It has become abundantly clear that the Bush administration needs to stop stalling and enact strict regulation of tailpipe emissions of greenhouse gases.
The U.S. Supreme Court said as much last month when it told the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency it could not sidestep the authority to regulate heat-trapping gases in auto emissions.
Yet, leaders in California, Connecticut and 10 other states find themselves pleading with the agency for permission to do what the EPA has refused to do: Crack down on the emission of heat-trapping gases.
In a recent newspaper commentary, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Connecticut Gov. Jodi Rell contended that the tougher emissions standards proposed by the dozen states would by 2020 reduce emissions by to an amount equal to taking 74 million cars off the road for a year.
For more than a year, the EPA has refused the states’ requests to go beyond federal standards in regulating carbon emissions.
At a daylong hearing in Washington Tuesday, California officials asked federal regulators for the authority to enforce stricter standards. California Attorney General Jerry Brown said the administration was “acting in collusion with the auto and oil industries” and threatened to sue the EPA.
Indeed, leadership on the issue of global warming increasingly is coming from statehouses around the country. While the action is laudable, it only makes more glaring the lack of federal initiative.
The Supreme Court had harsh words for the dallying of the Bush administration. “EPA has offered no reasoned explanation for its refusal to decide whether greenhouse gases cause or contribute to climate change,” Justice John Paul Stevens wrote for the majority.
You’d think that might have prompted the administration into immediate action. Instead, the president recently signed an executive order giving several federal agencies until the end of 2008 to put together regulations that would regulate tailpipe emissions and cut gasoline consumption.
The trouble is, we could wait until the end of next year and get a raft of weak regulations that don’t amount to a serious effort toward decreasing the amount of carbon we spew into the atmosphere.
There is no time to waste. A United Nations panel recently issued a report saying the world must stabilize greenhouse gas emissions within eight years to avoid disastrous effects of global warming.
It is a problem that must be attacked on multiple fronts, including auto emissions. While we applaud the states for moving quickly, it’s imperative that the EPA step up with nationwide rules to address this important issue.
