EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson announced today that she has determined that greenhouse gas emissions pose a danger to the public health and welfare. The next step is a 60-day comment period, but once that endangerment finding becomes official, it will mark a fundamental shift in how the United States addresses human sources of climate change.
So how did we get here?
The endangerment finding directly stems from the Supreme Court ruling in Massachusetts v. EPA, but it has roots that go back more than a decade to a most unexpected source: The mouth of former Republican representative Tom Delay of Texas.
We all know young people have a handle on the Internet like no other demographic. My generation grew up playing computer games, had PC literacy classes in elementary school, and secretly hijacked the internet for music pirating before we were teens. We have an intuitive sense of the web – its uses, its limitations, and its future.
The nation’s young people are now harnessing that power for climate action, and we’re beating coal’s dirty PR in ways that have industry front groups shaking.
The coal industry’s American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity has poured millions of dollars into online advertising to convince Americans that “clean coal” is the solution to global warming, and it’s planning a $20 million online push this year. But type “clean coal” into Google, and up pop progressive climate blogs, spoofs and news articles.
In my own search for “clean coal,” eight out of the top 10 organic results were web sites that completely debunked the idea – only Wikipedia and an AP news article held both “sides” up. Not a single site in the top 10 was a pro-clean-coal industry page. Industry front group have had to buy their way onto Google’s front page, thanks in large part to young bloggers.
A couple of weeks ago, we discussed the possibilities of biochar - burning organic waste, such as wood chips, left-over crop residue or even manure at extremely low oxygen levels and high temperatures in order to produce charcoal and biogas. The charcoal would go into the ground, increasing soil fertility, while the gas would be an effective energy source, making good use of detritus that would otherwise decompose, returning its carbon to the atmosphere.
I suggested that although the technology was still distant from full-scale implementation, it had considerable promise as a way to draw-down carbon from the atmosphere.
Well, environmental writer George Monbiot has demurred. He wrote in the Guardian yesterday that biochar advocates have been “suckered.” They promote “an even crazier use of woodchips.” They wish to “turn the planet’s surface into charcoal.” They are a wild band of “magical thinkers” who wish to “destroy the biosphere in order to save it.”
Remember, this is Monbiot, a serious analyst of anthropogenic global warming, not Bjorn Lomborg or a mercenary from the Heartland Institute. This man isn’t “supposedly” in the coalition to avert disastrous warming - he’s part of it, through and through.
So what’s he in a tizzy about? A lot of nothing, it turns out, since he’s battling with a straw-man that most biochar researchers don’t take even remotely seriously.
