Increasing the Heat: States Ratchet up the Pressure on the Administration to Realistically Address Global Warming
Michael Brown '06
Last week, the Senate finally confirmed – after a fierce 56-day battle – President Bush’s replacement for retired Environmental Protection Agency administrator, Christine Todd Whitman. The long struggle over the nomination of Michael Leavitt may, in fact, have had little to do with the former Utah Governor’s own positions on key environmental issues, and much more to do with the administration’s environmental track record, which has been long on promise and short on results. From concerns that the President has unduly relaxed restrictions on key air and water pollutants to the discovery that the administration may have withheld important information pertaining to chemical contaminants released into the air in New York City on 9-11, members of Congress on both sides of the aisle have become understandably perturbed about the administration’s environmental policies.
However, perhaps nowhere is the President’s deficient environmental policy more visible than in the case of global warming. In fact, President Bush’s consistent refusal to address this pressing issue has become so alarming that individual states have been forced to take the fight against climate change into their own hands. Ten states, including New Jersey, are poised to file a lawsuit against the EPA to force it to take a stronger regulatory stance against excessive greenhouse gas emissions.
The administration has traditionally avoided dealing with the question of global warming, viewing it as a remote and still unproven trend, the remedy to which would cost too much to American industry to be worth the effort. In one of his first actions as President, Bush withdrew the United States from the Kyoto Protocol, an international agreement to curb emissions of greenhouse gases – which are mainly composed of carbon dioxide discharged into the atmosphere by natural means, deforestation, fossil fuel combustion and industrial processes, strengthening the Greenhouse Effect that traps heat from the Sun on Earth – even though Japan and the European Union have already ratified the agreement. Even worse than the simple rejection of Kyoto, the President did not bother to propose an alternative treaty, leaving spurned allies to pursue anti-global warming objective on their own.
Twice, according to the New York Times, the administration has ordered the EPA to temper its reports on global warming, deleting a chapter on climate change in a 2002 report on pollution trends, and whittling down to a few paragraphs the section on global warming in an EPA assessment of broad environmental problems published last summer. Last week, the Senate, with strong White House backing, rejected the McCain-Lieberman Climate Stewardship Act, which would have set targets for reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. This comes in spite of the fact that the United States is the world’s largest producer of greenhouse gases, contributing 25 percent of the global total. In all fairness, the President has proposed some measures to address global warming, like developing hydrogen-powered cars and proposing a voluntary emissions reduction program. However, the White House has failed to seek any immediate, practical solutions to this pressing problem.
In the meantime, global warming’s impact is intensifying, and it threatens to reshape the world in countless ways. The 1990s, according to the Pew Center on Global Climate research, was the hottest decade in the 20th century, and 1998, 2001 and 2002 were three of the warmest years ever recorded. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a UN body made up of international climate experts, released a report in 2001 definitively asserting that the temperature increases were caused by human processes. It also predicted that average temperatures could rise by as much as 10.4 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the 21st century.
Another report, by the American National Academy of Sciences (NAS), concurred with UN discoveries, and also warned that heat waves and extreme weather will wrack the United States. Many coastal areas will be submerged by rising sea levels. Alaskan roads and oil pipelines have already started to sink into the ground as no-longer-permanent permafrost begins to melt. Global warming will disrupt crop growth and weather patterns, according to the Pew Center. Third world countries, with a more limited capacity to adapt their largely agrarian economies to the shifting climate, will be the worst hit. In addition, global warming may pose a serious public health concern. According to the Sierra Club, research at Harvard medical school has shown that the warmer temperatures have already begun to increase the spread of many infectious diseases, like malaria. The challenges posed by unchecked global warming will tax every nation on the globe in an attempt to adapt and respond to the drastically changed living conditions.
Although the federal government has not stepped up to meet the grave challenges posed by global warming, many states have developed their own initiatives to counter the problem. According to the Pew Center, 14 states, including President Bush’s Texas, have enacted legislation to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The New England states, in conjunction with five Canadian Provinces, have even formed their own mini international treaty agreement, agreeing to reduce emissions in their region to 1990 levels by 2010. On the West Coast, Oregon, California and Washington have jointly agreed to collaborate to limit the agents of global climate change.
The state efforts cut across party lines, and Republican governors have proposed some of the most innovative approaches. In New York, Republican Gov. George Pataki has created a regional market in which power companies can buy or sell carbon-dioxide credits, essentially offering incentives for businesses to be environmentally friendly. Even one of the nation’s newest governors, Arnold Schwarzenegger, pledged in his campaign to “lead by example – identifying and permanently retiring those heavily used vehicles that do the greatest harm to our air quality.” In fact, not only does President Bush’s approach to global warming ignore the reality and magnitude of the problem, it is also out of step with much of his own party. A full half of the ten states filing the lawsuit against the EPA have Republican governors. The reason states are beginning to take the initiative is mainly economic: the cost of reducing greenhouse emissions now outweighs the long-term economic cost of permanent and rapid changes in climate. Unfortunately, the limited jurisdictions of individual states, and the massive budget crises facing most state legislatures, mean that truly viable measures to fight global warming can only come from Washington, D.C.
It is plain that global warming is an imminent and potent danger to international stability. Michael Leavitt’s recent appointment to the EPA presents the Bush administration with a fresh opportunity to take a tougher stand on climate change. States across the country have already begun to prove that such a proactive approach is politically feasible. If the President is serious about enacting positive domestic reforms and rebuilding fractured international alliances, renewing a cooperative and aggressive attack on the forces of climate change would go a long way.