Chutzpah Challenged

California has been taking quite a beating from the chutzpah of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and its administrator Stephen L. Johnson, a beating, which, as we saw last May, did not go unrecognized by the Democratic staff of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. Fortunately, whatever actions (or lack thereof) may be taken at the Federal level, the State has an Attorney General who does not suffer the chutzpah of others willingly. As Al Jazeera English reported from their wire services last night, the EPA is now well beyond the limits of his tolerance:

California has said it plans to sue the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for failing to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from ships, aircraft as well as construction and agricultural equipment.

In the latest legal threat from the state against the EPA, Jerry Brown, California's attorney-general, said on Thursday that the body was "wantonly ignoring" its duty to set pollution standards.

California is already suing the EPA over the agency's failure to approve the state's proposed standards for vehicle emissions.

"Ships, aircraft and industrial equipment burn huge quantities of fossil fuel and cause massive greenhouse gas pollution yet [George] Bush [the US president] stalls with one bureaucratic dodge after another," Brown said in a statement.

"Because Bush's Environmental Protection Agency continues to wantonly ignore its duty to regulate pollution, California is forced to seek judicial action."

Brown also said that under federal law the EPA was authorised to regulate greenhouse gases on ocean-going vessels and aircraft, as well as agricultural, construction and industrial equipment.

If the act of a State official telling the Federal Government what to do is, itself, chutzpah, then it is a well-needed administration of positive-connotation chutzpah to offset the destructive negative connotations being imposed by an EPA that has been reduced to a servile creature of the White House. I just hope that Brown uses his legal weapons with enough precision to make sure that the EPA staffers who have been trying against all odds to do their jobs do not end up as victims and that the real targets need to be both Johnson and those found to be directly responsible for pulling Johnson's strings.