WASHINGTON — The US state of Vermont has won a landmark victory in the battle against global warming being waged at local level across America in defiance of the Bush Administration. A federal judge has ruled against an alliance of US and European car companies seeking to kill off Vermont’s tough new greenhouse gas standards for motor vehicles. The regulations are modelled on California’s groundbreaking pollution standards for cars which were adopted in the teeth of opposition from President George Bush. Earlier this year the US Supreme Court recognised for the first time the phenomenon of global warming and its potentially catastrophic effects upon the environment. Now, the courts have said that, as a result, individual states have the authority ‘to monitor and regulate emissions’, in effect to adopt tougher rules than those at than federal level on carbon dioxide pollution from cars. Irate car manufacturers hope to have the ruling overturned in a higher court. They had sued Vermont saying it was usurping federal authority by passing its own laws to limit the sale of polluting vehicles. California’s Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger called the Vermont ruling an ‘important victory in the fight against global warming.’ The […]