PSR leaders decry efforts to block the EPA from regulating carbon pollution

PSR Executive Director Dr. Peter Wilk (on right) and Director of Environment and Health Programs Kristen Welker-Hood, ScD MSN RN, (on left) at the U.S. Senate on January 21, 2010, where they criticized efforts to block the EPA from implementing life-saving greenhouse gas regulations. Here Senator Lautenberg (NJ) speaks, while Senators Merkley (OR), Whitehouse (RI), and Boxer (CA) look on.

On January 21, 2010, Senator Lisa Murkowski (AK) took to the floor of the Senate and introduced a resolution that, if passed, would block the ability of U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to regulate dangerous greenhouse gas emissions. The resolution was the culmination of weeks of speculation about how Murkowski would lodge her formal disagreement with the scientific findings of the EPA, finalized in December 2009, determining that greenhouse gas emissions are a threat to public health.

Instead of adding an amendment blocking EPA authority to an unrelated bill, a tactic that had been discussed in the early weeks of January, Murkowski submitted a joint “resolution of disapproval” under the Congressional Review Act, a little-used 1996 law that allows Congress to overrule new regulations. This option, if passed, would retroactively veto the EPA’s scientific conclusion, thereby preventing the EPA from regulating all sources of greenhouse gas emissions. As Senator Jeff Merkley (OR) wrote, “This extremely damaging proposal is a political stunt designed to effectively strip the EPA’s power to curb harmful air pollution.” (1)

Medical and public health professionals have publicly opposed this attack on the Clean Air Act. PSR joined with the American Public Health Association, the Association of Public Health Laboratories, the National Association of County and City Health Officials, the National Environmental Health Association, and Trust for America’s Health to send a letter to U.S. Senators opposing Murkowski’s resolution. The letter affirmed that global warming will have grave public health consequences, citing the “increased likelihood of more frequent and intense heat waves, more wildfires, degraded air quality, more flooding, increased drought, more intense storms, harm to water resources and harm to agriculture.”

The EPA regulates air quality under the Clean Air Act, which for nearly 40 years has reduced dangerous pollution and worked to protect public health. The Clean Air Act regulates pollutants known to directly harm public health, such as nitrogen oxides, ozone, sulfur oxides, particulate matter, lead, and carbon monoxide, as well as dozens of other toxic air pollutants. In 2007, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the EPA was obligated to regulate greenhouse gas emissions as air pollutants as well. In December, 2009, EPA completed the first step in regulating those emissions as air pollutants: it determined that “the current and projected concentrations of the six key well-mixed greenhouse gases--carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), nitrous oxide (N2O), hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), perfluorocarbons (PFCs), and sulfur hexafluoride (SF6)--in the atmosphere threaten the public health and welfare of current and future generations.” (2)

This endangerment finding, based on decades of scientific evidence, set the EPA on course to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from mobile sources (cars) and stationary sources (power plants and factories). But some lawmakers – Senator Murkowski is the leading voice among them – are desperate to avoid such regulation, and now seek to officially overturn the scientific conclusion of a government agency. By rejecting the scientific finding of a government agency, the Murkowski resolution seeks to cater to the interests of industry while ignoring the serious health threats posed by global warming.

Keeping the EPA on course to regulate dangerous carbon pollution is more important than ever. The climate bill approved by the House has foundered in the Senate, leaving Senators Kerry, Graham, and Lieberman scrambling to work out a less ambitious compromise. It is unclear when such a compromise will be reached, or whether it will adequately protect public health in its scope. In the absence of strong climate legislation, the Clean Air Act is the sole regulatory mechanism for cutting greenhouse gas emissions – a move that PSR Executive Director Peter Wilk says “is essential for safeguarding the health of our generation and the ones to follow.”

The effort to cripple the EPA’s ability to protect public health from the dangers of global warming has taken a different form in the U.S. House of Representatives. There, Representatives Pomeroy (ND) and Moran (KS) have each introduced bills that prevent the EPA from regulating carbon pollution. As PSR’s Director of Environment and Health Programs Kristen Welker-Hood says, we need to safeguard the Clean Air Act so it can effectively regulate greenhouse gases. “There is no greater threat to public health, now and in the future, than climate change.”

Watch the full press conference here.

Read the joint letter from health professional organizations here.

Notes
1. See http://www.grist.org/article/2010-01-21-against-murkowskis-radical-attempt-to-overrule-epa-scientists/.
2. See http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/endangerment.html.