EPA

News

18 States Urge EPA to Act on Global Warming

February 17, 2009

On Feb. 5, Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley lead an 18-state coalition, the Corporation Counsel for the City of New York, and the City Solicitor of Baltimore, urging U.S. Environmental Protection Administrator Lisa Jackson to act in response to the 2007 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Massachusetts v. EPA.

“On April 2, 2007, the Supreme Court established the EPA’s responsibility to regulate greenhouse gases under the federal Clean Air Act. With the change in administrations, we are extremely hopeful that the EPA will finally start to do its job under the statute,” Coakley said. “The second anniversary of the Court’s ruling is now on the horizon, and we are today urging Administrator Jackson to issue as quickly as possible a determination that greenhouse gases are endangering public health and welfare.”

In Massachusetts v. EPA, the Supreme Court ruled that — contrary to the agency’s claim — EPA has the authority to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act. The court also held that the agency could not refuse to use that authority based on the agency’s policy preferences. Instead, the EPA would have to decide, based on the science, whether it believed that greenhouse gas emissions were posing dangers to public health or welfare. If the agency determined that endangerment was occurring, the agency would have to start the process of setting emission standards for greenhouse gases. In late 2007, EPA officials sent a proposed endangerment determination to the White House as an e-mail attachment, but White House officials refused to open the document, and former EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson refused repeated requests to make the document public.

The following states signed on to the letter: Arizona, California, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Iowa, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Washington. All of these states, together with the city of New York, and the Mayor and City Council for Baltimore, joined a petition last year seeking to compel EPA to act under the Supreme Court’s ruling.

A copy of the letter can be found at http://www.mass.gov/Cago/docs/press/2009_02_05_mass_epa_letter_attachment1.pdf

Source: http://www.eponline.com/articles/70781

President Obama Takes The Lead

President Barack Obama leaves no doubt that his administration will move aggressively to address “long overdue” energy and environmental issues and, in a pointed reversal of U.S. policy under George W. Bush, he said that “ideology will no longer trump sound science.”

He said carbon emissions must be reduced to stem the ill effects of climate change, and oil consumption must be reduced to protect national and economic security from over-reliance on oil imports.  That’s the correct way of looking at the Climate Change issue.

If deep reductions in greenhouse gas emissions are required to meet the UNFCCC [The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change] goal of stabilization of anthropogenic (man made) greenhouse gas emissions (of which carbon dioxide is the main culprit) – then one thing is clear, we must move fast, very fast. In 2007, US greenhouse gas emissions totaled 7.28Bt [billion tonnes] carbon dioxide equivalent (GtCO2e).

The capture and storage of CO2 from fossil fuel combustion could play an important part in solving this problem. However, widespread use of a newly available CO2 Emissions Reduction Black Box Device promoted by Climate Cleanup’s Green Tech Group could achieve rapid reduction of CO2 emissions without the need for a rapid change in the energy supply infrastructure.

Green Tech Group

In the long-term the world’s energy system may have to be based on non-fossil energy sources. Decarbonizing the use of fossil fuels, by capture and storage of CO2, would help the transition to a future carbon-free energy system.  However, reducing current CO2 emissions by using our CO2 Reduction Black Box Device will ensure the rapid solution to saving the environment and life as we know it on planet Earth.

Today, there are many advocates of delaying needed actions and influencing government and the world’s population to wait for the emergence of alternate and renewable fuel sources to fossil fuels.  There is no guarantee whatsoever that the public will not be held to ransom by the suppliers of new fuels as they are currently by the fossil fuel providers.  This is the wrong target. We must act NOW and actually reduce CO2 emissions first!

The point is, it is not necessarily the fuel source that is the cause of the excess carbon dioxide CO2 pollution problem.  The actual problem is not acting to reduce the existing emissions, and this has primarily been because no universal device had been invented and made available to the world capable of reducing the CO2 emissions. Now there is such a device.

The White House Blog