The New York Times’ John Broder looks at the Obama administration’s overall failure to do anything big yet about global warming. This weekend the administration and other world leaders conceded that the upcoming United Nations climate talks will produce no hard agreements on capping carbon emissions that cause global warming.

I looked at this issue of administration inaction in my piece on the FutureGen “clean coal” plant that will likely come to Illinois. One issue that Broder doesn’t get much into is that the Environmental Protection Agency can make their own carbon caps absent Congressional approval. In fact the 2007 Supreme Court decision Massachusetts v. EPA mandated EPA had to regulate carbon under the Clean Air Act.

The Bush administration infamously flouted the decision, suppressing reports from EPA staff scientists. Meanwhile, Obama EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson has announced her intention to, down the line, propose a regulation that would limit carbon emissions from the highest polluting power plants.  Yet the EPA response by both administrations is broadly similar: Bush said he didn’t want EPA to have first say on global warming, because Congress had to do something first. He cited the December 2007 energy bill as a reason for EPA to defer action. Today Obama says it is up to Congress to pass a cap-and-trade bill and that it would be politically unwise for his administration to do something about global warming without Congress’s approval.

In theory, that makes sense: capping carbon is a momentous public policy choice that should require Congressional approval (though the Supreme Court would assert that Congress effectively approved it when they passed the 1990 Clean Air Act). Any type of successful long-term policy that considers alternative energy sources will require legislation.

But doesn’t there come a point (maybe not this year) that the administration starts to consider the worldwide consequences of global warming and the feelings of the international community as more important than the feelings of lawmakers? Among climate scientists, there is no debate that the U.S. needs to do something now to reduce carbon levels. Why should the administration, then, leave a debate to members of Congress driven more by feared short-term economic costs than a well-documented, long-term global catastrophe?

Comment RSS - You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.