“The United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit issued a decision affirming EPA’s first round of greenhouse gas (GHG) regulations in all respects.”
Last year, I outlined the case being made against the EPA’s issuance of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions regulations. The case was being brought before the Washington D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals by a group of petitioners which have become collectively known as the Coalition for Responsible Regulation, and made up of large number of businesses, business associations and several states. The petitioners argued on several different grounds that the EPA was wrong in the way that it determined that GHGs were an endangerment to the public health and welfare as well as in the manner in which it was going about issuing regulations.
Earlier this week, the Court handed down its decision—a unanimous finding in support of the EPA on virtually all counts. This was very disappointing. For starters, there are at least two major points of science where the Court went terribly astray. The first deals with whether or not the EPA had to consider such things such as adaptation when making its endangerment finding. And the second deals with whether or not the EPA was “reasonable” in its consideration of the science of climate change.
In the first case, the Court decided that such considerations were not part and parcel of what the EPA had to take into account when determining whether or not greenhouse gas emissions may “reasonably be anticipated to endanger public health or welfare.” From the Court’s decision:
