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EPA staffers go to Hill over global warming
Peter N. Spotts, The Christian Science Monitor
Dissatisfied with the agency’s greenhouse-gas emissions program, labor leaders are pleading for congressional intervention.
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This week, labor leaders representing more than 10,000 Environmental Protection Agency scientists, engineers, and staff have asked Congress to hold aggressive oversight hearings on the agency’s own greenhouse-gas emissions programs.
Under the Bush administration’s voluntary approach, the labor leaders’ petition says, the agency isn’t doing enough to encourage the use of current technology to control carbon-dioxide emissions, the leading cause of human-induced climate change. In fact, the time for a voluntary program is over, the leaders say.
(1 Dec 2006)
China sees tackling climate change as urgent-Stern
Alan Wheatley, Reuters
China’s leaders recognise that tackling climate change is urgent and that reducing greenhouse gases does not mean slamming the brakes on growth, the author of an acclaimed report on global warming said on Friday.
At a news conference to outline a study he presented to the British government in October, former World Bank chief economist Nicholas Stern disputed the premise of several questions that China was not doing enough to address global warming.
“There is a sense of urgency in China,” Stern, head of the British government’s economic service, said. “It’s important to recognise that China is moving, and moving quite quickly.”
…For China, global warming would exacerbate droughts in the north and floods in the south, in part because of the melting of Himalayan glaciers, Stern said.
He said the focus of his meetings in China had been very practical. Officials wanted to explore the transfer of technology and help with financing to clean up its coal-fired power plants.
Noting that China would implement an export tax on energy-intensive exports this month, Stern said he believed Beijing had also embraced the idea of using price incentives to encourage the move to a low-carbon economy.
“I think that principle is accepted in China, and I hope that China does go forward with these kinds of policies as part of the story of increasing energy efficiency, of encouraging technology for renewables, carbon capture and storage for coal and so on.”
…Stern said it was the poorest countries that would suffer most if global warming was not tackled. Far from costing jobs, more efficient use of energy would save money and developing new technologies would be a rich source of growth.
“The idea that you’ve got to grow first and adjust later is wrong. It’s one of the key conclusions of the Stern review and I think it’s recognised here in China,” he added.
(1 Dec 2006)
Four U.S. West states adopt greenhouse gas accord
Leonard Anderson, Reuters via Yahoo!News
Energy regulators from four U.S. Western states, saying they cannot wait for the Bush administration to act on climate change, signed an agreement on Friday to cooperate to promote energy efficiency and reduce greenhouse gas emissions from power plants.
The move by the public utilities commissions of California, Oregon, Washington and New Mexico is likely to draw in other states in the West, officials said.
A meeting of the four state commissions in San Francisco to adopt a “Joint Action Framework on Climate Change,” drew regulatory and legislative representatives from Montana, Wyoming, Utah and Nevada and even a group from Australia.
“The Bush administration has continually failed to take action” to fight global warming, Ben Lujan, chairman of the New Mexico Public Regulation Commission, said.
(1 Dec 2006)
