Who Would You Trust on Climate Policy — a Politician or the CEO of GE?

Politicians do many foolish things, but few such spectacles deliver the eye-rolling entertainment value of politicians substituting their opinions for the laws of science.

When I was in the first year of my journalism career, sometime during the Pleistocene, I worked as a part-time reporter covering a school board in southern California. At a meeting one fine evening, the chairman proposed dividing the school board meeting room into smoking and non-smoking sections. (Yes, Twenty Somethings, back in the days of rotary phones and manual typewriters, it was OK for adults to smoke at school board meetings.)

The idea was patently ridiculous. In a meeting room the size of a large parlor, the chairman's notion that cigarette smoke would confine itself to the non-smoking section betrayed a lack of familiarity with physics that was unbecoming of an educator.

So, in my article about the chairman's proposal, I observed that cigarette smoke would not obey the dictates of public bodies, not even one so august as a school board. Amazingly, the editor let my snarky comment stand.

At the school board's next meeting, the chairman gave me a dirty look.

So here we are decades later, fresh from the Senate having turned aside a resolution from Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) that would have overturned, by legislative fiat, the Environmental Protection Agency's determination that, based on its review of the science, greenhouse gas emissions threaten public health and welfare. The finding opens the door to EPA adopting greenhouse gas emissions standards under the Clean Air Act.

Murkowski insisted that her resolution had nothing to do with challenging science. "The science is what it is, and beyond the power of Congress to change," she said during the June 10 floor debate.

The premise of her resolution, she argued, was that Congress should be the one to set climate policy, not EPA. That's all well and good, but why attack the scientific finding as a way to head EPA off at the pass? As Richard Nixon's and Gerald Ford's EPA administrator, Russell Train, noted in a letter to Senate leaders, the resolution struck at the heart of the Clean Air Act, which is that EPA must follow the science in adopting public health protections.

Murkowski must know that attacking the scientific finding enabled the obtuse, the ideologically extreme, and the merely mendacious who loudly refuse to acknowledge that "the science is what it is."

Still, being soft-hearted, I'll take Murkowski at her word that she wasn't attacking science. The bone to pick with Murkowski, then, is that if she is adamant that Congress must set climate policy, then she and her allies need to spell out how Congress should do so. So far, we haven't heard much.

Meanwhile, businesses that would like to make money selling low-carbon energy technology are drumming their fingers impatiently. "What we have is uncertainty. That's our energy policy," General Electric CEO Jeff Immelt said at a June 10 press conference to unveil a "business plan" for energy technology R&D.

Put a price on carbon, Immelt pleaded for the umpteenth time.