Boston, Massachusetts – Today, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency released a proposed finding that carbon dioxide and other global warming pollutants, which come mostly from burning fossil fuels, are a threat to public health and welfare.
“‘Duh’ may not be a scientific term, but it applies here. Today, common sense prevailed over pressure from Big Oil and other big polluters to deny the obvious in order to maintain the status quo on energy. EPA has embraced the basic facts on global warming that scientists around the world have acknowledged for years. We applaud President Obama and EPA Administrator Jackson for putting science back in its rightful place at the forefront of environmental policy,” said Environment Massachusetts Field Organizer Winston Vaughan.
Two years ago, the Supreme Court ordered the EPA to determine if global warming pollution threatens public health or welfare – a conclusion supported by a worldwide scientific consensus. Today’s action comes in response to that decision and sets the stage for the EPA to take long-overdue steps to reduce global warming pollution from cars, power plants, and other large pollution sources under the Clean Air Act.
“Reducing global warming pollution to the levels demanded by the science will drive the creation of a clean energy economy, put Americans back to work in clean energy jobs, and spare our children and grandchildren and the world they’ll inherit from the ravages of global warming,” said Vaughan.
The following is the timeline leading up to today’s decision:
1999: EPA was first petitioned to regulate global warming pollutants from new cars and light trucks under the Clean Air Act.
2003: The Bush EPA denied the petition.
April 2007: The Supreme Court rejected the Bush EPA’s reasons for denying the petition.
December 2007: The Bush EPA prepared a proposal finding that global warming pollutants endanger public welfare, but the White House did not allow the proposal to be released.
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Environment Massachusetts is a statewide, citizen-based environmental advocacy organization.
How does this relate to the Markey Waxman bill’s provision to prohibit the regulation CO2 and other greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act? Will we get better results with legislation or EPA regulation? Thanks for any insights you can offer
As we have seen in the past year, collapsing tax revenues from low growth also cause public health problems such as increase in crime, domestic violence, drastic cuts in services and so on. Removing each unit of carbon costs money, either in paying more for the same amount of energy, paying a tax on carbon generation, subsidies, or not generating the product in the first place to avoid the tax (which leads to lower growth).
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p>Can we judge how much carbon is proposed to be removed, how much it will cost, and what the effects on public health will be in the balance?
The fact that the oceans contain much of the CO2 and marine biologist have no idea of the effect on sea life, and that every plant that uses CO2 for respiration for life is likewise irrelevant.
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p>The only relevancy is dogma. It’s not a thought ought mathmetaical equation, it is speculation and religion. That is the only imporatnt issue. You see, there are many people on this planet that must have a cause, otherwise there would be absent a raison d’etre. So al long as Obama is in office we will have to live with it—and the next presidency will dismantle it—if there is a next presidency.
Why am I even bothering to respond to this?
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p>MCRD titles his rant with a distortion, strawman and lie:
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p>NOBODY is advocating “the removal of all CO2 from the earth’s atmosphere” (emphasis mine). Just what reaction do you expect from asserting this?
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p>The mathematics of atmospheric CO2 and its effect on temperature at the surface of the earth most certainly are “thought ought” — and have been published since the nineteenth century. They are taught in high-school physics classes.
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p>The Stephan-Boltzmann equation, derived in 1879, is used to calculate the surface temperature of the Earth in the absence of an atmosphere. Josef Stephan deduced the law based on empirical measurements. Ludwig Boltzmann published a derivation from basic thermodynamics in 1884.
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p>The Stephan-Boltzmann law is:
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p>where F = energy flux, sigma is the Stefan-Boltzmann constant, and T is the temperature in degrees Kelvin.
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p>EVERY high-school physics student uses this law to calculate the temperature of the surface of the earth, in the absence of atmospheric warming, as:
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p>279 degrees Kelvin
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p>When taking albedo (reflectivity) effects into account — the earth reflects about 30% of sunlight incident upon it — the effective temperature at the surface is lower:
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p>255 degrees Kelvin (or about 0.67 F).
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p>The average temperature of the earth is much warmer than that. In 1896, Svante Arrhenius published research showing the relationship between atmospheric CO2 concentration and temperature change (in the absence of water vapor):
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p>This is the “settled science” that is and has remained unchanged in more than a century. It is “settled” because we rely on it every day. If it was wrong, thermodynamics would be wrong. Jet engines wouldn’t work. Internal combustion engines wouldn’t work. Airplanes (including gliders) would fall from the sky. Specifically — how large is the warming effect of the enormous quantities of atmospheric CO2 humanity has injected into the atmosphere, how soon will those effects be felt, and what if anything can be done about them.
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p>The science that is changing every day is the question of how these fundamental laws play out in the dynamic environment of a changing atmosphere with changing CO2 levels, positive and negative feedbacks, and the enormously strong influence of large-scale ocean currents and upwellings.
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p>The rest of the above rant does not merit further comment.
My sentence that begins “Specifically — how large …” should be the last sentence of the following paragraph, after “… ocean currents and upwellings.” I was attempting summarize the science that is very much in dispute within the scientific community — and is therefore the focus of a great deal of excellent climate research.
after all, look at the amount of CO_2 releasing energy combustion that the Feds subsidize… coal mining, oil and gas exploration, the occasional war in the Middle East, and so forth. It’s not clear that green energy is more expensive than ‘black’ energy now given the market alterations.
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p>Of course, we pay all kinds of added costs from burning fossil fuels above and beyond CO_2. Asthma rates go up near coal fired power plants. The erosion of the wetlands south of Louisiana due to the tangled network of natural gas pipelines results in increased storm surge and greater damage and danger for storms and hurricanes. Massive trade deficits from oil importation.
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p>Furthermore, conservation removes CO_2 and saves money. Sometimes you’ve got to pay capital to make it back in operations budgets, and I’m not claiming that every investment in conservation has adequate payback. However, this idea that “removing each unit of carbon costs money” is flat out wrong, and the reality is that there’s plenty of hidden costs to dirty fuel that we’re paying in other ways now.
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p>Back here in the USA we’re more likely to see coal companies take money from the cap & trade tax to tank up their CO2 and bury it in unused mine shafts.
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p>An actual accounting of the effects of CO2 would have to make a real determination as to where the world will be one way or another. Predictions coming out of the climate change adherents are sketchy and apocalyptic at the same time.
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p>Cutting the growth rate of the world’s economy results in people getting chopped up with machetes somewhere in the world. Let’s think about what we’re actually doing.