JOHN TIERNEY: “Ordering the E.P.A. to address global warming may be a legal victory for environment groups, but it will probably just slow progress against global warming. The Environmental Procrastination Agency, as I like to call it, has a hard enough time taking action against routine pollutants. It’s in even worse position to deal with something as complicated as carbon dioxide, because the agency was founded on a fantasy: that scientific experts can transcend both politics and economics. . . . It took the agency 15 years to deal with pollution from leaded gasoline, which was a trivially simple problem compared with global warming.”

Tierney recommends David Schoenbrod’s book on politics and the environment, which I mentioned here a while back. It’s worth reading.