  EPA Administrator Lisa Perez Jackson
BY ERNEST COREA
IDN-InDepthNews Service
WASHINGTON DC (IDN) - The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) recently made the legally required determination that will enable it to crackdown on green house gas (GHG) emissions. EPA’s positive move is likely to have improved, even slightly, America’s credibility as a partner in climate change negotiations.
President Barack Obama and EPA Administrator Lisa P. Jackson have both said that they prefer legislative solutions to the problems of climate change. Despite the caveat, EPA’s preparation for action drives home the point, both domestically and internationally, that if the legislature fails to act, the Obama Administration can.
This is a serious commitment and will be followed through, say administration sources; hence, Obama’s decision to attend the UN Conference on Climate Change in Copenhagen when hard bargaining in going on and a “deal” can be closed.
The point was not lost in Copenhagen where the head of the UN Climate Change Secretariat Yvo de Boer said the ruling was "like having a stick behind the door...something to fall back on" for Obama. "I think that will boost peoples' confidence in the U.S. coming forward with a number, and that number making it through, either as cap-and-trade or as regulation.”
Scepticism has not disappeared, however, and India’s special envoy for climate change Shyam Saran voiced a view held by others as well when he was reported to have said: "It's for the U.S. to indicate how that (the EPA finding) will be reflected here in the negotiations in terms of targets and how those targets are going to be enforced."
EVIDENCE
On December 7, a public announcement from EPA confirmed, “after a thorough examination of the scientific evidence and careful consideration of public comments, that greenhouse gases (GHGs) threaten the public health and welfare of the American people.
EPA also said that GHG emissions from on-road vehicles contribute to that threat.
EPA explained that its “findings do not in and of themselves impose any emission reduction requirements but rather allow EPA to finalize the GHG standards proposed earlier this year for new light-duty vehicles as part of the joint rulemaking with the Department of Transportation.
”On-road vehicles contribute more than 23 percent of total U.S. GHG emissions. EPA’s proposed GHG standards for light-duty vehicles, a subset of on-road vehicles, would reduce GHG emissions by nearly 950 million metric tons and conserve 1.8 billion barrels of oil over the lifetime of model year 2012-2016 vehicles.”
EPA’s findings cover six GHGs: carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, hydrofluorocarbons, perfluorocarbons and sulfur hexafluoride. They have all “been the subject of scrutiny and intense analysis for decades by scientists in the U.S. and around the world,” EPA pointed out.
Pressure from two directions caused EPA to act. First, the Supreme Court ruled in April 2007 that under the provisions of the Clean Air Act, GHGs are air pollutants that need corrective action by EPA. That was in the days of the Bush Administration.
Two years later, in April 2009, with the Bush Administration no longer in office, EPA responded to the court ruling by issuing preliminary findings on GHGs. As legally required, EPA opened its findings to public observations for 60 days. The agency reports that it “received more than 380,000 comments, which were carefully reviewed and considered” before a final determination was made.
Second, while conforming to the letter of the law, EPA responded to the pressure of scientific evidence that the realities of climate change caused by human action required urgent counter measures.
It referred to the scientific consensus that “as a result of human activities, GHG concentrations in the atmosphere are at record high levels and data shows that the Earth has been warming over the past 100 years, with the steepest increase in warming in recent decades.”
“The evidence of human-induced climate change goes beyond observed increases in average surface temperatures; it includes melting ice in the Arctic, melting glaciers around the world, increasing ocean temperatures, rising sea levels, acidification of the oceans due to excess carbon dioxide, changing precipitation patterns, and changing patterns of ecosystems and wildlife,” EPA noted .
“GHGs are the primary driver of climate change, which can lead to hotter, longer heat waves that threaten the health of the sick, poor or elderly; increases in ground-level ozone pollution linked to asthma and other respiratory illnesses; as well as other threats to the health and welfare of Americans.”
This affirmation of reality is supported in recent studies commissioned by the U.S. National Institutes of Health and several British partners, including the Academy of Medical Sciences and the Royal College of Physicians.
Reacting to the studies, Health and Human Services Secretary (Minister) Kathleen Sibelius said: “We are learning that the health of our planet and the health of our people are tied together. It is difficult for one to thrive without the other…..If we work to reduce pollution, we also reduce deaths due to respiratory and cardiovascular diseases.”
HISTORY
Commenting on the significance of the agency’s action, the EPA Administrator said: “These long-overdue findings cement 2009’s place in history as the year when the U.S. Government began addressing the challenge of greenhouse-gas pollution and seizing the opportunity of clean-energy reform.”
“Business leaders, security experts, government officials, concerned citizens and the U.S. Supreme Court have called for enduring, pragmatic solutions to reduce the greenhouse gas pollution that is causing climate change. This continues our work towards clean energy reform that will cut GHGs and reduce the dependence on foreign oil that threatens our national security and our economy.”
Equally important is the work of the houses of Congress. Climate and energy legislation has already been adopted in the House of Representatives. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi described the Bill as “transformative legislation that takes us into the future.” Full transformation is yet to see the light of day.
In the Senate, the future envisioned by Pelosi is still to come, with consideration of the legislation on standby while health care reform and other issues take precedence.
DENIAL
Meanwhile, the country’s climate change deniers, and critics of the current approach to climate change policy, whether they are practicing politicians, Palinoids, representatives of the private sector, or academics, have not lost their voices.
Congressman James Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin, the most senior Republican the House Select Committee for Energy Independence and Global Warming, is reported to have written to Rajendra Pachauri, head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), to demand that researchers who allegedly wrote emails indicating that climate change data was manipulated should not be allowed to participate in the latest report written by the U.N. panel. They were practising “scientific fascism”, he suggested.
"Global warming deniers are trying to say this is all a trick, but the truth of the matter is that our world is getting hotter, faster," says Congressman Edward J. Markey, a Democrat from Massachusetts, chairman of the Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming, and a co-author of legislation to limit greenhouse gas emissions.
Markey cited data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which concluded that this decade had an average global surface temperature about 1 degree Fahrenheit above the 20th century average.
CHALLENGE
Michel Jarraud, secretary general of WMO (World Meteorological Organization), said at Copenhagen that 2000-2009 "is very likely to be the warmest on record, warmer than the 1990s, than the 1980s and so on".
The fact of man induced climate change and its consequences, are demonstrable. So is the need to deal with them, in the interests of the entire human family, and not in terms of petty outbursts.
As Maurice Strong, one of the earliest leaders and wise men of the environmental movement, points out: "Climate change is the biggest single challenge humans have ever faced. Unlike other problems, which can be solved regionally or sectorally, climate change affects the very future of life on earth. It is the greatest security problem we have ever faced."
So perhaps all contending parties should discard their sectarian talking points, end their divisive outbursts, and spend some time pondering the words of John F. Kennedy who said (in a university commencement address): “in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's future. And we are all mortal.” (IDN-InDepthNews/11.12.09)
Copyright © 2009 IDN-InDepthNews Service
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The writer has served as Sri Lanka’s ambassador to Canada, Cuba, Mexico, and the USA. He was Chairman of the Commonwealth Select Committee on the media and development, Editor of the Ceylon ‘Daily News’ and the Ceylon ‘Observer’, and was for a time Features Editor and Foreign Affairs columnist of the Singapore ‘Straits Times’. He is on the IDN editorial board.
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