Even if you personally dispute it, Congress explicitly granted the EPA the authority to determine what's an air pollutant and what's not:
> For the purpose of establishing national primary and secondary ambient air quality standards, the Administrator shall within 30 days after December 31, 1970, publish, and shall from time to time thereafter revise, a list which includes each air pollutant—emissions of which, in his judgment, cause or contribute to air pollution which may reasonably be anticipated to endanger public health or welfare;
The fact that all of the parties and judges are calling a tail a leg, still doesn't make it a leg.
And the SCOTUS has the authority to rule on whether the EPA's rulemaking is within its statutory authority or not. Which is what it did today. So why are you objecting? Both governmental entities are exercising their authority. The fact that one such exercise, the EPA's, is one you like, and the other such exercise, the Court's is one you don't like, is irrelevant, according to your own logic, just as it's irrelevant, according to your own logic, that the EPA's rule under review here defies logic, common sense, and the plain meaning of words.
So, sure, I'm criticizing the Court's decision, because it's an incoherent and ideologically motivated decision. Doing so helps remove the mystique of the SCOTUS justices as some kind of apolitical actors in the sytem.
No, you are the one who shifted your ground, not me. You started out arguing that calling a tail a leg doesn't make it one--but you only applied that argument (incorrectly, in my opinion, but that's beside the present point) to the SCOTUS decision you didn't like, not to the EPA rulemaking you liked. Then, when I called you on it, you retreated to the argument that the EPA is just exercising its authority--which applies just as much to SCOTUS. So make up your mind: are you going to base your position on actual logic, common sense, and the plain meaning of words, or on government entities exercising their authority no matter what?
> I'm criticizing the Court's decision, because it's an incoherent and ideologically motivated decision.
I disagree that it is, since it's just pointing out that Congress didn't intend to delegate to the EPA the sweeping authority to restructure the entire energy sector of the economy, even if we accept that CO2 is a "pollutant" for the sake of argument. The statute does not give the EPA authority to regulate pollutants however it wants. It only gives it the authority to do so in certain ways.
That said, however, I'm criticising the EPA's rulemaking on the same grounds that you are criticizing the SCOTUS decision: that it's incoherent and ideologically motivated. Any such criticism presupposes that just because a government entity has the formal authority to do something, doesn't make it right. So it is no answer to my criticism to say that the EPA was just exercising its authority.
Suppose I piss in your drink. Have I polluted it, or will you drink it?
'It's not pollution if it comes out of animals' doesn't make much sense.
That's not the argument I was making. The argument I was making is that the presence of CO2 in the atmosphere is part of a natural process that all living organisms, including us humans, engage in. The presence of your piss in my drink is not.
That said, since these are products of the animal's metabolism, I would not consider them pollution if they're just being exhaled into the surrounding air outdoors. If you bring your animal into my climate controlled clean room and have it exhale the compounds there, that would be different--but I doubt the EPA would be the first line of defense in regulating behavior of that sort.
CO2 is not pollution. People and animals breathe it out. Plants breathe it in. Any such thing is obviously not pollution. The EPA calling it "pollution" does not make it pollution, any more than calling a dog's tail a leg makes it a leg.
If Congress wants to grant the EPA authority to regulate things that are obviously not pollution, in order to promote some other policy objective, it needs to say so explicitly. Which is exactly what the Court's opinion says.