Gore's Stealth Plan for Climate Regs
While former Vice President Al Gore has argued for a full governmental assault on global warming, his own lawyer from Bush v Gore, has emerged as one of the most respected voices opposed to judicial involvement on climate change.
Professor Professor Laurence H. Tribe is a liberal scholar (he was a judicial advisor on President Obama’s campaign). However, he also co-authored a Working Paper entitled Too Hot for Courts to Handle: Fuel Temperatures, Global Warming, and the Political Question Doctrine. After examining three climate-change cases, he came to the conclusion that courts are guilty of “government by injunction” when they rule on climate change and impose penalties.
Tribe argues it is a political question for Congress:
“Global climate change raises such manifestly insuperable obstacles to principled judicial management that its very identification as a judicially redressable source of injury cries out for the response that the plaintiffs have taken their ‘petition for redress of grievances’ to the wrong institution altogether.”
That is a strong statement coming from one of the country’s leading liberal thinkers.
It’s also a more publicly tasteful way for Republicans to handle the issue of climate change. According to a recent Washington Post report, 72 percent of Americans believe in global warming. To deny the science of climate change is perceived as backwards by most Americans. (Especially among the college educated and young Americans.)
Rather than denying the science of climate change, Republicans should protect economic liberty by adopting Professor Tribe’s argument and address climate change in the Congress. Thankfully, climate change legislation (such as cap and trade) tends to die in Congress.
Currently, climate change regulation has been relegated to executive branch agencies such as the EPA. The federal circuit and appellate courts enforce these regulations. If the Republicans remove climate change questions from the hands of judges, rein in executive agencies, and place the debate in Congress, Democrats will be forced to go through a very public front door if they want to impose unreasonable demands on the American people for the sake of climate change.
Professor Tribe’s paper can be found here.