EPA Slams Door on Climate Change

By David Malakoff
ScienceNOW Daily News
11 July 2008

Arguing that it's the wrong tool for the job, the Bush Administration today said that it will not use the nation's leading clean air law to regulate emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. "It would be irresponsible" to use the Clean Air Act to attack climate change, said Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Stephen Johnson, arguing that the strategy would produce decades of legal paralysis and economic disruption and few benefits.

Instead, EPA released a 588-page document that asks the public to comment on a dizzying array of issues raised by regulating greenhouse gases. Johnson says he hopes the document will help convince Congress and the public that new laws are needed to deal with global warming.

Few climate-policy experts were surprised by Johnson's move, which essentially hands off any decision on what the United States will do about climate change to the next president and Congress. "They've been delaying action, and this is more of the same," says Jody Freeman, head of the Environmental Law Program at Harvard Law School.

Today's announcement capped more than 8 years of debate within President George W. Bush's inner circle over the wisdom of using the Clean Air Act to regulate greenhouse gases. As a presidential candidate in 2000, Bush supported the idea. But he quickly backpedaled once he took office. Then, in a landmark 2007 ruling, the Supreme Court said that EPA must regulate greenhouse gases under the law if it found that the gases threatened human health (ScienceNOW, 2 April 2007).

Initially, it appeared that EPA might respond to the ruling by issuing preliminary regulations. But as material included in today's document makes clear, many other government agencies opposed that idea. In one letter, for instance, White House science adviser John Marburger said that using the Clean Air Act was a bad idea, "given the very weak ability of science to predict how nations, markets, and individuals respond to their environments." As a result, Johnson said, it was impossible to address in a timely fashion all the legal and political questions raised by the court's ruling.