Global fallout

Speaker Nancy Pelosi on yesterday's Supreme Court decision affirming the EPA's authority to regulate greenhouse gases and to put teeth in the regulation of power plants:

The Bush Administration is becoming increasingly isolated in its refusal to take action to prevent global warming. The scientific consensus on global warming is rock solid. The House and Senate are moving ahead. The Administration insisted that the Environmental Protection Agency’s hands were tied, but the Supreme Court today debunked that argument. It’s time for the Administration to join the search for solutions to climate change.

Regarding pollutants from power plants and factories, the Administration has used the regulatory process as a backdoor way to rewrite clean air laws so that the President’s corporate allies don’t have to upgrade their air pollution controls when they upgrade their plants. The Supreme Court put a stop to this practice today. We will all breathe more freely—literally—as a result.

Senator Barbara Boxer, chair of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works:

This decision puts the wind at our back. It takes away the excuse the administration has been using for not taking action to deal with global warming pollution. We will be calling the EPA before the committee later this month to ask them how they plan to use their authority under the Clean Air Act to begin to address the challenge of global warming. We now have a two-track process for addressing global warming – comprehensive legislation and administrative action.

More reactions to Massachusetts v. EPA.

Taking the Latex gloves off

A powerful salvo in one of the year's most-underreported stories, the Bush administration's manipulation of scientific research, is launched in today's New York Times.

[P]olitical action by scientists has not been so forceful since 1964, when Barry Goldwater's statements promoting the deployment of battlefield nuclear weapons spawned the creation of the 100,000-member group Scientists and Engineers for Johnson.

This year, 48 Nobel laureates dropped all pretense of nonpartisanship as they signed a letter endorsing Senator John Kerry. "Unlike previous administrations, Republican and Democratic alike, the Bush administration has ignored unbiased scientific advice in the policy making that is so important to our collective welfare," they wrote. The critics include members of past Republican administrations.

Dr. James Hansen, a NASA climate expert who has been cited by the Bush administration in support of its policies, is now one of the critics.

Under the Bush administration, he said, "they're picking and choosing information according to the answer that they want to get, and they've appointed so many people who are just focused on this that they really are having an impact on the day-to-day flow of information."

It's disturbing testimony from the reality-based community.