Earlier this year I wrote about a new (EPA-sponsored) study showing that increased CO2 in the atmosphere is directly correlated with increased ozone, particulates, and carcinogens in the air. Since California suffers disproportionately from those traditional air pollutants, it follows that California does have "extraordinary and compelling conditions" in the face of climate change, and the EPA’s decision to deny Cali’s waiver was bogus.
Now the author of that study, Stanford’s Mark Jacobson, has an op-ed in the San Francisco Chronicle arguing more or less the same thing.
In other EPA waiver news, there’s an unsigned editorial in the NYT today making the following argument: When EPA denied the waiver, Johnson claimed that California didn’t face "extraordinary and compelling conditions" because climate change endangered all Americans.
Oops! That was the first time this benighted administration admitted that climate change endangers public health. Now they’re stuck with that on record. And if EPA thinks climate change endangers public health, then it is obliged to develop the national program to reduce CO2 emissions that the Supreme Court said it was empowered to create.
Also, Johnson released his official legal rationale for denying the waiver last week. It is, predictably, shoddy. Tim Dowling dismantles it on Warming Law, which by the way is your go-to source for analysis of these and other green legal questions.
