Thirty years from now, what will be the Bush administration’s most enduring legacy? The Iraq War? Post 9/11 detainee interrogation methods? My guess is that it will be the failure to issue one single, measly rule policing greenhouse gases that cause global warming.

The Washington Post’s Juliet Eilperin and R. Jeffrey Smith give a must-read synopsis of what is now known about the administration’s global warming stalling. Their narrative begins 15 months ago when the Supreme Court ruled, in Massachusetts v. EPA, that the Environmental Protection Agency must regulate greenhouse gases if they are found to cause public endangerment.

The EPA in December found that — surprise, surprise — greenhouse gases are economically disastrous, will significantly alter the natural world and are already causing changes in weather patterns. But the White House simply ignored this report. Consequently, the EPA will likely announce today that they will re-open the comment period as to whether there’s a public endangerment that merits regulation.

It appears from the Post’s account that the focus isn’t on a certain administration official — say, Dick Cheney or Susan Dudley, regulatory affairs director for the Office of Management and Budget — who brought us to this stage. Instead, numerous officials and career employees have either distorted the global warming facts or not done enough to challenge the distorters.

Hopefully one day we’ll know the full story and won’t be in Siberia when we’re reading it.-MB

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