The key event in the Environmental Protection
Agency’s campaign to regulate carbon dioxide as a pollutant came on April 2,
2007. It was the Supreme Court’s decision in Massachusetts v.
Environmental Protection Agency.
Justice John Paul Stevens, writing for a five-member majority, held that the
EPA had a duty to decide whether greenhouse gas emissions from new vehicles are
contributing to “air pollution which may reasonably be anticipated to endanger
public health or welfare.”
Six years later, the apocalyptic predictions about
global warming have not been borne out, notwithstanding the dire rhetoric of Justice
Stevens’s opinion. The earth’s temperature has remained stable in the face of
increasing concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Indeed,
according to measurements
from the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia, “The Earth's
average temperature warmed by 1.4ºF (0.8ºC) between the 1850s and 2000s, mostly
during 1911-1944 and 1976-1998”—before the upsurge of carbon dioxide
concentrations in the atmosphere over the last 15 years.
