Supreme Court Nominee has Pressed for Government’s Role in Forcing Reductions of Carbon Emissions

US President Obama’s first nominee to the Supreme Court, Sonia Sotomayor, has hinted as an appellate-court judge that big polluters should be forced by government to reduce their emissions. In a case from 2006 (Connecticut vs. American Electric Power Company, Inc.) in which Connecticut and other US states brought action against five large US electric utilities companies as public nuisance case. Whilst the case was rejected, as it presented a ‘political’ question unsuitable for ruling by the judiciary, Sotomayor - then the lead jurist in the case - was moved to remark that,

"I have absolutely no idea about the science of global warming… But if the science is right, we have relegated ourselves to killing the world in the foreseeable future - not in centuries to come, but in the very near future. And at some point, someone is going to have to say ‘stop’”.

Sotomayor’s sentiments strongly reflect public opinion in the USA and across the world, as in the 2007 version of GlobeScan’s Climate Change Monitor, 46% of US respondents remarked that it is ‘definitely necessary’ for governments to impose strict limits on the amount of climate changing gases that individual companies are allowed to produce, and another 31% thought it was ‘probably necessary’. Globally, more than half of all respondents thought it was definitely necessary for national governments to take action in this area.

In terms of performance, GlobeScan’s 2008 wave of the Climate Change Monitor, also indicated that both governments and global companies are lagging behind in the effort to address the problem of climate change, with only 16% of US respondent saying that they thought the US government was doing its fair share, and likewise only 13% said the same of large US companies.