...for the very useful, informative comments.  How is it that you were in the court for this historic case?

Robert Delfs

  Justin your commentaries are much better and more useful than a lot of what I am seeing in the news!

regards,

patrick

Robert's question requires a bit of a confession. I'm actually so dedicated (or insane) that I arrived outside the Supreme Court at 3:00 AM to join the public line.  

In my defense, I was the 24th person in line - and there are only 50 seats.  I believe that the 50th person arrived sometime around 4:15.

-Justin

How so?  Does not a legal precedent in this case actually open the door to a much greater GHG reduction by forcing the ePA to not only raise standards once, but keep raising mileage standards periodically until the limits of technology actually make further improvements impossible?

Serial plugin hybrid vehicles can average over 200 miles on a galon of gas right now.  that's a lot of room to raise standards gradually a few percent per year.

As Al Gore says in "An Inconvenient Truth" as other nations, like Japan, have raised mileage standards, their share of vehicle sales has grown and US carmaker's sales have dropped.

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog

Yes, Justin Pidot, very well done.  I hope you are right, that including CO2 as a "pollutant" covered in the EPA's mandate will turn out not to be problematic.

Linda Greenhouse, the famous Supreme Court reporter for the NY Times, mentioned a nice argument by Justice Breyers, on "standing": Would we refuse to regulate child pornography, because there is plenty of it off-shore?

Chickens are our cousins! So are other sensitive animals! Enough is enough! No more factory farms!

Excellent!  It's good to see the Bush administration's recalcitrance on the global warming fight has finally made it to the judicial powers that be.  It's too bad it took this long.

One of the comments I sent to the U.S. EPA admininstor when he was deciding to accept or reject responsibility for regulating CO2 emissions from tailpipes was that air quality in the U.S. will get worse with global warming (because ozone levels and fine particle in the air will naturally increase with rising temperature and humidity).  I wish someone had brought that up to the court, since the EPA regulates those pollutants now already.

Scalia's comments seem to reflect an understanding that "the atmosphere" is somewhere off in the wild blue yonder and thus shouldn't concern us much.  Someone needs to tell him that the atmosphere is also all around us here on the surface, and that we breathe it and live in it everyday - CO2, oxygen, nitrogen, water vapor and all!  

Jay Leno had Al Gore on his show last night.  Jay asked Big Al to fill him in on the case.  Big Al mentioned what Justice Scalia said - that he didn't want to deal with the issue of global warming, and then he added that the judge should have felt the same way about the 2000 elections.  (Score one for the good guy.)

Has the court finished hearing introductory arguments already or are there more to come?  Anyone know?

The 2.5% number that Massachusetts relied on in their standing argument represents a projected 40% reduction in GHG emissions from domestic automobiles (once the regulations are fully implemented and the vehicle fleet has turned over).  U.S. auto emissions account for about 6% of total world emissions.

In terms of their standing argument, Massachusetts faced some difficult choices.  As amazingdrx notes, it is possible (maybe even likely) that regulation under the Clean Air Act would force technology improvements that could reduce greenhouse gases even more.  Also, a Massachusetts win could pave the way for EPA regulation of power plant emissions under the Clean Air Act.

However, the Court insists that litigants demonstrate standing, especially redressability, without relying on a speculative or overly attenuated chain of events.

For instance, Massachusetts did provide declarations that suggested that other countries would likely adopt emission control technologies developed in the U.S.  However, the Massachusetts attorney stated that "although we believe we have shown other governments will follow suit, we are not in any sense relying on that"

And this was probably wise.  Chief Justice Roberts didn't hide his distaste for the argument that other countries might follow the U.S. lead, saying "that strikes me as sort of spitting out conjecture on conjecture."  

I don't know the inner workings of the brains behind the Massachusetts legal strategy, but my guess is that they tried to strike a balance.  On the one hand, they wanted to identify significant positive impacts that could flow out of the case.  On the other, they didn't want to give the impression that they were stretching.