Articles by David Roberts

SCOTUS update

Bush will announce his Supreme Court nominee in a live, prime-time Tuesday night address.

The fact that this will distract media attention from Karl Rove is, of course, entirely coincidental.

Update [2005-7-19 11:27:7 by Dave Roberts]: Speaking of SCOTUS picks, the Center for American Progress has started a blog devoted to the topic. Check it out.

Will you scrutinize us?

Ever since I heard about Chevron's big "Will You Join Us?" shtick, I've been meaning to look into it more closely -- see if I can figure out whether it's a genuine attempt to open a dialogue on our post-oil future or ... a bushel of bullshit.

Joel Makower had the same idea. He says:

Rep. Barton got more than he bargained for when he started bullying climate scientists.

The big news today is the explosion of the Barton story into the major newspapers. The weekend brought several interesting developments

Most salaciously, and the reason the big papers perked up their ears: Rep. Sherwood Boehlert (R-N.Y.), chair of the House Science Committee, sent a letter to Barton. It was not friendly. It begins this way ...

I am writing to express my strenuous objections to what I see as the misguided and illegitimate investigation you have launched concerning Dr. Michael Mann, his co-authors and sponsors.

... and continues in the same vein, ripping Barton a new one for trampling around outside his jurisdiction and attempting "to intimidate scientists rather than to learn from them, and to substitute Congressional political review for scientific peer review."

"This," he adds in case the point was not clear, "would be pernicious."

It isn't pretty, but it is highly recommended reading. The squabbling among Republicans (over global warming! wtf?) was the main focus of coverage in the Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and USA Today.

But there are other letters. Boehlert's joins a similar letter (PDF) sent to Barton by Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), who said this:

Court rules that EPA is not obligated to regulate CO2 as air pollutant.

As many of you probably know, today a three-judge panel of the D.C. Court of Appeals ruled that the U.S. EPA is not obligated to regulate CO2 as an air pollutant. In doing so it ruled against a coalition of states and cities that had filed a petition trying to force the EPA to mandate reductions.

This is bad, if not entirely unexpected, news. I suspect we'll publish something more about it on Monday.

For now, Chris Mooney has read the majority opinion by Judge A. Raymond Randolph, the concurrence by Judge David Sentelle, and the dissent by Judge David Tatel. In Mooney's judgment, on both scientific and legal grounds, "Tatel rocks."

Update [2005-7-15 16:0:55 by Dave Roberts]: Not surprisingly, over at NRO Jonathan Adler has a different take on the case:

A decision to regulate greenhouse gases as air pollutants would vastly increase the EPA's regulatory authority over private economic activity. Carbon dioxide is a ubiquitous byproduct of fossil-fuel energy combustion. Controlling carbon dioxide emissions would require regulating every industrial facility that burns oil, coal, or natural gas, along with all manner of agricultural practices and land-use decisions. It would further require yet another round of federal controls on automobile tailpipe emissions. If the federal government is to assume such awesome regulatory authority, the decision should be made in the halls of Congress, not a federal courthouse.