A forthcoming study seeks to inform how courts consider challenges to these regulations by establishing once and for all that the lawmakers who shaped the Clean Air Act in 1970 knew scientists considered carbon dioxide an air pollutant, and that these elected officials were intent on limiting its emissions.

The research, expected to be published next week in the journal Ecology Law Quarterly, delves deep into congressional archives to uncover what it calls a “wide-ranging and largely forgotten conversation between leading scientists, high-level administrators at federal agencies, members of Congress” and senior staff under Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. That conversation detailed what had become the widely accepted science showing that carbon dioxide pollution from fossil fuels was accumulating in the atmosphere and would eventually warm the global climate. //

“The argument that the Clean Air Act for some reason should not include the regulation of greenhouse gases is simply wrong,” Burger said