On February 9, Representatives Henry Waxman (D-CA), Ranking Member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, and Bobby Rush (D-IL), Ranking Member of the Energy and Power Subcommittee, added yet another voice to the uproar over the proposed “Dirty Air Act.” CAPAF’s Valeri Vasquez has the story.
The draft bill by Energy and Commerce Committee Chair Fred Upton (R-MI) would overturn the scientific finding that carbon dioxide and other pollutants threaten public health and welfare.
Waxman released a white paper from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) that describes the significant economic benefits from the Clean Air Act. For instance, implementing the Clean Air Act’s public health protections would potentially amount to “2.8 percent of total U.S. health care costs.” Total annual savings are estimated to be over $50 billion. Translation? Net economic benefits exceeding $1 trillion in 2010 alone, a number projected to reach $2 trillion by 2020.
Employment, too, will be stimulated by the Clean Air Act. Its implementation would open the growing international market for pollution control technologies to American companies by “spurring investment in the design, manufacture, installation, and operation of pollution-reducing technologies.” There’s a veritable Sputnik moment to be had in the “healthy competition” generated by investment in innovative technologies like selective catalytic reduction (SCR).
The EPA white paper delineates how the Dirty Air Act would strike protections that
create American jobs and bolsters the global competitiveness of American industry, even as it lowers healthcare costs and protects American families from birth defects, illnesses, and premature death.
In a letter that accompanied yesterday’s release, EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson drove home these points. “The EPA’s priority is safeguarding the health of the American people,” she wrote.
Thank goodness someone is looking out for us.
Read the full white paper and Administrator Jackson’s letter here.
– By Valeri Vasquez, CAPAF Energy Policy Special Assistant.
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Language Intelligence: Lessons on persuasion from Jesus, Shakespeare, Lincoln, and Lady Gaga
Didn’t you used to say “Can (and will) stabilize at 350 to 450 ppm? Now it just says “can.” (In your popular posts section).
The GOP has a tin ear for health and employment benefits. The US EPA white paper emphasized health, and job growth related to clean air technology, without illuminating effects on other economic sectors, or defending regulation of any particular gas.
Had the white paper identified any increased profitability for existing businesses, that would be more likely to gain GOP attention.
That is not without its perils, however. Although a healthy working population buys more consumer goods, increasing profits, such a population spends less on health care. Now that health care is said to be 19% of the economy, that means that the health care economic sector doesn’t benefit from reducing the number of their customer-patients.
In the white paper, the looming shadows of climate changes from air pollution don’t get quantified in terms of near future effects on health, employment or business growth, so the benefit of the Clean Air Act as risk-avoidance on a larger scale is not addressed. (I forgive them that as it would be a challenging analysis even for an experienced team of actuaries.)
The white paper does not reaffirm need for regulation of any specific air pollutants, other than mention in passing of mercury and NOx.
In contrast the Upton -Inhofe bill attacks regulation of list of seven gases, plus any other gas that might be considered a greenhouse gas. The Upton-Inhofe bill does so categorically, regardless of what other health and safety effect a gas might have.
It looks like this response by the EPA may lead to a gas-by-gas discussion of health and safety effects, and could break apart regulation of gases that function as greenhouse gases.
That is worrisome.
Wendell Berry – walkin’ like an Egyptian
MUST SEE VIDEO
http://www.truthdig.com/report/page2/fight_for_a_world_without_coal_20110214/
The video above was filmed at I Love Mountains Feb. 14 2008 – which makes it even more power-full.
Check out this site for “What’s my connection to Mountaintop Removal?”:
http://www.ilovemountains.org/my-connection
Somehow folks not living in Appalachia think this does not involve them…