The new paper digs into congressional archives to settle a legal debate, arguing that climate science had determined by 1970 that greenhouse gases would warm the planet—and that lawmakers knew.
Nicholas Kusnetz, Inside Climate News, August 2, 2024
Among the many obstacles to enacting federal limits on climate pollution, none has been more daunting than the Supreme Court. That is where the Obama administration’s efforts to regulate power plant emissions met their demise and where the Biden administration’s attempts will no doubt land.
A forthcoming study seeks to inform how courts consider challenges to these regulations by establishing once and for all that the lawmakers who shaped the Clean Air Act in 1970 knew scientists considered carbon dioxide an air pollutant, and that these elected officials were intent on limiting its emissions.
