Global Warming Is Bad for You, Says EPA
It just became official: global warming is bad for our health.
You think? This headline may look like something lifted from The Onion – but in fact we’re talking legally and in the Here and Now. For the first time, the Environmental Protection Agency appears to have designated greenhouse gases (the most infamous being carbon dioxide) as a danger to human health, opening the way to regulating these gases under the Clean Air Act.
In other words: the government is legally required to directly tackle these gases as pollutants that threaten people right now – not as a form of housekeeping for the future of our planet.
The Obama adminstration has been quick to impress with its unprecedented environmental reforms – but this is potentially colossal. And naturally it has a sizable slice of the commercial sector up in arms. They’re asking the question: is a recession really the time to impose such a check upon economic development? The fear is that all major manufacturing projects will have to comply with stricter emissions controls, which will prove costlier and so hamper economic growth.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is unimpressed, to say the least – but it ties in nicely with the current government’s proposed “cap and trade” system, where companies will have to obtain a permit to be allowed to release emissions.
Whether such hands-on regulation comes from Congress or from the EPA, it appears to be on the way at last. Democrat Edward Markey has stated that the EPA report “will officially end the era of denial on global warming”. And that’s change by anyone’s definition.
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4 Comments
March 26th, 2009 at 5:17 am
Great article, though I’m totally pissed right now about the idea of the recession being a bad time to impose checks.
When IS a good time?
March 26th, 2009 at 7:42 am
Thanks, Amy.
It’s an interesting question: is it right to think in the short-term with something concerning keeping the environment human-friendly – even when times are as hard as they are now?
And is it right to put this kind of question out to the public vote, in the best spirit of democracy, when everyone is feeling the pinch of the credit crunch and most people are liable to look unsympathetically at anything that might prolong the recovery of the economy?
Or should the government take the initiative, even if the popular opinion says otherwise? Is that what governments should do, to behave responsibly?
Heady stuff…..
March 26th, 2009 at 10:18 am
It’s always the right time to do the right thing, no matter how difficult and painful it is – but that’s just my opinion.
March 26th, 2009 at 3:50 pm
Yes, I believe we should proceed with responsible stewardship, while taking care, at the same time, to not cause unnecessary economic distress. But of course, some economic distress will be necessary and inevitable. I also believe that no one in the scientific community has an absolutist lock on this: scientists on both “sides” of the issue all agree that warming is an empirically documentable reality, but they are at variance when it comes to causality. Some feel it’s humanly caused and others equally qualified believe that it is naturally caused (viz. part of a normal, global cycle). I feel that even if it’s due to the latter, we should still take the measures endorsed by the former, just to be on the safe side. It can never be wrong to do so.
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