A way too loosey-goosey definition of "air pollution"

Ramesh Ponnuru at Bloomberg on how SCOTUS justice John Paul Stevens paved the way for the Most Equal Comrade's latest use of the EPA as an instrument of tyranny and decline:

The Clean Air Act, initially written in 1970 and last significantly amended in 1990, was intended to deal with traditional air pollution, the kind that clogs your lungs and clouds your view -- not with the possibility that chemicals emitted into the air might affect the entire globe through their effect on the upper reaches of the atmosphere. Justice John Paul Stevens, writing for the court, got around that problem by holding that Congress had "carefully" declined to define "air" to exclude those upper reaches.

A vast regulatory apparatus is now being built on Stevens's inference. One set of regulations is before the Supreme Court, and it shows how hard it is to fight climate change through the Clean Air Act. To treat greenhouse gases as a conventional air pollutant, the Environmental Protection Agency was required to impose stringent rules on anything that emitted more than 100 to 250 tons of it a year. The EPA decided that this wouldn't be "feasible" and set new thresholds at 100,000 tons a year instead.

The MEC and even a Congress full of zealots and squishes can point to a foundation for the way they proceed.

A pretty tidy post-American arrangement.