In the wake of yesterday’s important Supreme Court ruling on climate change, we can’t forget that the global warming deniers still have friends in the White House.
Remember that last year, the Supreme Court told the White House to respect the Geneva Conventions. The White House responded by passing the Torture Bill, thumbing its nose at the slow-moving judicial process.
The Supreme Court majority, not being activists like the conservative minority, didn’t tell the EPA exactly what to do about global warming, if anything.
It told the EPA to follow the Clean Air law. It told them CO2 is a pollutant under the law. And if they’re not to going combat it, their reasons have to adhere to the law, not be random and made-up.
But the ball is in the EPA’s court. And like with the Torture Bill, Bush and his EPA can still be expected to act in bad-faith.
Without a new, strong law, codifying a 50-year strategy to combat climate change and signed by the president, we shouldn’t expect real progress.
And we shouldn’t expect that to happen until we have a new president.
The Court ruling is still huge. It denied the conservative judicial activists the ability to undermine the democratically created law and strip the EPA of the authority to act.
But the imperative for Congress remains the same: craft a strong bill, build public support for it, and create a mandate for the next occupant of the Oval Office.
