All I can say is that ‘it’s about time!’ Bush, along with his oil industry supporters, has fought tooth and nail to ensure co2 was not included as an environmental pollutant. If we ever hope to do anything about the environmental disaster we have made, this needed to be done.

Bush is not a mouthpiece for the oil industry. That’s lazy rhetoric. The reason Bush fought this is because it’s political incorrect to call CO2 a pollutant, as well as ripe with technical fallaciousness. In addition, the ruling gives more power to environmental groups that really don’t deserve that power.

However (here’s the 180), this is the CORRECT ruling. Sometimes, to bring about real change, we need to abandon what we view as politically correct and be honest with the situation. For one, CO2 emissions are not helping the planet… period. They might not be the scientifically correct explanation behind “global warming” but they ARE hurting the environment in indirect (and sometimes direct) ways. Secondly, if by regulating CO2 emissions we force energy corporations to look for alternative (even renewable) fuel sources, that’s a good thing. We’d be helping the planet and avoid having to deal with the nutcases in the Middle East. Action needs to take place, and though this ruling has problems associated with it, at least we are moving in the right direction.

P.S. It’s “pollutant”, Tim. Seriously man, give me your address and I will send you Microsoft Word.

Clean Air act… HA! I love how legislature uses doublespeak for naming things. Almost as good as the phrase ‘no child left behind’.

…or ‘patriot act’. It’s the work of those that need to convince you what they are doing is right and to take your attention away from the stupid things that they include in the law. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could have an independent analyst that looked at these laws they are trying to pass and let us know what things in it are good and what is just a back door for future transgressions.

This is great that the SC actually looked at the law and upheld it in spite of the current administration that seems to subvert any law that regulates oil industry or energy producers that prefer to make the population around their plants sick rather than spend a million or two to clean up their emmisions. These are executives that make tens of millions a year, yet are so ate up with greed that they refuse to invest a little money to protect their fellow humans. Isn’t it interesting he way the vote was divided along party lines?

To those that don’t believe that carbon monoxide and carbon dioxides as well as sulphites are not a pollutant, I would invite them to get into a sealed garage with their car and let the engine run for a couple of hours. What is being done to our planet is the same thing only at a slower pace in a much larger scale. Even worse, we are changing the medium, air, that is necessary to maintain the electrical charges that drive our planet. Anyone with a little training in electrical theories knows that if you change the composition of a dielectric, in this case air, you change the electric behaviour of the system. This might not be reversible if we don’t act soon folks, even if we reforest the land and stop poisoning the waters tomorrow we may have a hard time restoring the health of our homeworld.

‘polutant’ needs 2 l’s and is correctly spelled ‘pollutant’ – i feel better now; i just misspelled ‘ultimate’ as ‘ulimate’ in the dio segment of the RNR daily…

are you making fun of the prop sniffer?

unfortunately Jed, if we did get independent people in on it, the lobbyists would simply do to them as they have done to the politicians. Buy them. What we need is the removal of outside influence on the legislation process. However, I wouldn’t hold my breath on that.

As if special interest groups don’t have as much (or more) influence as corporations. We need a third party…

Hey Jed since you suggest someone who does not believe CO2 is a pollutant get in sealed garage, I suggest you drink ten gallons of water in 10 minutes and see what happens. Guess that would make water a posion. Everytime we breathe we exhale CO2, which plants require to live, you tree huggers should know that, so I guess we pollute everytime we exhale. All this ruling does is help the evironuts and the trial lawyers who will now start suing everyone.

right, those plants, trees, kelp, bacteria etc that consumes the co2 we breathe out. not what our combustion engines produce. If we hadn’t destroyed our forests and treated nature with contempt we probably wouldn’t be having this problem. I have a choice in how much water I drink, unfortunatelly I don’t have a choice in what I breathe. Power plants have a choice in using scrubbers on their smoke stacks to clean the air we breathe, they choose to save that million dollars or so to improve their profits by .0000001% to the detriment of the general public. Why is it that the ones with weak platforms usually look for an extreme, implausible example to rufute a point. Why not say something like, if you drink a glass of water one mile down river from a chemical plant you can die or get cancer… does that make it a poison? damn skippy.

“Why is it that the ones with weak platforms usually look for an extreme, implausible example to rufute a point.”

I don’t know why you do that jed. The fact is locking yourself in a garage with the motor running is an implausible example. The fact is the co2 coming from power plants is no different than the co2 we exhale, co2 is co2 no matter the source. And talk about weak platforms, first it was global warming, but when that did not fit it became global climate change (that way the evironuts could explain record cold or record heat), then it became global climate crisis. What’s next?

An implausible example? I guess you have never heard of people locking themselves in the garage with the engine running to end their lives?

Right, the CO2 we breathe out is not different, co2 is co2(except for a few ions here and there), a combustion engine however produces in 4 hours what a human produces in a decade or more. While the exhaust from combustion produces CO2, it also produces plenty of other poisons as well, carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides, sulphur dioxide, hydrocarbons, and not least of all, as a result of burning coal, mercury vapors. Something that could have been addressed in the 50’s when a canadian showed that you could get 100mph in one of those old innefficient engines by merely vaporizing the fuel before pushing it into the combustion chamber. Even earlier than that, Nikola Tesla made an engine that was much more efficient than anything around, yet his invention was never implemented. He proposed using the combustion engine to produce electricity and make electricity the prime mover rather than combustion thereby improving efficiency by at least 50% or more, yet his work was largely ignored and disbelieved.

Not sure where you live but almost any major metropolitan city on our planet today is covered by a hazy dome of pollutants that it’s inhabitants are forced to breathe in. As a result, our children are beset by asthma, allergies, autism and other odd illnesses at an alarming rate never seen before, yet people such as yourself continue to defend a suicidal policy.

The term Global Warming did not fit the situation well enough, when scientists realized what putting more fresh water into the earth’s water system would cause, more violent weather, the term Climate Change seemed alot more appropiate, this doesn’t reduce one iota the gravity of the problem.

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised you repubes love to gather around a Dick(Cheney) and it’s two balls (Rove and Bush) totally isolated from the real world by a undergarment of ignorance.

Pig
You are totally right and wrong. Yes, defining CO2 as a pollutant is quite inaccurate and misleading and giving power to “evironuts” and their lawyers is very dangerous. However the huge CO2 emissions pumping out of our factories (particularly in India and China) are not good for the Earth. Plus, we can’t run on fossil fuels forever, in part because they’re non-renewable, and in part because having to associtate with the crazy fucks in the Middle East is going to led to WWIII and the destruction of humanity. You are thinking about this from a political standpoint when really we need to think about the greater good. Yeah, Al Gore and most liberals who talk about global warming really don’t give a shit and are just looking for more power, but it doesn’t change the fact that we need to make some changes if we want to hang around on this rock. It’s a fine line, but we need to walk it anyway.

Jed, well put my friend. I agree, it is very amazing the lengths ‘repubes’ will go. Funny thing is: people already know that drinking that much water will kill you. But, at least you know how much you’re taking in. I have no idea how much tailpipe emissions end up in my lungs on a daily basis. Climate is changing, which is in whole agreement, finally. But, the ‘repubes’ would still have you believe that it’s just a ’scare tactic’. However, these same ‘repubes’ will push terrorism as being a global threat. Thing is, the oil is what makes it a threat. It’s the revenue stream for them. Secondly, ice ages HAVE ended civilization, whatever the cause was. Terrorism has yet to. Ice cores show co2 levels before the few recorded ice ages, and whether or not the co2 levels are the cause of the ice age, we’re reaching those levels once again.
Third, and lastly, wouldn’t it be nice to start moving away from oil, even if it takes a supreme court decision to do so? The oil industry’s stranglehold on foreign policy is why the middle east is so chaotic in the first place. IT DRIVE UP OIL PRICES!!!

Bring back the EV1 | 4/6/2007, 11:13 pm EST

Jed, well put my friend. I agree, it is very amazing the lengths ‘repubes’ will go. Funny thing is: people already know that drinking that much water will kill you. But, at least you know how much you’re taking in. I have no idea how much tailpipe emissions end up in my lungs on a daily basis.
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Actually not very well put at all. People also know that locking themselves in garage with the engine running is going to kill them. What you global warming worshippers can’t seem to explain is if all this is so bad, the why has the average lifespan increased during the industrial age? You scream about how we are killing the planet yet funny thing is we are living longer than ever. If you theory is true we should be dropping like flies. At the dawn of the 20th century the average lifespan was 48 years, at the end of the century it was 72 years, an unprecedented increase. And what was responsible for this increase? Industrialization.

So, you think emissions are okay? Try explaining what is fundamentally wrong with wanting to clean up the air we breathe. As far as living longer, vitamins, drugs, comfortable beds, and, last but not least, evolution. Go ahead, keep on calling warming a big scam. You probably do, and will keep on believing terrorism is a bigger threat than an ice age. How many times has terrorism ended civilizations? Huh? What’s that? None? Yeah, that’s right. Never! Remember this, if you can. The global war on terror is a facade. It’s a way for the conservatives to hide their racism behind ‘national security’. Do your history homework. Whites have been calling every other race a threat since we got here on this continent. Indians, threat. Mexicans, threat. Blacks? Don’t educate them, they’re a threat. Now, it’s the arabs and the mexicans, again. Kudos to the supreme court for continuing to defy this president. The ONLY thing they’ve given him is his tribunals. And, they’re doing a lot of good…..NOT

Oh, ignore Cap. He has reality perception issues.

I see a lot of disinformation in the discussion about car exhaust in a garage. It’s the carbon monoxide (CO), not the carbon dioxide (CO2) that ends up killing you.
If you want to cut CO2, cut your enengy consumption. If you think just regulating it in the US is the answer, your job will go to China where they will pollute more than in the US and the planet will be worse off than it was before.