As the new home of OSPIRG's environmental work, Environment Oregon can be contacted regarding this news release.
PORTLAND, OR -- State officials in Oregon and Washington are praising a U.S. Supreme Court decision Monday on global warming. Both states were parties to the lawsuit against the Bush administration. Colin Fogarty reports.
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The case revolved around the question of whether the federal Environmental Protection Agency has the authority to regulate carbon dioxide.
CO2 is nontoxic, but it's been linked to global warming.
Oregon and Washington have a stake in that debate because both states have adopted California's tailpipe emission standards. That means air regulations along the west coast are
stricter than in the rest of the country.
Washington state's Attorney General Rob McKenna says the decision is a victory for west coast states.
Rob McKenna: "We think this ruling will help Washington and Oregon and California uphold their tougher tailpipe emissions laws. And it makes it less likely that anyone will be able to
overturn those state laws given that the Supreme Court has come out in favor of the view that EPA can and should regulate greenhouse gases."
In a separate lawsuit, the auto industry challenged California's auto-emission standards. But this ruling from the US Supreme Court upholds the state's authority.
The Bush administration had argued that under the Clean Air Act, the EPA doesn't have to regulate CO2, that the agency has the discretion not to. But Oregon Attorney General Hardy Myers says the new ruling makes that less likely.
Hardy Myers: "It makes clear that a decision not to regulate really has to be based on a finding that these emissions are not posing a danger to health and safety. And I think that that's going to be very difficult for the EPA to do. So it's a just an extremely significant ruling."
Atmospheric scientists say CO2 does contribute to global warming. In fact, David Betiste, at the University of Washington, says carbon dioxide is the main contributor to the greenhouse
effect.
He filed a brief in the court case disputing the claims of the EPA. Betiste says the agency "cherry picked" misleading data on climate change from the National Academy of Sciences.
David Betiste: "What they did is they selected those out and said therefore the science isn't there and we can't make a determination. In fact, the correct representation of all the reports out of the Academy is that the science is there. People's activities are increasing carbon dioxide and it's changing the climate in a way that a 100 years from now, this is going to be a
very different planet."
Oregon Governor Ted Kulongoski released a statement saying the Supreme Court ruling means that decisions on climate change should come from what he called "scientific evidence,
not the political proclivities of the Bush administration".
The decision is a victory for environmentalists like Jeremiah Bowman. He's with the Oregon State Public Interest Research group.
Jeremiah Bauman: "I mean the states they are closer to where people are on the grassroots level. They can tell that global warming is there. Global warming is happening. They see the
risks and they want the federal government to solve it because its going to take that level of a solution."
Four justices on the Supreme Court dissented from the majority opinion. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that he makes "no judgment on whether global warming exists, what causes it,
or the extent of the problem." But he said the case should be resolved by Congress and theOregon and Washington were among 12 states arguing the EPA should regulate carbon dioxide.
On the other side were ten other states, several car manufacturing groups and the Bush Administration.
