I understand the question of “standing” in legal thought. The person complaining has to have something to do with what is being complained about. I cannot complain about your loud music if it doesn’t vex me, etc. However, the Supreme Court is beginning to sound like the frontier courts of the 1850s which contemptuously explained to the Indians that certain treaties did not say what they said, had never said what they were claimed to have said and only said what the court, that day, declared them to say. The Indians had no understanding of what was said because they were Indians, after all. What did Indians know of elegant legal prose? Move on. Move on.

The justices seemed deeply divided on the question of standing. Any plaintiff in federal court must establish standing to sue, by proving there is an injury that can be traced to the defendant’s behavior and that will be relieved by the action the lawsuit requests.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., along with Justices Antonin Scalia and Samuel A. Alito Jr., expressed strong doubts that the plaintiffs, represented by Assistant Attorney General James R. Milkey of Massachusetts, could meet those interrelated conditions by showing that global climate change presented a sufficiently tangible and imminent danger that could be adequately addressed by regulating emissions from new cars and trucks.

“You have to show the harm is imminent,” Justice Scalia instructed Mr. Milkey, asking, “I mean, when is the cataclysm?”

[err, it happened when you were appointed to the court….]

NY Times on Greenhouse Hearings

For those legally or scientifically interested among you, here is the Friend of the Court petition by several renowned scientists, James E. Hansen of NASA among them. Amicus Curiae.

Commentary on the Amicus Curiae brief is here at Prometheus.

If the core question is “Did Congress intend to include CO2 in the establishing legislation?”, or, “From what they did intend can CO2 be reasonably inferred?” a statement in the form of new legislation by the new Congress could answer this. Dear Congress: Act.