Global Warming: The Issue of a Lifetime in Court

November 26, 2006 – Vol. 11 No. 36

GLOBAL WARMING: THE ISSUE OF A LIFETIME IN COURT.

Who knows what they’re thinking? When the US Supreme Court hears a case it’s supposed to issue a decision based on the facts, the findings put before them in the court. Their final ruling is supposed to be an interpretation of the law, or perhaps the constitution, based on what’s presented and prior rulings.

The Court is supposed to be apolitical, evenhanded, neutral and fair. The judges aren’t supposed to be swayed by outside influences, prior knowledge or their own personal beliefs.

But that’s not the reality of course.

All of us - all of us including those judges - are influenced by what we hear and see around us. It’s hard not to have opinions. It’s even harder to ignore them.

Global warming has been heavily debated, researched and publicized for nearly twenty years. Behind the scenes scientists have been concerned longer than that.

Unless judges on the Supreme Court live in a vacuum - which of course they don’t - each of them must have some deeply entrenched opinions that possibly they don’t even realize they have.

Global warming, more than international terrorism, is the issue of our lifetime. The changes that need to made to stop it, or even reverse it, would mean major and dramatic changes to the world’s economies, societies, and our daily lives. It’s hard not have opinions about that.

The decision by the Court in “Massachusetts vs EPA,” as to whether or not the US Environmental Protection Agency must regulate carbon dioxide from vehicles, is due in mid-2007. At that time a decision that would favor Massachusetts could be a monumental change for the auto industry marketing in the US as well as the oil companies. Fuel efficiency or alternative fuels would be the law of the land.

But even if the ruling is against Massachusetts, eleven states and others that brought the case to the Court (that is rule in favor of the EPA that it can’t regulate carbon dioxide) all may not be lost. Much depends on how the final decision is written.

It could be written so that the next Congress or the next President can rewrite the law.

Or, in a worst case scenario, it can be written so that the states can’t act on their own to regulate vehicle greenhouse gas emissions.

Even if that worst case happens the states CAN move ahead with every possible effort to bring carbon-free, carbon-neutral or extremely low carbon emitting vehicles to their states. They can build markets for them, create incentives for people to buy them and, yes, they can even create opportunities to build new green vehicles themselves.

If the major automobile companies won’t provide the vehicles they want, the states can sidestep around them, and thus sidestep around the EPA and Washington itself.

Imagine the market the states could create if they banded together to build their own green car and truck companies? Those states, Massachusetts, California, Connecticut, Illinois, Maine, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Washington include some of the wealthiest and populous. California, in particular, already has many of the bits and pieces needed to build a full-fledged green vehicle industry, and it seems to moving in that direction. All that’s really missing there is the mass production lines. If all those states teamed up with California a green car industry could be built rapidly. What a market they would have!

The embedded car companies might resist, but the threat might be strong enough for them to jump rapidly on the green vehicle bandwagon - which they are slowing jumping on anyway.

Green cars are the future whether the Supreme Court says so or not.