Editorial | Carbon Dioxide's Double Identity

0 Comments | Philadelphia Inquirer, The, June, 2006

'Carbon dioxide: It's what we breathe out and plants breathe in. They call it pollution; we call it life."

That paradox expressed by the free-market Competitive Enterprise Institute is being used to counter former Vice President Al Gore's scary global warming documentary, An Inconvenient Truth.

How could a life-giving gas be dangerous to our planet? What right does a president or Congress have to regulate it as if it were smog, acid rain, or arsenic?

Those are the central questions the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to answer by hearing Massachusetts v. Environmental Protection Agency next fall. It could be the most significant environmental case ever to come before the court.

The justices will decide whether the Clean Air Act requires the government to...