Wrong time for pollution decision

THE SUPREME Court's order late Tuesday halting President Obama's Clean Power Plan is frustratingly opaque. The terse ruling offers no hints about why the court took the unusual step of pausing Obama's important new regulations - which would have significantly curtailed emissions from the nations' coal-fired electric plants - before a lower court had ruled on their legality. The justices may be sending the president a message about his expansive use of executive authority. Or the court may be trying to avoid a repeat of last summer's Michigan v. EPA ruling, in which most of the nation's power plants were already far along the path to compliance before the court got around to striking down the regulations that had been challenged.

This comes at a bad time for a world that had finally appeared to be making modest progress in grappling with global warming. The Clean Power Plan, though its goals are insufficiently ambitious, is the centerpiece of the administration's carbon-reduction promises under December's Paris Agreement, in which nearly 200 nations committed to limiting the rise in global temperatures to less than 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. This delay sends the wrong signal about the U.S. government's reliability in fulfilling its promises.

Yet all is not lost. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit is expected to hear arguments in June on the merits of the challenge to the EPA's regulations, and if the fight reaches the Supreme Court, a decision likely will come after Obama leaves office.

If the EPA prevails, states will still have time to move away from coal-fired energy production under a timetable that is supposed to see reductions begin in 2022. If the EPA loses, the next president must work with Congress to achieve the same or an even more ambitious goal, though that seems likely to happen only if the Democrats take power.

As it is, at least 18 states, support the Clean Power Plan, and there is nothing to preclude them from moving ahead on their own.

Meanwhile, the administration has taken other steps to meet its 2025 goal of cutting domestic greenhouse gas emissions to as much as 28 percent below 2005 levels. It has set a 54.5-miles per gallon standard by 2025 for cars and light-duty trucks. The Interior Department froze new coal-mining leases on federal land, pending a review of how mining fits in with the need to develop energy sources while protecting the environment. The moratorium signals that the nation is recalibrating where it will draw its energy from.

As welcome as these steps are, the U.S. and other nations need to do more. Climate change has already melted glaciers, shrunk the Arctic ice cap, shifted plant and animal ranges and intensified extreme weather. Without significant global action now, change will become more pronounced, with potentially catastrophic consequences.

What's needed is an even higher sense of urgency, not obstructionist moves based on politics. And the fossil-fuel industry needs to recognize that the nation's future energy production must move in a different, renewable direction. Addressing global warming will be disruptive and expensive, but it must be done.

The Daily News occasionally runs editorials from other sources. This first appeared in the Los Angeles Times.