EPA Rules Carbon Emissions Endanger Human Health

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9 December 2009 :: J.E. Robertson

The United States’ Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has ruled that carbon and other greenhouse gas emissions pose a danger to human health, two years after the US Supreme Court gave it the authority to regulate carbon emissions for that very reason, under the Clean Air Act. The finding gives new weight to the American administration’s efforts to help achieve international consensus on aggressive emissions reductions at Copenhagen.

There has been criticism from some quarters of the business community, and from the “climate-skeptic” movement, suggesting that the EPA’s ruling is little more than an ideological aggression against open markets. In fact, the EPA has taken far longer to recognize the science produced by its own experts, and thus follow the mandate of the Supreme Court, than most observers expected.

Scientists at NASA and at NOAA have been intensely critical of the EPA’s overzealous consideration of the viewpoint that it might be entitled by law to do nothing. International observers, including scientists and diplomats, have been skeptical that the EPA would bring the US in line with its own pledges to take action to curb emissions, so the finding breathes new life into multilateral negotiations toward the goal of capping global greenhouse gas emissions in a responsible way.

The finding may also be considered a signal to the United States Senate that it is falling behind on crafting legislation that will allow the US to start planning for a low-carbon energy future. The bill currently up for consideration, which proposes a 20% cut by the year 2020, has languished, with ideological opponents claiming it would destroy the American economy, even as it invests heavily to create entirely new industries and spur economic growth.

The EPA can, due to its authority under the Clean Air Act and in connection with the 2007 Supreme Court ruling classing carbon emissions as a harmful pollutant, establish regulatory guidelines in keeping with the scientific consensus that informed that ruling. This is a 100% legal and viable strategy for the US to institute steep barriers against further expansion of overall national carbon emissions.

The “endangerment” finding also helps to reframe the legal debate on how Congress should approach the problem of dealing with emissions linked to climate destabilization. While ideological opponents question the science showing a link between human activity and climate change, the fact of the legislative role in this process is to make the emissions response more workable, more specific and more geared toward the twin goals of climate stabilization and long-term economic opportunity.

In early 2007, the New York Times reported:

The Bush administration estimates that emissions by the United States of gases that contribute to global warming will grow nearly as fast through the next decade as they did the previous decade, according to a long-delayed report being completed for the United Nations.

The document, the United States Climate Action Report, emphasizes that the projections show progress toward a goal Mr. Bush laid out in a 2002 speech: that emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases grow at a slower rate than the economy. Since that speech, he has repeated his commitment to lessening “greenhouse gas intensity” without imposing formal limits on the gases.

The Bush policy calling for emissions to slow was a tacit admission of the need to curb greenhouse gas emissions in the interests of public health, a recognition that the EPA should have the authority the Supreme Court ruled it in fact already had. Critics from both the climate-science community and the business community were warning at the time that failure to institute meaningful emissions regulations could severely hamper future US economic growth.

In order to prevent a crippling lag in developing clean energy technologies, which could put countries from Denmark to Japan to China, in the forefront of clean energy industrial production and technology export, business leaders have been calling for clear, coordinated action to curb emissions and develop the new technologies that will allow those regulations to have little to no effect on consumer energy pricing or overall economic output.

The “Copenhagen Call” was issued by business leaders at the end of the World Business Summit, earlier this year, and laid out six key steps for combatting global climate destabilization and spurring economic progress at the same time:

1. Agreement on a science-based greenhouse gas stabilization path with 2020 and 2050 emissions reduction targets;
2. Effective measurement, reporting and verification of emissions;
3. Incentives for a dramatic increase in financing low emissions technologies;
4. Deployment of existing low-emissions technologies and the development of new ones;
5. Funds to make communities more resilient and able to adapt to the effects of climate change;
6. Innovative means to protect forests and balance the carbon cycle.

The Copenhagen Call is an intelligent, forward-thinking science-based approach to confluence of needs of the global population, to protect the human habitat, and the business community, which seeks to expand economic opportunity, despite the need for tighter regulation of emissions-related business activities. It is a clear sign that the climate-skeptic position has been rejected by informed stakeholders, and the science demonstrating human-caused climate-destabilization is verified and troubling.

The first point, calling for a science-based response specifically notes that:

We support the scientific evidence of the IPCC’s 4th. We are concerned that some recent scientific evidence suggests the problem may be worse than many of the IPCC estimates.

An effective global climate treaty must establish an ambitious goal and set emission targets that protect us and future generations from the risks of climate destabilization. Limiting the global average temperature increase to a maximum of 2°C compared to pre-industrial levels would entail abatement of around 17Gt versus business-as-usual by 2020.

Also in 2007, William Stevens, the former New York Times chief correspondent on global climate change, wrote for the newspaper that there had been a heated theoretical debate over the findings of top climate scientists, throughout the 1990s, but that the 2000s had brought enough evidence that a “sea change” had occurred, in which it was no longer a viable scientific claim that climate change might not be caused by human activity.

Stevens argued that in fact it appeared the science had produced enough hard evidence that the “beyond a reasonable doubt” threshold had been crossed, and there was the very real possibility of legal judgements finding criminal liability in cases of excessive contributions to overall emissions. The Supreme Court ruling later that year, recognizing the EPA’s authority to regulate carbon emissions under the Clean Air Act essentially confirmed Stevens’ observations.

Indeed, the burden of proof was legally shifted by that Supreme Court ruling, in which Justice John Paul Stevens wrote that the only way the EPA could conceivably “avoid taking further action” would be “if it determines that greenhouse gases do not contribute to climate change”. The Clean Air Act was found to have “clear statutory command” over the EPA, and the ruling essentially mandated immediate change in policy to ensure the EPA acts to curb carbon emissions, unless it can be scientifically proven that emissions are not a threat.

That language is the law of the land in the United States, meaning neither the EPA nor the United States Congress can simply treat the issue of emissions-related climate-destabilization as a matter of unsettled science, raw opinion or ideological dispute. There is a tangible, legally-based responsibility to regulate greenhouse gases, and Copenhagen provides the opportunity to coordinate those regulations with 191 other nations.