"Clearing the air"
The Guardian
April 5, 2007
By Sasha Abramsky

View the document (pdf)

Senior Fellow Sasha Abramsky writes, "Thanks to the supreme court's ruling this week, states and cities across America can finally start tackling climate change."

Clearing the air
Thanks to the supreme court's ruling this week, states and cities across America can finally start tackling climate change.

By Sasha Abramsky
April 5, 2007 7:00 PM

This week's ruling by the US supreme court essentially mandating that the Environmental Protection Agency regulate greenhouse gas emissions will, I think, one day be seen as a turning point in American politics.

For the past six years, the Bush administration has essentially run public policy on faith. Scientific studies indicate educating students about safe sex does more to prevent the spread of HIV/Aids than programmes that preach abstinence? Fuggedaboudit. It doesn't gel with prevailing religious fervor. Science suggests evolution is far less than just one among many equally valid theories? No way - that's not what the Bible says. The overwhelming preponderance of evidence indicates that global warming is real and is directly tied to human activity? Aggressively pretend the evidence doesn't exist, and hope that faith in its nonexistence trumps all the evidence to the contrary.
It's been a good run, a remarkable exercise in the power of blind faith over reason. Now, though, even the deeply conservative justices who make up the majority on the supreme court - or at least enough of them to matter - seem to be saying that enough is enough.

Briefly, the ruling indicates the evidence is in and the evidence clearly demonstrates greenhouse gas emissions are altering global climate systems. As a follow-on to this, because the EPA is mandated to protect the environment through issuing regulations on, say, water and air quality, the court said the Bush administration had no right to fail to regulate greenhouse gases. The lack of regulations is, the court said, simply no longer an acceptable option.

That's important, because despite their willingness to trample private rights when it comes to, say, eavesdropping or warrantless searches, despite their willingness to magnify federal power when it comes to enforcing drug policy or, to take a recent case, selectively hiring and firing US attorneys, on the environment the Bushies have been pleading impotence for too long. I think their rationale goes something like this: "We're not convinced all those noxious greenhouse gases are actually hurting the environment, but even if we were convinced, our hands are tied by our fealty to the American Way - by the leeway we have always given private organizations and local political entities to go their own way."

Despite the hoopla around the ruling, in many ways the court was simply recognizing an on-the-ground reality. Faced with an extraordinary federal intransigence on global warming, for several years now cities and states across America have been crafting their own responses to the crisis.

A lot's been written on America's refusal to sign onto Kyoto. At the federal level, the government certainly deserves the opprobrium. Locally though, cities like Denver, Madison, Salt Lake, San Francisco, Seattle and many others have significantly reduced their own emissions. And at a state level, regional alliances in the West and Northeast, in particular, are springing up to force utility companies to lower their emissions.

California, itself the fifth-largest economy on earth, is about to pass the world's most stringent emissions-control regulations for automobiles; and several other states are likely to join up with California in enforcing these controls. Absurdly, the Feds had attempted to block California from doing this. Tuesday's ruling, according to the legal scholars who have been all over the airwaves in the hours since, has put the kibosh on that. Now, California will almost certainly be allowed to forge ahead on introducing its new regulations. Because it's the biggest state in America, the effects will soon be felt nationwide.

Since 2004, many of the mayors most interested in using their positions to promote public transit systems, to encourage urban redevelopment in place of suburban sprawl, and to craft more sensible local environmental protocols have been loosely knit together into a group called the New Cities Project, the brainchild of Madison mayor Dave Cieslewicz and the Madison-based thinktank the Center on Wisconsin Strategy (COWS).

COWS, and its director, University of Wisconsin law professor Joel Rogers, has long promoted what it calls "High Road" politics. Essentially, this boils down to a belief that long-term strategising about local economic arrangements and environmental concerns produces better societal results than short-term profiteering.

The NCP does not craft template legislation or local ordinances. Rather it serves the function of an intellectual salon, allowing mayors at the biennial gatherings to bounce ideas off of each other out of the glare of the media spotlight. "Mayors are all closet policy wonks," asserts Rogers. "They know about this stuff. They think about it. They're very visible, and they are extremely interested in making stuff work."

Many of these mayors are also involved in the US Mayors Climate Protection Agreement, a group established in 2005 by Seattle's mayor Greg Nickels to ensure localities implement the Kyoto protocols to curb greenhouse gas emissions even absent action from the federal government. So far, over 400 cities, the majority of them on or near the two coasts, have signed on.

Given all that's been happening, oftentimes under the radar, at the city and state level, it's nice to see the Feds finally being ordered to play catch-up. Reason rather than faith seems to finally be winning a place at the table in DC. There's only one thing to say in response: thank God!