Supreme Court Short Note: Convert To Global Warming Religion Or Die

A gang of blue states and enviro-whacko groups have decided that American automobile emissions, even though they admit that these emissions account for only 4 percent of alleged greenhouse gases, simply MUST be regulated by EPA. As liberals always do when they lose in the political and scientific process, they turn to the courts for some bench legislation, and this time they have hit the big one. SCOTUS has officially established global warming voodoo as the state religion.

In a long opinion that reads like a transcript of a sermon by Grand High Llama Algore, the Supremes cherry-pick the facts they like, mash them up with enviro-propaganda and laughable Chicken Littleisms ("These rising seas have already begun to swallow Massachusetts' coastal land."), and apply this muddle to the ever-elastic Clean Air Act. Then they claim that all they are ordering the Environmental Protection Agency to do is "decide whether greenhouse gases cause or contribute to environmental change" and they don't care whether or not "EPA must make an endangerment finding, or whether policy concerns can inform EPA's actions in the event that it makes such a finding"--but their wholesale endorsement of absolutely everything the enviro-whackos say or write leaves no doubt that if EPA does not prostrate itself before the new state religion, they will be right back in front of the Nine Robed in Black, who will then order them to Believe, and to Do Something. Justice Stevens wrote this travesty, and in his sway are Kennedy, Souter, Ginsburg, and Breyer. You could NOT have knocked me over with a feather.

It's left to the Dread Chief Justice Roberts ("I Am Here For Your Souuuuul"), Scalia, Thomas, and Alito to point out that EPA already HAS looked at this stuff many times before and respectfully declined to substitute religion for science, seeing as how the earth has been blowing hot and cold by for squillions of years without human intervention, and "this Court has no business substituting its own desired outcome for the reasoned judgment of the responsible agency." What a concept. Scalia, in the second dissent, even said "flatulence" (if only in a footnote), to the delight of Real Men everywhere. But seriously folks, Roberts observes that now the reach of redressability extends to this case, where 80 percent of greenhouse gases come from OUTSIDE the United States and only 4 percent of GHGs come from American cars, to confer Article III standing on Taxachusetts because the ocean is now swallowing Martha's Vineyard or something. (Hey, somebody tell Ted Kennedy it'll also submerge those offshore windmills!) "The Court ignores the complexities of global warming, ... using the dire nature of global warming itself as a bootstrap for finding causation and redressability." That's it in a nutshell.

Anybody who wants to read this, please do so at http://www.supremecourtus.gov/opinions/06pdf/05-1120.pdf . It's 66 pages, so brew a pot of fair trade coffee and pour in some cream from non-flatulent cows and sugar harvested by union labor. Also, bring your brain.