Climate Change Case Headed To Supreme Court

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration and environmental interests generally agree that global warming is a threat that must be dealt with.

But they're on opposite sides of a Supreme Court case over the ability of states and groups such as the Audubon Society that want to sue large electric utilities and force power plants in 20 states to cut their emissions.

The administration is siding with American Electric Power Co. and three other companies in urging the high court to throw out the lawsuit on grounds the Environmental Protection Agency, not a federal court, is the proper authority to make rules about climate change. The justices will hear arguments in the case Tuesday.

The court is taking up a climate change case for the second time in four years. In 2007, the court declared that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are air pollutants under the Clean Air Act. By a 5-4 vote, the justices said the EPA has the authority to regulate those emissions from new cars and trucks under that landmark law. The same reasoning applies to power plants.

The administration says one reason to end the current suit is that the EPA is considering rules that would reduce carbon dioxide emissions from power plants. But the administration also acknowledges that it is not certain that limits will be imposed.

At the same time, Republicans in Congress are leading an effort to strip the EPA of its power to regulate greenhouse gases.

The uncertainty about legislation and regulation is the best reason for allowing the case to proceed, said David Doniger, a lawyer for the Natural Resources Defense Council, which represents Audubon and other private groups dedicated to land conservation.

"This case was always the ultimate backstop," Doniger said, even as he noted that the council would prefer legislation or EPA regulation to court decisions. The suit would end if the EPA does set emission standards for greenhouse gases, he said.

The legal claims advanced by six states, New York City and the land trusts would be pressed only "if all else failed," he said.

When the suit was filed in 2004, it looked like the only way to force action on global warming. The Bush administration and the Republicans in charge of Congress doubted the EPA's authority to regulate greenhouse gases.

Federal courts long have been active in disputes over pollution. But those cases typically have involved a power plant or sewage treatment plant that was causing some identifiable harm to people, and property downwind or downstream of the polluting plant.

Global warming, by its very name, suggests a more complex problem. The power companies argue that any solution must be comprehensive. No court-ordered change alone would have any effect on climate change, the companies say.

"This is an issue that is of worldwide nature and causation. It's the result of hundreds of years of emissions all over the world," said Ed Comer, vice president and general counsel of the Edison Electric Institute, an industry trade group.

The other defendants in the suit are Cinergy Co., now part of Duke Energy Corp. of North Carolina; Southern Co. Inc. of Georgia; Xcel Energy Inc. of Minnesota; and the federal Tennessee Valley Authority. The TVA is represented by the government and its views do not precisely align with those of other companies.

Eight states initially banded together to sue. They were California, Connecticut, Iowa, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, Vermont and Wisconsin. But in a sign of the enduring role of partisan politics in this issue, New Jersey and Wisconsin withdrew this year after Republican replaced Democrats in their governor's offices.

Another complication is that the administration and the companies may be on the same side at the Supreme Court, but the power industry is strongly opposing climate change regulation. The Southern Co. is a vocal supporter of GOP legislation to block the EPA from acting.

"It's two-faced for them (the companies) to come into court and say everything is well in hand because EPA is going to act," said Doniger, the NRDC lawyer.

Comer said the key point is that judges should not make environmental policy. "This has important implications for jobs. If you raise energy costs in the U.S., does that lead industry jobs to go elsewhere and if it does, do you get the same emissions, just from another country?" Comer said. "These judgments are properly made by elected officials."

Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who was on the federal appeals court panel that heard the case, is not taking part in the Supreme Court's consideration of the issue.

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Obama's Fiscal Policy: Bipartisan Hill Leaders Fire Warning Shots

A day before President Barack Obama is set to map out his long-term fiscal policy, Congressional leaders in both parties are already drawing lines in the sand over the types of cuts they won’t support.

Obama is hosting top House and Senate leaders at the White House on Wednesday morning to preview the major budget speech he plans to deliver later in the afternoon. Details on the speech are slim, but Obama is expected to focus on three core pieces of long-term fiscal reform: entitlements, tax expenditures and defense spending.

Lawmakers from both parties say they welcome the president’s attention to fiscal responsibility—as long as their priority issues remain untouched.

“Taxes are not on the table,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) told reporters Wednesday. "There's no way to tax our way out of this problem … We don't have a revenue problem, we have a spending problem."

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said he has “no problems” with taking on entitlement reform but warned Obama against touching Social Security, which he said has not contributed to the deficit.

“Leave Social Security alone,” Reid told reporters.

Reid and McConnell will be among those meeting with Obama before his speech, which is set for 1:30 at George Washington University. Others lawmakers in the meeting will include House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), House Majority Whip Eric Cantor (R-Va.), House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-Md.), Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and Senate Minority Whip Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.).

Senior Democratic and Republican aides privately concurred that the meeting will be big on show and little on substance.

“With that many members in attendance, this is likely to be a photo-op so that [reporters] will write that we were briefed on the ‘plan,’” said a top GOP aide.

"Nothing will come out of the meeting," said a senior Democratic aide. "Bipartisan and bicameral means nothing happens."

And some Republicans bashed Obama’s speech before hearing it.

Cantor dubbed Obama’s remarks a “budget-do-over speech” and criticized the president’s plan to raise taxes on families and business owners.

“Not only is raising taxes the wrong move in the current economic environment, but it locks in the Democrats’ status-quo agenda to keep spending taxpayer dollars on duplicative big-government programs,” Cantor said.

“Furthermore, it’s the latest in a series of flip-flops from the president and an affront to the bipartisan tax deal that he negotiated with us this winter and has repeatedly credited for the economic uptick,” he said.

An administration official questioned how Republicans could attack Obama’s plan before even seeing it and called on lawmakers to address fiscal problems that have been put off for decades.

"The president ran a campaign promising to take on the tough challenges and tough choices that Washington has put off for too long," said the official. "Few issues fit that description better than our nation's fiscal policy."

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Obama First To Put Tax Increases On Budget Table

Higher taxes have been missing from the fierce budget battle that nearly shut down the federal government. But President Barack Obama is about to put them on the table – at least a modest version that he had pushed before and then rested on the shelf.

Most economists and budget analysts say a comprehensive mix of spending cuts and tax increases is essential to any viable deficit-reduction plan. Yet few players in the negotiations have gone there.

It comes in the scramble to heed what is widely viewed as a loud clamor from voters to slam the brakes on runaway government spending. There has been no corresponding public demand for raising taxes. That's not surprising, but the top-bracket U.S. tax rate now is the lowest it's been in decades, and it's far lower than those in many other industrialized countries, especially in western Europe.

Tax elements of Obama's broad deficit-reduction plan, to be laid out in a speech Wednesday, seem likely to revive his earlier proposals.

The president is expected to bring back his recommendation, first made in the 2008 campaign, to end Bush-era tax cuts for households earning over $250,000 a year. He temporarily set it aside when he signed onto a late 2010 agreement with Republicans to extend all Bush tax cuts for two years.

However, he did renew the bid earlier this year in his budget for the 2012 fiscal year that begins Oct.

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Iran's nuclear efforts have slowed: US agencies

U.S. intelligence agencies believe Iranian leaders have not yet decided to build a nuclear bomb, and some officials say recent problems affecting Tehran's nuclear equipment and personnel have set back Iran's nuclear program by two years or more. The latest assessments, based at least in part on Israeli intelligence, appear to have eased political pressures on Israeli and American leaders for a military strike against Iran's nuclear infrastructure, according to current and former officials familiar with the intelligence. These developments have also given the administration of President Barack Obama breathing room to pursue a two-pronged strategy of seeking greater diplomatic engagement with Tehran while also threatening increased economic sanctions, they said. Deadly attacks on Iranian nuclear scientists and a computer virus which allegedly infected control systems for Iran's uranium enrichment equipment have likely slowed Iran's nuclear progress, Israeli intelligence sources have said. That evaluation is shared by some, but not all, U.S. nuclear and intelligence experts. "We've got more time than we thought," said Gen. Michael Hayden, former director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Hayden said he now believes the "key decision point" for possible military action against Iran has been postponed until the "next (U.S.) presidential term" which would be after the 2012 election. At the same time, current and former U.S. national security and intelligence officials believe Iran is actively trying to assemble the infrastructure and know-how for atomic bomb production if and when political leaders decide to build one. A current U.S. official who is following the issue closely told Reuters: "The intelligence folks think that the Iranians aren't necessarily moving full steam ahead with the development of a nuclear weapon, but that there's fairly robust debate inside the Iranian regime on whether to go forward." "This is a momentous decision for an isolated government, and people are watching very closely to see what they do." The official added that, "Even if (the Iranians) choose to do the wrong thing and proceed toward nuclear weapons, it's unclear that they could do so quickly. While they've got a lot of knowledge, putting it into practice is a whole different ball game." Six major powers -- the United States, Britain, Russia, Germany, France, and China -- are meeting with Iran next week in Istanbul to seek assurances that it is not trying to develop nuclear weapons. Tehran says its nuclear work is for production of electricity.

In the last few days, however, the assessment in the United States and Israel seems to be shifting back toward the 2007 intelligence evaluation of slower Iranian nuclear progress. Israelis, who had claimed Iran's bomb-making was advanced enough to produce a device within a matter of months, appeared to significantly revise their outlook. Meir Dagan, outgoing director of Israel's principal intelligence agency, Mossad, said Tehran would not be able to build a bomb for at least four years "because of measures that have been deployed against them." Israel sees a nuclear-armed Iran as a threat to its existence. It bombed an Iraqi reactor in 1981 and a suspected Syrian nuclear site in 2007 to disrupt nuclear programs in those two Arab states. Israel is widely assumed to have the Middle East's only atomic arsenal, but many analysts say its air force is too small to take on Iran's nuclear sites on its own. Following the Israeli statements, word began to circulate among U.S. intelligence officials about a new push to complete the long-awaited updated National Intelligence Estimate on the Iranian nuclear program. An official with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence would not comment, citing a long-standing policy not to discuss these reports or even acknowledge their existence. Some American experts question whether the revised Israeli view of Iran's nuclear glitches could be too optimistic and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also seemed to question the Israeli intelligence view. A few days after Dagan's assessment, Netanyahu insisted the Iranians were still intent on getting a nuclear weapon and that only a combination of sanctions and a credible threat of military action would be effective deterrents. David Albright, a former United Nations weapons inspector who heads the Institute for Science and International Security, a Washington think tank, told Reuters that his own analysis still indicated Iran's nuclear research could reach a breakout point for bomb building in a year or two. Albright said he did not understand why Israelis like Dagan were so confident Iran will remain incapable of putting together a bomb any earlier than 2015.

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Ms. Giffords opened her eyes

President Barack Obama on Wednesday implored a divided America to honour those attacked in the Arizona shooting rampage by becoming a better country, and in a dramatic moment said that Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, who on Saturday was shot point-blank in the head, had opened her eyes for the first time shortly after his hospital visit. Mr. Obama dramatically announced that following his bedside visit with Ms. Giffords, the target of the assassination, she “opened her eyes, so I can tell you, she knows we’re here, and she knows we love her.”

First lady Michelle Obama held hands with Ms. Giffords’ husband, Mark Kelly, as the news brought soaring cheers throughout the arena. Speaking at a memorial in Tucson, Arizona, Mr. Obama conceded that there is no way to know what triggered the shooting rampage that left six people dead, 13 others wounded and the nation shaken. He tried instead to leave indelible memories of the people who were gunned down and to rally the country to use the moment as a reflection on the nation’s behaviour and compassion.

Authorities previously said they found handwritten notes in Loughner’s safe reading “I planned ahead,” “My assassination” and the name “Giffords.” Nanos and Rick Kastigar, the department’s chief of investigations, and told the AP they also found notes with the words “Die, bitch”, which they believe referenced Giffords, and “Die, cops.” Giffords, 40, was less sedated and more responsive and her doctors said that her recovery was going as anticipated.

Back in Washington, Ms. Giffords’ House colleagues praised her and the other shooting victims and insisted that violence would not silence democracy. “We will have the last word,” declared new House Speaker John Boehner. He fought back tears as he described Ms. Giffords’ battle to recover.

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