Lynne Kiesling
Jonathan Adler has summary post at Volokh Conspiracy that provides a lot of useful links to articles and analyses of yesterday’s Supreme Court oral arguments in Massachusetts vs. EPA. This Washington Post article gives an overview of the case and the arguments:
Twelve states, led by Massachusetts and joined by the District of Columbia, are objecting to the Environmental Protection Agency’s decision to decline to issue emissions standards for new cars and trucks. They and the environmental organizations that support them say the standards should be the first step in a broader effort to reduce carbon dioxide and other gases that they say are harming the atmosphere and leading to global warming and rising sea levels.
One of the sobering things for me in this is the level of discussion and understanding at the science/policy interface. Complex systems are hard to understand, and the intricacies are hard to communicate to non-experts; yet when we choose to make such complex systems the object of public policy, those non-experts are precisely the parties who make the path-determining decisions. Very sobering.