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Comment by gnulinux | Hacker News Reader

> Given that the danger of CO2 was completely unknown in 1963

This is a bizarre claim!

> In 1896, a seminal paper by Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius first predicted that changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels could substantially alter the surface temperature through the greenhouse effect. In 1938, Guy Callendar connected carbon dioxide increases in Earth's atmosphere to global warming.

Also read: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_climate_change_sc...

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No one was talking about CO2 in 1963 other than a few scientists. It didn't reach critical mass until the late 80s. The law was written for known pollutants at the time. Congress is just going to have to add to the powers of the EPA, it's as simple as that.

Rather than "completely" maybe it would have been more correct to say "widely". The idea of global warming basically started in the late 60s with a very few scientists talking about it.

Rediscovering old previously discredited scientific papers from the late 19th and early 20th century doesn't make it date all the way back to then.

This simply misses the point. Very few laws are restricted to the best science of their day: nearly all allow for administrative interpretation so that the US Government can apply the law without having to relitigate its essential qualities.

The CAA empowers the EPA to identify pollutants, and that's what the EPA has (correctly!) done. Whether or not the scientific consensus from the 1960s agrees is immaterial.

> This simply misses the point. Very few laws are restricted to the best science of their day: nearly all allow for administrative interpretation so that the US Government can apply the law without having to relitigate its essential qualities. Precisely, if it was the case then arms of the second amendment wouldn’t apply to modern day firearms.

Maybe, or one could argue that the second amendment applies to the most modern and capable arms of the day e.g. the musket of the time = an assault rifle today

Don’t want to talk guns, but want to illustrate the challenges of making such claims

Why would the Second Amendment be interpreted in that way and the CAA not be allowed similar breadth in interpreting what is a pollutant? The latter is actually explicit in this regard; the former has been constructed through judicial interpretation.

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