a helpful provision

When I wrote this post on environmental policy in the United States, I hadn’t realized an important section of an earlier House version on Environmental Protection Agency regulation of greenhouse gases had made it into the final version of the Inflation Reduction Act.

The language amends the Clean Air Act and is very specific that the EPA has the authority to regulate all greenhouse gases and to reduce them through the promotion of renewable energy.

This should blunt the impact of the Supreme Court decision in West Virginia v. EPA which held that the Congress had not been explicit enough in defining the scope of the EPA’s work in moving the country away from fossil fuels in order to limit global warming.

One more step in the right direction…

My response to EDF’s climate confession email

This message from the Environmental Defense Fund: http://support.edf.org/site/MessageViewer?dlv_id=65441&em_id=35201.0
really upset me. They have been giving cover to the oil and gas industry to keep fracking, so I took their invitation to write to them and sent the following:

I am distressed with your climate confession email because your hopeful graph isn’t telling the whole story. The graph only tells about carbon dioxide emissions from the energy sector. It ignores other sectors and, even more disturbingly, ignores the emissions of other greenhouse gases, such as methane. Methane is a much more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide and is particularly damaging in the twenty year timeframe, which is the critical time period in which we can temper climate change to make it only damaging to the planet and its inhabitants, instead of catastrophic.

It sickens me that EDF has fallen into the trap of the oil and gas industry to push ramping up unconventional fossil fuel extraction by HVHF in the name of helping the climate when what we really need to do is withdraw all support for fossil fuels and convert to renewable energy as quickly as possible.