A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the recent Supreme Court decision that said that the EPA does have the authority to regulate carbon dioxide emissions.

As several readers pointed out at the time, since the decision didn’t say that the EPA had to regulate these emissions, they didn’t have much hope that there would be any immediate change.

Well, their foresight was correct.

Earlier this week, the head of the EPA testified before a Senate committee and would not give any response to questions about when the EPA would move to regulate carbon dioxide emissions.

As much as I would like to see the EPA “hop to it” and solve this issue, I think the article’s author was not very fair in describing Mr. Johnson’s actions as “repeatedly [refusing] to say … how soon he will comply with a Supreme Court ruling and decide whether to regulate carbon dioxide.”

The Supreme Court ruling did not say that the EPA must “decide whether to regulate carbon dioxide” or not. Quite to the contrary, the Supreme Court basically said that this is not a choice that the EPA can even make.

Instead, what the Supreme Court ruling said was that “EPA can avoid taking further action only if it determines that greenhouse gases do not contribute to climate change or if it provides some reasonable explanation as to why it cannot or will not exercise its discretion to determine whether they do.”

So, the EPA’s job is to determine if greenhouse gases contribute to climate change. If the answer is “yes”, the EPA has no discretion — the Clean Air Act mandates that they act.

On the flip side, if they determine that greenhouse gases do not contribute to climate change or if they come up with some creative reason for saying that they are not going to decide one way or the other, then they don’t have to do anything.

I just think it is a bit unfair to describe this as “refusing to comply” with a court order since those are pretty serious words.