys show their numbers are increasing.

Mr. McAleer, whose film premiers this weekend, says he’s more disappointed in the environmental journalists who give Mr. Gore cover than in the former vice president. Mr. Gore is simply doing what any propagandist with a weak case would do — avoiding serious debate or exchange. To quote the late William F. Buckley, “There is a reason that baloney rejects the grinder.”

Saving the Earth by Hating Humanity

via: climatechangefraud

As the greatest hoax of the modern era, “global warming”, bites the dust around the world, it behooves us all to contemplate why environmentalists—Greens—would attempt to hoodwink the world’s population into believing they could do anything to “control” the planet’s climate.

One singular fact stands out in all Green propaganda and permeates all the legislation and other programs they sponsor. It is a contempt and disdain for the Earth’s human population. The leaders of the movement hate humanity. Obsessed with population growth, anything that can reduce it—disease, poverty, famine, or lack of energy is pursued as part of the Green agenda.

The Green movement grew out of an earlier, more salutary one, conservation. We can surely thank Americans such as John Muir and others who sought to preserve tracts of wilderness such as Yellowstone and the nation’s forested areas from the rampant depredations of the 1800s and early 1900s. The nation owes a debt of gratitude to President Theodore Roosevelt for the initial creation of national parks and forests.

As the nation industrialized, rivers suffered pollution and the air was polluted by factories that befouled both. In 1970 President Richard M. Nixon signed into being the Environmental Protection Agency which, empowered by the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts, can be credited to early success.

However, like all government agencies, the EPA has steadily sought to expand its powers and, aided by other environmentally related agencies such as the Fish and Wildlife Service and the Corps of Engineers, it has relentless pursued ever larger control over all the land and waters of the nation, and by extension over everyone’s life.

They pose a threat to the constitutionally protected right to private property, vital to the nation’s economy and a keystone of capitalism.

The growth of literally hundreds of “environmental” organizations has led to an endless barrage of scare campaigns, often without any basis in science, and used to undermine the industrial, agricultural, and transportation sectors of the nation’s economy.

On a global scale, the United Nations Environmental Program and its Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have pursued an agenda devoid of scientific merit or justification.

Greens lie and they lie all the time

The lies about Alar came close to wrecking apple growers. The lies about the spotted owl species laid waste to the northwest’s timber industry. New claims about alleged dangers from plastic bottles are based on lies.

The lie that carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, has anything to do with “warming” has driven the totally deceitful “global warming” hoax and is used to create a market for worthless “carbon credits” that ultimately increase the cost of energy and everything else.

The introduction of the Endangered Species Act is one long history of near constant failure in pursuit of a foolish goal, advocating for obscure species while thwarting all manner of projects useful to the human species. It has been used to impoverish farmers in Oregon and California.

The truth is that the Earth is actually cooling, not warming. Carbon Dioxide is not a “pollutant.” The North and South Poles are not melting. Sea levels worldwide are not rising any more than they have for millennia. Polar bears are thriving. Solar and wind energy is a bust, providing barely 1% of all electricity used daily nationwide.

The truth is that pesticides protect people against insect and rodent-borne diseases and property damage. Saving “endangered species” ignores the fact that 95% of all the species that previously existed are now extinct.

The truth is that nothing humans do has any affect on the climate that is dependent on solar and ocean cycles.

The Greens are now famous for their campaigns against products from toilet paper to plastic bags, bottles, and everything else made from plastic, a petroleum derivative. Anyone who buys “environmentally” approved products is being charged a premium for their own gullibility. Every supermarket and store in America has comparable, safe products at far lower costs.

Americans are constantly harangued to adopt Green lifestyles. Generations of young Americans have suffered the child abuse of being told that the Earth is doomed despite its 4.5 billion year existence.

Corporations that advertise and promote their “Green” credentials pander to environmental hoaxes in order to avoid criticism and generate an “environmentally friendly” public image.

The real environmental message speaks to a hatred of humanity and the many technological, medical, agricultural, and other achievements that have enhanced, improved, and saved the lives of millions.

If you hate energy, join an environmental organization.

If you hate science, join an environmental organization.

If you hate jobs in America, join an environmental organization.

If you hate industrial and agricultural development and progress, join an environmental organization.

And if you hate humanity, join an environmental organization.

Al Gore Still Lying about An Inconvenient Truth

via: climatechangefraud

Please, Al, just zip it already!

Ed. Note: The following piece also serves as validation of a recent study where it shows greenies are more likely to lie and steal than the gen. pop. But we didn’t need a study to tell us that.

This is getting quite tiresome, and as time goes on severely diminishes the man involved who says far more about himself with his snide routine than those he broadly and specifically seeks to smear. So let’s get this straight: There is an opinion of the U.K. High Court which thoroughly trashes Al Gore’s movie for “educational” purposes, finding that not one of the eleven money claims from the movie on which it sought evidence could be supported. Gore and his spokesman have ritually held that the Court “affirmed thousands of other statements in the movie” (really? name one), that the court “supported” or “found in favor of” the movie, and so on.

The U.K. High Court “found in favor of the movie” by, for example, saying Gore’s claims “arise in the context of alarmism and exaggeration in support of his political thesis,” “there is a view to the contrary, i.e. (at least) the mainstream view,” and the sea level rise claims “distinctly alarmist.” The closest the Court came to supporting the movie was to say that it was grounded in the science . . . and spends the rest of its opinion detailing how it then egregiously departs from the science. In other words, any invocation of that snippet as supporting the film is a dishonest use.

The court did not rule as Gore says; it required that an antidote be given to all children forced to watch the film, in the form of part of that “mainstream view” that Gore aggressively departs from with his “alarmism and exaggeration.”

Again: Her Majesty’s Government (HMG) was the defendant in the case brought by a father concerned about his children’s education . . . now smeared by Gore, who has a long history of smearing even his college professor Roger Revelle among many others, simply as “deniers.” HMG had every resource, opportunity, and motivation to present a defense of something it had required as educational material for children. After three days of evidence, to its extreme embarrassment, it was unable to support a single claim.

Now Gore is at it again. Listen to Phelim McAleer of Not Evil Just Wrong having his microphone turned off because he asked Gore if he disagrees with the court’s finding or wishes to respond to the specific findings of error. In dodging the question (shock!), Gore flatly lies — again — saying over and again that the court actually validated him. “The ruling was in favor of the movie, by the way. And the ruling was in favor of showing the movie in the schools.”

Well, then: post the opinion on your website. That you haven’t tends to undercut your claim. Post the opinion. Without using the word “deniers” or otherwise changing the subject. Post the opinion. Let your followers (who, as I continuously find, are shocked to read what the Court actually said) read the findings when coming to your portals for balm. Post the opinion, in full. Or at least stop lying about it.

How hysterics gave away the global warming debate

via: climatechangefraud

Hysterical pronouncements of upcoming doom because of global warming have apparently reached the point of diminishing returns. Joe Romm is as good an example as any of the doom-mongers, although he certainly isn’t alone. Global warming is losing all force as a political issue because the Joe Romms have cried wolf once too often.

Evidence that global warming is losing political momentum comes from a variety of sources:

The BBC: “What happened to global warming? This headline may come as a bit of a surprise, so too might that fact that the warmest year recorded globally was not in 2008 or 2007, but in 1998. But it is true. For the last 11 years we have not observed any increase in global temperatures. And our climate models did not forecast it, even though man-made carbon dioxide, the gas thought to be responsible for warming our planet, has continued to rise. So what on Earth is going on?”

The Houston Chronicle: “It seems pretty clear that the models forecast a steady upward trend in global temperatures as long as carbon dioxide levels rise. (Which they have). Yet according to satellite and surface temperature measurements the global average temperature has essentially remained flat for the last 12 years. This strikes me as somewhat curious.”

The Christian Science Monitor: “How do you reconcile the early snow in Minneapolis, ski resorts already opening in Nevada, and that August chill in North Dakota with expert warnings about a warming climate?You don’t. Why? The Earth isn’t warming right now, is why. It may even be cooling down somewhat.Five major climate centers around the world agree that average global temperatures have not risen in the past 11 years, according to the BBC. In fact, in eight of those years, global average temperatures dipped a tad.”

And opinion poll after opinion poll show that Americans, despite considering themselves environmentalists and being concerned about pollution, put global warming last on any and every list of issues of importance.

The reason is that the purple prose of panicked flacks like Joe Romm have just jumped the shark. Named Hero of the Environment by Time Magazine, Romm’s blog yesterday trumpeted, “As the planet hits record high temperatures, a falsehood-pushing film-maker tries to shout down real journalists from asking Al Gore questions.” There’s a headline right out of People’s Worker Daily. (I can say that–I’m to the left of PWD.) I wonder if he means that at the exact moment that the planet hit a record, the film-maker timed his remarks? Never mind that temperatures are not at a record. Never mind that Romm hasn’t seen the film or talked to the film-maker. He had the temerity to question Al Gore about the UK court ruling that said his own film, An Inconvenient Truth, err, pushed… well, falsehoods. Of course, maybe Romm has other reasons for defending Mr. Gore?

I would be remiss if I didn’t include his headline from today, trumpeting my acceptance of his long-standing wager on temperatures in 2019: “Memo to deniers, delayers, and disinformers: When I propose a sucker bet, the only conclusion you can draw is that I’m looking for suckers.” I think he writes his own headlines.

In addition to declaring victory a tad early–well, actually, he claims to be a winner before the period in question actually starts–Romm does a lot of hand-waving to disguise the timidity of his position in the bet. Romm has written that he believes temperature rises will be dramatic–5 degrees Celsius (7-9 Fahrenheit) by 2100. But our bet, which covers the next decade, is only for 0.15 degrees Celsius. He must be expecting a heckuva ninth inning rally to push those temperatures up. He even has a clause in our wager that if there are two big volcanic eruptions, he can call it off.

Although my tongue has been in cheek for most of this article, what’s happening is really a tragedy. The tone deafness and hysteria of people like Romm have made it much less likely that we will take the real steps we need to take to address the global warming that I do believe will occur. While Romm rants and raves about ‘deniers, delayers and disinformers,’ the fact is he is a dunderhead, a dodo and a bit dyspeptic. First clue? I had the temerity to call him Mr. Romm on his blog. His response? ‘You can call me Doctor Romm.’ Well, Joe, actually I could call you a number of things

The ups and downs of global warming over time

via: climatechangefraud

While we’re fussing and feuding over temperature rises and falls over the past decade, some people think it’s better to look at things over a longer period of time. Bill Illis has written a guest post over at Watt’s Up With That, a skeptical website, that charts temperatures, CO2 and sea level rises over a very long period of time. 600 million years. I’m posting it here, but I strongly recommend you pop over to Anthony Watt’s weblog and read the accompanying article. I’ll wait until you get back. Here’s the chart (right).

You have to read this chart from right (older time periods) to left (now). In case it’s too small for you to read, the thin yellow line is CO2, which you can see has quite often been much higher than today–in fact, we’re pretty close to historic lows. The blue line is variation from recent averages–how much higher or lower temperatures were compared to now.  Again, for most of the past 600 million years, you can see we’re at one of the low cycles, not matched since the Ordovician/Silurian ice ages. The brown fuzzy line is sea levels, which have been 265 meters higher and 120 meters lower than today.

The data is there for you to download and examine, and comes from identified and respected sources–although to be sure, they’re not the only sources out there.

So let’s discuss. Obviously, there is more than one way to look at this. If you accept the figures (and I would ask those who don’t to please provide evidence, hopefully in the form of a chart as clear as this), then a couple of important corrollaries emerge: First, climate can change radically, as it has in the past. Second, we’re pretty much at the bottom of the CO2 and temperature cycles, and about in the middle of the range for sea levels. What would we expect next if we were not contributing CO2?

The interesting fact of the day I learned from this piece is that the massive extinction that killed 96% of marine life and 70% of land animals 250 million years ago coincided with a massive series of volcanic eruptions that covered a land area the size of Australia with magma hundreds of meters deep and lasted for a million years. I think I’ll block that period off from the time travel machine.

What would you expect to happen to today’s climate if we were not contributing CO2 to the atmosphere? That’s my question for today.

It’s Winter, So That Must Be Gore Talking about ‘Warming’

The left’s own Punxsutawney Phil brings more hot air to a chilly Washington.

It’s almost Groundhog Day. Americans wait anxiously for Al Gore to pop up out of his hole, mumble “global warming” to the shivering masses and then scurry away again while we suffer through weeks more of winter.

We won’t be disappointed. Gore is scheduled to nuzzle his way into a hearing for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Wednesday to warn of a warming planet. Temperatures are near freezing. It may even snow.

Gore’s appearance in the dead of bone-chilling winter is almost five years to the day since he came out of hibernation in New York and called President Bush a “moral coward” for his climate change policies. That day was the coldest the Big Apple had seen in 47 years.

Not much has changed – in the weather or Gore’s message. This time around, it might not be so bone-shatteringly cold, but it certainly has been this winter. ABC’s weather man Sam Champion told viewers this season’s weather “feels like the coldest winter in years.” He added, “and a report from NASA climate scientists says 2008 was the coolest year since 2000.”

Gore’s message is also predictably similar – more like a clip from the movie “Groundhog Day,” than from the annual Punxsutawney Phil event. Al Gore, in the role of a dumpier Bill Murray, seems doomed to repeat his dire warnings of a toasty apocalypse forever. Only real life isn’t as funny as the movie version and more Americans are turning their backs to his complaints.

According to the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, that’s precisely what’s happening. Pew conducted a survey of American priorities from Jan. 7-11 and “global warming” finished dead last out of 20 choices. According to the survey, concern for the environment declined and warming dropped for the second year in a row. A recent Rasmussen poll says 59 percent of those surveyed don’t believe mankind is warming the planet.

So ordinary Americans are less receptive to global groundhoggery and more worried about the economy. Not so the new administration. President Barack Obama promises a government that cares less about the economy and is more focused on eco-orthodoxy.

For all of his talk about the stimulus plan and getting the economy back on track, Obama vowed the United States will “roll back the specter of a warming planet” during his inaugural address – no matter what it does to the economy.

Obama wants “an economy-wide cap-and-trade program to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 80 percent by 2050,” according to the White House Web site. That plan would cost at least another $56 billion per year added to an already overwhelmed budget.

That doesn’t seem to matter. “Global warming is not a someday problem; it is now,” he said during a speech in 2007 New Hampshire. The new president has abandoned bipartisanship and sided with the eco-left. He picked Carol Browner, a Gore loyalist who worked for the former vice president and served on the board of the Alliance for Climate Protection, founded by Gore.

Browner is already making headlines for her extreme views and as “one of 14 leaders of a socialist group’s Commission for a Sustainable World Society, which calls for ‘global governance’ and says rich countries must shrink their economies to address climate change,” according to The Washington Times.

On Wednesday, we’ll see much the same – hypocritical finger-wagging about living small from a man who owns three homes and flies around the globe more than Superman. Gore is expected to tell Congress “the role he believes the United States should take as a leader on the environment and global warming,” wrote The New York Times.

The last time he appeared on the Hill, Gore tried to burrow into our lives in the form of new regulations, new taxes and even control of our light bulbs. That time we got Gore the “prophet,” as CBS called him.

This time, it’s likely he’ll follow the lead of his mentor James Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies. Hansen recently declared: “We have only four years left to act on climate change – America has to lead.”

What Hansen means and Gore will probably repeat, is America has to pay. Hansen proposes a global carbon tax and eliminating using coal – an energy resource the U.S. has in abundance. It’s impossible to reconcile Hansen’s prescription for more U.S. giving with a major downturn in the economy. But for the liberal elite, such inconsistencies don’t matter.

What does matter is that we embrace larger taxes and more regulation so that we live our lives the way Gore and others think we should.

Perhaps, if we’re lucky, Gore will see his shadow – dooming us to a longer chill, but saving us from more discussion of global warming until spring.

Source

Global Warming On Hold Until May (Satire)

U.S. Scientists agree – global warming has been put on hold by the powers of the universe until May, possibly even June. As ice storms rage across the country today, prominent researchers tell us that the global warming scare is over at least until the weather warms up.

Global warming, you may recall, is the process through which the planet’s surface temperature warms up due to the sun’s heat being trapped in the atmosphere. During summer months, this gives millions of people the excuse to blame each other for heat waves, unexpected and unreceived rainfall, and other geologic conditions.

“This is the modern world, and we can no longer blame the gods, as was done in ancient times,” Reported one top researcher. “Now we know that it is actually people who are to blame, and most people seem perfectly content to blame one another for planetary cycles.”

Until the third week of May, scientists are urging people to use the phrase ‘global cooling” instead. This term, while not especially accurate, is more appealing to younger people, because it contains the root word ‘cool.’

Source

Congresswoman Claims to Have Asked Gore About Global Warming on 19-Degree Inauguration Day

Rep. Michele Bachmann

Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., warns about forthcoming cap-and-trade legislation and says earth is entering into a long-term global cooling stage.

It’s a question the press didn’t dare ask, but a second-term Minnesota Republican congresswoman wasn’t afraid.

Rep. Michele Bachmann, told participants in a Jan. 26 Americans for Prosperity teleconference that at President Barack Obama’s inauguration on Jan. 20 she had asked former Vice President Al Gore if it was cold enough for him and noted this wasn’t “exactly a global warming day.” The 19-degree temperatures were too cold for even a quartet to perform a piece arranged by composer John Williams, forcing them to prerecord the performance.

“On the Inauguration Day, Dr. Tom Price [GOP U.S. congressman from Georgia] can attest to this – we were freezing to death, sitting there during the inauguration, with our blankets huddled up there,” Bachmann said. “We were asking Al Gore when he came in through the door, ‘Hey Al, is it cold enough for you down there? This isn’t exactly a global warming day.’”

According to Bachmann, the earth is entering a stage of prolonged global cooling. She cited her brother, who dismisses the theory of anthropogenic global warming.

“My brother is also a certified meteorologist,” Bachmann said. “He agrees with you. He said there is nothing to this global warming phenomenon. As a matter of fact, we are now in a long-term global cooling stage.”

Bachmann also warned about pending cap-and-trade legislation and said it would not only have an economic impact.

“The cap-and-trade legislation is something that we all need to be very worried about, because what it would do in effect is give government the right to control almost every aspect of our lives. The economic impact is one thing. The freedom impact is almost worse because almost every activity that we engage in involves energy and government would now have the right to put a tax and control energy, which means they would have a right to control almost our every move.”

Bachmann also urged people to visit an Americans for Prosperity Web site, NoStimulus.com – a site lobbying against a massive stimulus package that is set for a vote on Jan. 28.

Source

Antarctic Warming: Another Mann-made Climate Change

Michael E. Mann

WASHINGTON–(BUSINESS WIRE) — The growth in the area of the Southern Ocean covered by sea ice over the past 30 years disproves a new theory based on computer modelling of invented temperatures that suggests the Antarctic has been warming over the past 50 years, says a new paper published today by the Science and Public Policy Institute – a Washington, D.C. research organization.

A recent paper in Nature has suggested that the Antarctic had not been cooling for half a century, though temperature measurements taken by research stations on the ice-bound continent had long shown cooling.

Christopher Monckton, the paper’s author, said: “The Arctic has been warming, and there has been some loss of sea ice there, particularly in recent summers. This demonstrates the unsurprising real-world conclusion that warming melts ice.

If there had been warming in Antarctica too, the area of the Southern Ocean covered by sea ice would have shrunk over the 30 years since the satellites have been watching. Instead, the extent of Antarctic sea ice has grown – and it has grown fast enough to match the decline in the extent of Arctic sea ice. That means the Arctic has been warming and the Antarctic has been cooling.”

One of the authors of the paper suggesting “warming” of the Antarctic was Michael E. Mann of Pennsylvania State University. Dr. Mann had been the lead author of a paper also published in Nature in 1998-9, in which similar purely statistical techniques had been used to alter the temperature record. On that occasion, Dr. Mann purported to abolish the medieval warm period, when temperatures worldwide were warmer than the present. Now, he and his colleagues are attempting to abolish the cooling of Antarctica, which, like the medieval warming, suggests that the official “global warming” theory has some large gaps in it.

“Finally,” said Monckton, “there has been a global cooling trend throughout the eight years of George Bush’s presidency, though most media have somehow not reported the cooling. It would be remarkable if Antarctica, where the thermometers show temperatures plunging, had somehow bucked the global trend towards cooler weather.”

Added an actual Antarctic researcher, “I feel your study is absolutely wrong. With statistics you can make numbers go to almost any conclusion you want. It saddens me to see members of the scientific community do this for media coverage.”

The paper can be accessed here: http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/monckton/monckton_man_made.html

Click here for the Full PDF Version.

Climate Policy Crash

Lisa Jackson, EPA head, already has the authority to make everyone’s life miserable

Climate change remains at the top of President Obama’s agenda, current economic woes notwithstanding. Obama recently inveighed against energy sources that “threaten our planet,” and several of his early appointments—including Energy Secretary Stephen Chu, science adviser John Holdren, and White House energy czar Carol Browner—signal the importance of climate-change policy to this administration.

During the campaign, Obama endorsed an 80-percent reduction in greenhouse-gas emissions by 2050, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said she hopes to move climate-change legislation before the end of the year. California Representative Henry Waxman’s successful coup against longtime Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman John Dingell of Michigan makes congressional action more likely.

Even were Congress to have second thoughts, the climate-policy die is cast. In April 2007, the Supreme Court held, in Massachusetts v. EPA, that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has the authority to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act. Thus no new legislation is required for the Obama EPA to begin crafting rules to control the emission of carbon dioxide and other gases from automobile tailpipes, power plants, boilers, and more. Like it or not, EPA administrator Lisa Jackson and her team have ample authority to impose controls on the most ubiquitous by-product of modern industrial civilization.

Indeed, they may not have a choice. Justice Stevens’s majority opinion in Massachusetts did not command the EPA to begin regulating, but that is the practical effect of the Court’s decision. At issue was Section 202 of the Clean Air Act, which requires the EPA to impose emission standards on new motor vehicles for any air pollutants which in the EPA’s “judgment cause, or contribute to, air pollution which may reasonably be anticipated to endanger public health or welfare.” The Court decided that greenhouse gases are “air pollutants,” and so the EPA must set standards if it believes climate change “may reasonably be anticipated to endanger public health or welfare.”

The EPA would have a hard time claiming not to believe that, even if the Obama administration were so inclined: In numerous documents and statements, the agency has reiterated its belief that climate change is a significant concern, and that a gradual warming could have deleterious effects on health and welfare. Even during the Bush administration, the EPA endorsed federal action to “reduce the risk” of global warming. The EPA has done everything short of publishing a formal statement that climate change “may reasonably be anticipated to endanger public health or welfare,” and no court would readily let it off the hook. Thus, Massachusetts effectively requires the imposition of carbon-dioxide controls on new cars and trucks.

But that’s not the only regulation affected by the Court’s conclusion that greenhouse gases are air pollutants under the act. Section 111 of the act, for instance, requires the agency to set standards for some stationary sources of emissions “which may reasonably be anticipated to endanger public health or welfare.” So if the EPA must regulate automotive emissions under Section 202, it must regulate emissions from power plants and factories under Section 111 as well.

And there’s more. The act requires the issuance of permits and the imposition of technological controls on facilities that emit more than 250 tons of regulated pollutants annually. For traditional pollutants, such as sulfur oxides, these provisions capture only the really big emitters—large power plants and the like. Applied to carbon dioxide, however, the 250-ton standard could encompass many commercial and residential buildings, increasing the number of regulated facilities tenfold, if not more.

A plain reading of the Clean Air Act would also seem to require that the EPA set a National Ambient Air Quality Standard (NAAQS) for carbon dioxide, and then force state pollution-control agencies to develop plans to ensure that metropolitan areas comply. This is a fool’s errand. There is simply no way for state and local regulators to ensure that individual cities, or even larger regions, meet an air-quality standard for a globally dispersed atmospheric pollutant. Local emissions could be reduced to zero, and a given city could still violate the NAAQS because of emissions elsewhere. It would be a pointless regulatory exercise, but after Massachusetts v. EPA it is the law.

The regulatory train thus set in motion by the Supreme Court will move apace unless Congress stops it through legislative action. What should such legislation look like? Some who would prefer to replace existing Clean Air Act rules with a cap-and-trade emissions-control regime have labored under the delusion that such a regime could be adopted by administrative fiat. Unlikely. Last year a federal court struck down the Bush administration’s effort to create a regional cap-and-trade system for traditional air pollutants. If the Clean Air Interstate Rule was invalid under the Clean Air Act, there is little hope for implementing a greenhouse-gas trading system. Read rest…