Georgia Gets Green 'Justice'

Vicki Lawrence’s 1972 hit "The night the lights went out in Georgia" may become the official state song thanks to what passes for justice in the court of Fulton County, Ga., Judge Thelma Wyatt Cummings Moore.

Acting on a petition from the Sierra Club and the Friends of the Chattahoochee, Moore invalidated a permit issued by the Georgia Environmental Protection Division allowing Longleaf Energy Associates to build a 1,200-megawatt coal-fired power plant in Early County.

The key issue in the case is the emission of carbon dioxide from the proposed plant. The permit granted to the plant did not limit CO2 emissions from the plant for the simple reason that the federal Clean Air Act does not include CO2 as an "air pollutant" to be regulated.

While Moore observed that the permit could be upheld if CO2 was not an "air pollutant" subject to the Clean Air Act, she concluded that the Supreme Court had already decided the matter to the contrary in its 2007 decision Massachusetts v. EPA.

"Faced with the ruling in Massachusetts that CO2 is an 'air pollutant' under the Act, [Longleaf] is forced to argue that CO2 is still not a 'pollutant subject to regulation under the Act.' [Longleaf’s] position is untenable," Moore wrote.

If anything is untenable, however, it is Moore’s misreading of the Supreme Court’s decision. The court did not, in fact, rule that CO2 was an air pollutant that must be regulated under the Clean Air Act.

The court wrote that, "we hold that EPA has the statutory authority to regulate the emission of [greenhouse] gases from new motor vehicles."

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,376082,00.html