Suit Cites Global Warming to Mask a Grab for Power
Some lawsuits are filed in pursuit of just compensation. Some are undertaken in the hope for a windfall. Still others are filed in the quest for political power. And so 11 attorneys general, three large cities and a number of large environmental lobbies have joined in legal actions arguing that the Environmental Protection Agency be forced under federal law to regulate carbon dioxide emissions from motor vehicles.
The stated goal is a reduction of the purported dangers of global warming; the actual goal is the acquisition of political power -- the power to regulate -- over whole industries in major geographic regions.
For the record:
12:00 a.m. Dec. 17, 2003 For The Record
Los Angeles Times Wednesday December 17, 2003 Home Edition California Part B Page 13 Editorial Pages Desk 1 inches; 37 words Type of Material: Correction
Scientists -- A Dec. 5 commentary referred to 17,000 atmospheric scientists who signed a 2001 petition challenging theories about global warming. The signers were scientists with global warming expertise, but not all of them were atmospheric scientists.
Let us review first the scientific evidence. No one disputes that atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide have increased about 25% over the last century. As shown by atmospheric physicists Sallie L. Baliunas and Willie Soon of Harvard University, more than 80% of this increase occurred after the surface temperature peaked around 1940, a sequence of events inconsistent with the conventional global warming hypothesis.
The same researchers have found that ocean sedimentary evidence suggests that surface temperatures have varied about 3.6 degrees Centigrade over the last three millenniums. Now rising from the Little Ice Age, temperatures are a bit below or at the 3,000-year average. According to prominent astrophysicists at the University of Alabama, since 1979, satellite, weather balloon and surface measurements suggest increases in temperatures of less than 1 degree Centigrade for the next 100 years. Other recent projections point to similarly modest warming over the next century, of about 1.5 degrees Centigrade.
Most important, climatologist Patrick J. Michaels at the University of Virginia has shown that prospective warming will occur for the most part where it will do little harm -- the coldest and driest air masses, particularly Siberia and western North America in the winter.
Such data explain why the purported scientific “consensus” on global warming is illusory: More than 17,000 atmospheric scientists signed a 2001 statement challenging the conventional wisdom.
The position of the attorneys general has little merit legally. They claim that carbon dioxide legally is a pollutant that must be regulated under the Clean Air Act. But the Clean Air Act has no section on carbon dioxide per se, and Congress failed to pass a policy on climate regulation when the act was amended in 1990. No section of the act authorizes regulation in the context of global climate change, and two specifically preclude it. The Clean Air Act amendments contain no provision for carbon dioxide emission standards for vehicles. Only the research and development provisions of the act mention carbon dioxide, stating that nothing “shall be construed to authorize the imposition on any person of air pollution control requirements.”
The legal effort of the attorneys general turns federalism -- the constitutionally greater powers of states and localities -- on its head. Instead of the preservation of political competition among localities and states, the principle underlying the legal action is the right of a single state or even a single individual to force the federal government to impose the same regulatory mandates upon all. Regulation imposed by a given state or nation would have virtually no effect on atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, but whatever the effect it would not justify the erosion of constitutional processes.
Nor should we ignore the large economic cost of regulating carbon dioxide emissions from vehicles; those costs would be hundreds or thousands of dollars per household per year, hundreds or thousands of additional highway deaths per year caused by the downsizing of autos (the only practical way to cut emissions), and substantial public-sector costs needed to compensate those bearing heavy losses because of new regulatory requirements.
Both substantial global warming and efforts to reduce it through regulation would yield less “economic capital” (food production systems, technology, medical care, shelter, transportation, etc.), higher interest rates and lower wages. Regulation guarantees these effects, while gradual warming, even if it occurs, allows market-driven adaptation as the evidence emerges over time.
Because future generations would prefer to inherit more, not less, economic capital -- of which the environment is but one component -- it is watchful waiting that will serve those future generations, particularly given the scientific understanding and evidence now available.
The current effort to reduce carbon dioxide emissions is unnecessary, legally suspect and a blatant attempt to gain the regulatory power to help or hinder particular industries and groups -- that is, to transfer wealth politically.
Moreover, the popular election of attorneys general and their right to run for higher office create a perverse incentive to use legal processes for political purposes, an outcome that is obvious and deeply troubling.
