Last week, in a post that got a fair amount of attention, I observed that we may well have a global warming case heading towards the Supreme Court. In the comments thread, the issue then quickly arose: Is that a good thing? Is it something that we ought to be drawing attention to? Could drawing attention actually have any impact on the court's decision about whether to take this case?
The first question is perhaps the easiest to tackle. This case (involving the Clean Air Act) has been appealed to the High Court by environmentalists and a collection of state attorneys general. If these plaintiffs want their case heard at the highest level despite the risk of a negative precedent and the conservative tilt of the court, then they have already made their strategic calculation, and I have no grounds to second guess it. So in this sense, yes, we should want this case to reach the Supreme Court.
Can blogging influence that? Tthe other day I took a negative stance on this. But as ably pointed out in the comments, Supreme Court clerks are just people, and a lot of them are young enough to be blog readers. Justices, meanwhile, will certainly take notice if a case appealed to them is in the news. If a case that's been appealed to them gets a lot of attention, that may, in turn, get their attention and make them more inclined to grant the cert petition. They're just people, after all, in the end.
So I say make a lot of noise about this pending case--and especially about the egregious ruling at the D.C. Circuit level. At the very least, we can make it more widely known just how outrageously the D.C. Circuit distorted science in this case.
Since there is not yet a consensus amongst the general public in this country to regulate CO2 as a pollutant, I would seriously worry about a political backlash if the Supreme Court were to shock us all and come down in favor of regulating CO2.
Given the Republican control of Congress, such a decision could easily give them the nerve to gut the Clean Air Act in the guise of fighting "activist" judges. This is something they've wanted to do all along, but it hasn't been politically feasable yet.
"...such a decision could easily give them the nerve to gut the Clean Air Act in the guise of fighting 'activist' judges. This is something they've wanted to do all along, but it hasn't been politically feasable yet."
Then we have to pass on info to bloggers not just about the potential case for the court, but on the CO2 levels.
Dig up your best links/URLs.