-- First, a quick update from the docket for State of California et. al. v. EPA, recently filed in the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. While a briefing schedule has now been tentatively set-- California's opening brief is due on March 24 and the EPA's reply on April 22-- this may not be the final schedule in the case. In addition to the previous possibility that EPA would seek to get the case moved to the DC Circuit, other indicators suggest that EPA is mulling an effort to get the current suit tossed as premature; under this scenario, it would issue additional legal justification for the waiver denial next month and assert that those documents, not the December 19th decision letter to Governor Schwarzenegger that California based its January 3rd petition upon, constitute its formal denial of the waiver.
--Meanwhile, LA City Beat has an important report on the EPA waiver denial and last week's Senate field hearing, making the case that administration officials have been speaking out of two sides of their mouth regarding California's clean cars program (and it wouldn't be the first time):
[B}ush dispatched a senior White House official to go halfway around the world to the United Nations conference on climate change in Bali, Indonesia, to assuage international anger about U.S. inaction on global warming. There, the official— James Connaughton, chair of the White House Council on Environmental Quality—actually touted California’s tailpipe standards as evidence to the world that the U.S. is working diligently to cut greenhouse gas emissions.
[...]
In Bali, [Connaughton told] “the entire world one of the pieces of evidence of American ‘leadership’ on climate change, evidence we were getting ‘real results,’ was that eleven states had adopted California’s clean car standards,” Carl Pope, Sierra Club executive director, told the committee. “The slide he presented actually quantified the carbon dioxide emissions which California’s standards would achieve and took credit for them.”
Pope, who attended the Bali meeting, went on to explain that Connaughton’s presentation was based on an official State Department report to the United Nations, entitled the Fourth Climate Action Report to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. In explaining myriad efforts underway in the U.S. that will help meet the President’s 2002 goal of reducing the carbon intensity of the U.S. by 18 percent by 2012, the document highlights California’s tailpipe standards and the plans of other states, which now number 15, to enforce them within their borders.
--And finally, Richard Graves, almighty blogmaster of the youth climate movement (and we say that with no jest intended), has a great post up at It's Getting Hot In Here, "What Can a New President Do From Day One on Global Warming?" This is an issue we hope to write more on ourselves, but meanwhile, a great discussion going on in comments over there...
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