Global warming: no more excuses

First, science confirmed the reality of global warming. Now, the U.S. Supreme Court's reprimand of the Bush administration has cut through the legal impediments for dealing with climate change.

Global warming is an environmental challenge to be addressed, not avoided, and the court's decision clears the legal and bureaucratic landscape for deciding how best to proceed. Real conversations can begin. Monday's split decision, with its impatient tone, swept aside excuses and stalling by the Environmental Protection Agency for its refusal to regulate greenhouse gases, including the carbon dioxide in auto emissions.

States, including Washington, prodded the administration to take a lead on climate change, but the EPA responded with claims that it did not have statutory authority, that links to rising temperatures were not established and domestic decisions could complicate foreign-policy issues.

If EPA drags its feet in the future, the court said, the reasons better be grounded in science, not legal and political conjecture.

This ruling will ripple through the lower courts looking at other cases of the EPA refusing to regulate carbon-dioxide emissions. But it all represents a larger, one-two punch on global warming.

At the first of the year, a panel created by the United Nations and the World Meteorological Organization reported the existence of global warming as unequivocal, and found a very likely link to human causes. Their conclusions came after cycles of research and periodic pronouncements since 1988.

For the United States, the way is much clearer for discussions about emissions from automobiles, power plants and other manufacturing, and how industry, the public and government can work together. Automakers were among the first to propose a legal and scientific rapprochement.

In another beneficial ruling for the country, the court unanimously ruled the EPA had enforcement powers over power plants that renovate or add capacity that increases their levels of air pollution. The agency was told to quit sheltering scofflaws.

In the absence of federal leadership, and in light of the Bush administration's refusal to enforce the laws on the books, individual states tried to go their own way. The frustration is understandable, but the best hope for real progress is through coherent national policy.

That is most likely to come with a change of administration, but the court made clear that EPA has lost its license to ignore statutes it does not like.

The same message was repeated in another arena. A federal judge in Seattle slapped down the administration for arbitrarily editing passages of the Northwest Forest Plan.

In a scant three months, the reality of global warming has been reinforced by science and the law.