"Ms. Jackson Makes a Change" (EPA)

From the New York Times:

Less than a month into the job, and with only a skeleton staff, Lisa Jackson, the new administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, has already engineered an astonishing turnaround.

She has pledged to reverse or review three Bush administration directives that had slowed the government’s response to global warming and has brought a new sense of urgency to an issue that President Bush treated indifferently. She has also boosted morale at an agency badly demoralized after eight years of political meddling.

This sea change would not have been possible, of course, without White House backing. Indeed, it was President Obama who announced the first big change in Bush policy. This was a decision to reconsider (and almost certainly approve) California’s request to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from cars and trucks, which the Bush administration had denied.

Ms. Jackson moved quickly to carry out that directive, meanwhile forecasting further policy shifts. In a memo to her employees last month, and later in an interview with The Times, she indicated that it was only a matter of time before she complied with the Supreme Court’s nearly two-year-old decision ordering the E.P.A. to address the effects of greenhouse gases from vehicles and regulate them if necessary. The Bush administration had dodged that one, too.

Then, last week, Ms. Jackson said she would reconsider a Bush administration declaration that the law did not allow it to regulate carbon dioxide emissions from new coal power plants. Just as obeying the Supreme Court decision could lead to the first nationwide limits on carbon dioxide from vehicles, this latest decision could lead to the first greenhouse gas limits on utilities.

These would be major changes in regulatory policy affecting, all told, more than half the greenhouse gas emissions emitted in this country.

No single agency, E.P.A. included, can hope to address climate change in all its complexity. Regulation can carry the ball only so far. Congress will eventually have to take command of the issue by making big investments and putting a price on carbon.

But smart rules can at least get things moving again after so many years of inertia. They are also a measure of Mr. Obama’s seriousness, and a goad for Congress to act.