So much is at stake, and the people arguing and deciding the fight over EPA’s greenhouse gas regulations are frustratingly clueless.
During today’s arguments at the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit over the EPA’s greenhouse gas rules, Reagan-appointee and Chief Judge David Sentelle and Clinton-appointee David Tatel were reportedly upset because industry lawyers seemed to want to re-argue global warming science, despite the Supreme Court ruling in Massachusetts v. EPA.
According to Greenwire:
Patrick Day of the Coalition for Responsible Regulation argued that the finding “erroneously decided to completely divorce” the risk assessment from the agency’s regulatory decisions. EPA’s inadequate endangerment finding, he said, authorizes “ineffective and perhaps even fruitless regulations.”
Judge David Tatel, who was particularly aggressive in questioning both sides, sharply dismissed Day’s logic.
“I do not understand your argument,” he said. “Why don’t you try again?”
Tatel and Sentelle both seemed concerned that the petitioners were asking the court to overturn the scientific basis for EPA’s endangerment finding or the Supreme Court’s decision in Massachusetts. Both judges indicated that was not their job.
Earth to all involved, as we reported in “Supremes retreat from climate panic,” the global warming rationale of Massachusetts v. EPA was entirely trashed in the June 2011 Supreme Court decision, AEP v. Connecticut.
So while the legal holding of Massachusetts v. EPA stands, it’s factual basis are very much in dispute.
Let’s hope they all try again.
[h/t Chris Horner]
As I remember, it was revealed upon hid death, the chief scientist who linked smoking tobacco to lung cancer, was being secretly funded by the chemical company manufacturing a red food dye, the main suspect at the time.
When WHO completed, “The largest, longest and most thorough examination into the effects of passive smoking ever undertaken.” A few weeks after pre-publishing the study’s conclusions, resulting in the current persecution of smokers (I’m a long term non-smoker, so have no personal axe to grind) they discovered the actual study showed that secondary smoke was harmless and that the children of smokers appear to develop a partial immunity from lung cancer. The actual results of the study had to be leaked as the WHO, a political organisation, refused to publish them.
It was a clear case of causing mischief designed to demonise a section of the public, first smokers, then people made obese, deliberately, by adding chemicals to their soda pop and foods.
False science and scare tactics, the BIG LIE as favoured by Hitler, If only he had though of using anthropogenic global warming, as a fraud to finance his Nazi Empire.
On the one hand the federal courts are supposed to be the gatekeepers for good scientific evidence, on the other, the federal judges are consistently neglectful of that resposibility.
For example Gladys Kessler was the presiding judge in the second hand smoke/rico tobacco trial and never entertained a Daubert challenge hearing on the admissibility of studies with less than proof effects–studies that violate the rules of the Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence published by the Federal Judiicial Center (get this, Kessler is a supervising judge for teh 3rd edition that was just published by the National Academies Press..
Then if you look, to their briefs and arguments the lawyers for the tobacco companies never advanced the argument and insisted on a Daubert hearing to vet the science assertions. They never briefed on appeal any rationale for reversible error based on Kessler just letting in Jon Samet’s testimony–much of which was based on studies that were less than enought to argue proof of toxic causation.
So Kessler just let everthing in because she was just in love with the star witness, Jon Samet. What’s to account for taste?