Believe it or not, there was another momentous federal court decision in late June other than the one on health care.  The Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit found that the EPA’s key “endangerment” finding on greenhouse gases and the regulatory regime that it has pursued is not only not, as the petitioners asserted, based on “improper constructions” of the Clean Air Act and “otherwise arbitrary and capricious,” but rather that the finding and the EPA’s program are entirely in keeping with the law.  EPA has been unambiguously correct in its reading of the Clean Air Act and its procedures, according to the court.  (The court’s decision gives a concise history of the relevant EPA and federal court rulings.  See pp. 16-21.  It’s actually a good read.)

I was giving a workshop on climate change and water last Friday at NYU’s Wagner School and I was, once again, surprised at the level of ignorance that people have regarding the progress of the Obama Administration on climate and energy issues.  I wrote about what Obama and his team have achieved any number of times at my Foreign Policy Association blog, including here in January.  People don’t know – or maybe they do and don’t want to acknowledge – that the Barack Obama/Lisa Jackson EPA has been slowly but surely advancing a comprehensive regulatory program to not only protect public health and the environment from mercury, other hazardous air pollutants, spills from coal ash lagoons, the despicable practice of mountaintop-removal mining – Al Gore’s words, with which I am in total agreement – but from greenhouse gases as well.

For more, see Matt Wald’s characteristically excellent coverage at the NY Times here.  For the big picture on climate change and EPA’s programs, go here.

[54BNNM8XH2UW] (Don’t worry about this, folks.  It’s a Technorati thing.)