THE US Environmental Protection Agency used to insist that it lacked the authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions - until the Supreme Court ruled otherwise a year ago. Since then, scientific research has provided new evidence for the urgency of acting to slow global warming. But the Bush administration drags its feet anyway, leaving the matter in bureaucratic limbo. Now Massachusetts is rightly leading a suit by 18 states to force the EPA to rule that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases emitted by cars are harmful and to take measures against them.
Such a ruling by the EPA could lead to federal requirements that vehicles emit fewer greenhouse gases, either through higher fuel economy standards or inducements to consumers to buy smaller vehicles or hybrids. But the US government will still be stuck in neutral on action against global warming until the EPA stops evading the issue.
EPA head Stephen Johnson said last year that he would make a decision and propose regulations by the end of 2007. And in fact, the agency did acknowledge the harm of greenhouse gases in a ruling on California's plan to limit vehicle emissions on cars sold there. (EPA rejected that plan anyway.) Meanwhile, according to the suit by the 18 states, an EPA proposal specifically responding to the Supreme Court decision went to the White House's Office of Management and Budget in December. Nothing has been heard of it since.
Now the EPA is talking about beginning an entirely new rule-making process, with a comment period extending into the fall, on the greenhouse gas emissions from all sources, not just the motor vehicles that were the focus of the Supreme Court decision a year ago.
The EPA should have long since begun the regulation of carbon dioxide that George Bush pledged as a presidential candidate in 2000. The initial petition for a rule-making on cars' greenhouse emissions dates to 1999, and since then thousands of citizens and organizations have commented on it. Starting the regulatory process from scratch now looks more like a way to punt the issue to the next administration. Sure enough, an EPA spokesman said yesterday that the "timing is unlikely" that a rule will be in place before the end of President Bush's term.
Baseball old-timers used to say that Shoeless Joe Jackson's glove was where triples went to die. In the waning days of an administration that has made denial of global warming one of its hallmarks, the budget office seems to be the final resting place for proposals for action on climate change.
