In denial to the end

Tuesday, July 29, 2008 | 2:06 a.m.

After the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in April 2007 that the Environmental Protection Agency has the authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, the Bush administration should have let the agency do its job.

Instead it continued its policy of blunting any suggestion that emissions from motor vehicles, factories, oil refineries and power plants are contributors to global warming.

The high court’s decision sprang from a 2003 ruling by the EPA that it did not have authority under the Clean Air Act to regulate carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases emitted from automobiles. Massachusetts took the lead in challenging that decision.

It was a blow to the Bush administration when the Supreme Court ruled the EPA “can avoid promulgating regulations only if it determines that greenhouse gases do not contribute to climate change.”

This was a problem for Bush because the EPA was already on record regarding emissions and climate change. In 2002 the agency had reported to the United Nations that warming “is real and has been particularly strong within the past 20 years ... due mostly to human activities.”

Bush was noticeably irritated by the report, telling reporters at the time, “I read the report put out by the bureaucracy.”

One strategy employed by the White House to delay acting on the Supreme Court’s decision was to ignore a Dec. 5 report e-mailed to it by the EPA. Democratic Sens. Barbara Boxer of California, Benjamin Cardin of Maryland and Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, after threatening to issue a subpoena, were allowed by the EPA last week to read the hushed-up report.

The report strongly reiterates the EPA’s position that human activities are exacerbating climate change. Given the Supreme Court’s ruling, this means the agency must begin regulating greenhouse gas emissions.

But the Bush administration has unveiled another delay. It has pressured the EPA into not only retreating from that report, but also into beginning a months-long process of taking more public comment on global warming — after hundreds of comments have already been received.

So the job of complying with the Supreme Court’s ruling will fall to the next administration. History will judge Bush harshly for delaying on an issue of such urgency.