Finally, US leads on environment
By Derrick Z. Jackson
IN A CRITICAL demonstration of backbone on global warming, the Obama administration yesterday declared carbon dioxide a dangerous pollutant. Saying the country “will not ignore science and the law any longer,’’ Lisa Jackson, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, said her findings and declaration “cement 2009’s place in history as the year when the United States government began addressing the challenge of greenhouse gas pollution.’’
In a news briefing, Jackson rattled off the predicted effects of unabated climate change, based on “overwhelming amounts of scientific study.’’ The effects range from melting polar ice caps to droughts and from disease to hotspots for military conflict. Her ruling covered six top contributing gases to climate change. Other gases included methane, nitrous oxide, and hydrofluorocarbons. “We know that skeptics have and will continue to try to sow doubts about the science,’’ Jackson said. “It’s no wonder that many people are confused. But raising doubts – even in the face of overwhelming evidence – is a tactic that has been used by defenders of the status quo for years. . . . It’s time that we let the science speak for itself.’’
After the briefing, Jackson flew to Copenhagen, where she will be the first of several administration officials to address the international climate change summit. The last official will be President Obama on Dec. 18. The fact that the EPA administrator and the president are the two American bookends at Copenhagen is the strongest signal yet of a new American attitude on the environment.
Still, the summit does not have a global agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. American business lobbyists and fossil fuel-state politicians have thus far kept federal climate change legislation from getting out of the Senate. The United States, about 6 percent of the world’s population, consumes about a quarter of the world’s energy and in turn is responsible for a quarter of world’s greenhouse gases.
This cloud is a hangover from the Bush administration, going back to when EPA Administrator Christine Todd Whitman issued a report in 2002 saying that human activities were responsible for the greenhouse gases of global warming. President Bush brushed off the report as an irrelevant document “put out by the bureaucracy.’’ Whitman later resigned. America became a global pariah in environmental circles.
With the EPA now fully in command of the message of a more well-intended administration, there is hope that the Copenhagen summit, whether it does or does not itself end with a binding agreement, will be a springboard, not a dead end. Jackson’s command of the message was on display last week in a Senate environmental hearing. For several minutes, she was badgered by the Senate’s leading disbeliever of global warming, Republican James Inhofe of Oklahoma. Inhofe tried to play up the recent story of e-mails showing the process of how scientists have debated, in some cases unprofessionally, the findings of climate change.
Jackson responded by saying, “While I would absolutely agree that these e-mails show a lack of interpersonal skills . . . I have not heard anything that causes me to believe that [the] overwhelming consensus that climate change is happening and that man-made emissions are contributing to it, have changed.’’ When Inhofe pressed for Jackson to delay her endangerment finding, Jackson stood firm and said, “Senator, I believe that what we should be looking for are any changes in the consensus opinion of scientists around the world about climate change.’’
Having seen no changes, Jackson officially announced that the gases do endanger us. Congress now has a clock ticking on regulations, with Jackson herself saying the nation would be better served by congressional legislation beyond the powers of the EPA. Obama now has leverage with other large polluting nations, leading by a fresh, unprecedented example at home. One of the high points of the early Obama administration has been letting Jackson deliver the president’s message. Now Obama needs to deliver it himself.
