Washington (Platts)--22Aug2007

In a victory for environmentalists, a US court in California has ordered
the Bush administration to issue a timely, single, comprehensive scientific
report on greenhouse gas emissions and climate change.

     The Center for Biological Diversity lawsuit, which was supported by
Senators John Kerry, Democrat-Massachusetts, and John McCain,
Republican-Arizona, alleged that the Bush administration's policy of issuing
dozens of climate science assessments rather than a single assessment violated
the law and undermined the ability of policymakers to weigh decisions about
how best to cut GHGs.

     The assessment and a regular research plan, which the administration has
only updated periodically, are required by the 1990 Global Change Research
Act.

     Tuesday's ruling by US District Court for the Eastern District of
California Judge Saundra Armstrong found that the administration violated the
1990 law and shows that "this administration has denied and suppressed the
science of global warming at every turn," said Brendan Cummings of the Center
for Biological Diversity and one of the attorneys arguing the case. The ruling
"is a stern rebuke of the administration's head-in-the-sand approach to global
warming."

     The concerns by Kerry and McCain yielded a Government Accountability
Office report in 2004 that criticized the Bush policy. It concluded that the
administration failed to submit a scientific assessment in November 2004 as
required by the act and that the administration refused to complete a single
assessment. 

     The GAO report also said the White House's piecemeal approach lacks an
"explicit plan for...assessing the effects of global change on the eight areas
enumerated in the act: the natural environment, agriculture, energy production
and use, land and water resources, transportation, human health and welfare,
human social systems, and biological diversity."

		--Martin Coyne, martin_coyne@platts.com