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Opinion

Court should never have heard EPA 

Monica Granger
Opinion Columnist

Hold the phone. A government agency actually displayed a modicum of self-oversight in fulfilling its public charge. But do not get overly excited. Before the Environmental Protection Agency could implement its abnormally conservative agenda for international greenhouse gas abatement, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled against the continued line of action. 

The plan, developed with the increasingly unpopular Bush administration, hinges on coordination between administrative and legislative branches, the former dealing with multilateral treaties and the latter with localized pollution abatement. It allocates regulatory powers to the level of government most immediately concerned and incorporates time to allow private markets to voluntarily accommodate the transition into government regulation. 

The New York Times reported "the 5-to-4 decision was a strong rebuke to the Bush administration."

Whether or not it is true that the Court was politically motivated to do so, it is emphatically evident that the Court overstepped its constitutional jurisdiction in deciding even to hear the case.

The state of Massachusetts argued in Massachusetts v. EPA that the EPA, in opting not to promulgate vehicle emissions regulations, neglected its duty to address via regulation any "agent" that causes air pollution that can endanger public health. 

Massachusetts argued its constitutional standing, or harm, comes through the loss of its coastal lands due to global warming that, it argues, could have been prevented and will be redressed with the Courts' forcing immediate EPA regulation.

Four justices strongly dissented: "The Court ignores the complexities of global warming, and does so by now disregarding the ‘particularized' injury it relied on in step one, and using the dire nature of global warming itself as a bootstrap for finding (the) causation and redressability (required for judicial hearing by Article III of the Constitution)." 

The Court, further, should have refused to hear the case due to "petitioners' failure to demonstrate injury in fact, causation, and redressability."

The Court is mistaken in imbuing the EPA with more power and pressure to regulate.

Dr. Mary Ruwart, a Libertarian critic of government environmental policies, called for more liberty-oriented, private property solutions, noting that private ownership of scarce resources, and the motivations of private profit and loss suffice to keep our land clean more than the most despotic regulations. Such a scheme in America would not only be socially equitable, as it would empower those lacking access to both Courts and political power (i.e., the poor and weak), but economically efficient. The cultural and community benefits of freely responsible environmental stewardship, moreover, would accrue to society as a whole. 

Rigid enforcement of personal property rights are the only way to solve environmental dilemmas, and in the 2008 elections, Ron Paul just might be the only one advocating justice for the multi-billion dollar corporations who choose to leak toxic waste into the ground simply because current laws unduly shield them from legal action. Do you know your mission?

Granger, an economics/political science senior, 
can be reached via dccampus@mail.uh.edu