In a landmark finding for America and humanity, the EPA “issued a proposed finding Friday that greenhouse gases contribute to air pollution that may endanger public health or welfare.”  The ruling sounds the death knell for new dirty coal plants and should apply some pressure on Congress to pass climate legislation.

Note: everything you could want to know about this finding — including the 133 page finding itself and the 171 “Technical support document” — can be found on EPA’s website here.

“This finding confirms that greenhouse gas pollution is a serious problem now and for future generations. Fortunately, it follows President Obama’s call for a low carbon economy and strong leadership in Congress on clean energy and climate legislation,” said Administrator Lisa P. Jackson. “This pollution problem has a solution – one that will create millions of green jobs and end our country’s dependence on foreign oil.

As the EPA reports on its website:

EPA’s proposed endangerment finding is based on rigorous, peer-reviewed scientific analysis of six gases – carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, hydrofluorocarbons, perfluorocarbons and sulfur hexafluoride – that have been the subject of intensive analysis by scientists around the world. The science clearly shows that concentrations of these gases are at unprecedented levels as a result of human emissions, and these high levels are very likely the cause of the increase in average temperatures and other changes in our climate.

The scientific analysis also confirms that climate change impacts human health in several ways. Findings from a recent EPA study titled “Assessment of the Impacts of Global Change on Regional U.S. Air Quality: A Synthesis of Climate Change Impacts on Ground-Level Ozone,” for example, suggest that climate change may lead to higher concentrations of ground-level ozone, a harmful pollutant. Additional impacts of climate change include, but are not limited to:

• increased drought;
• more heavy downpours and flooding;
• more frequent and intense heat waves and wildfires;
• greater sea level rise;
• more intense storms; and
• harm to water resources, agriculture, wildlife and ecosystems.

BACKGROUND AND IMPLICATIONS

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Third-World Stove Soot Is Target in Climate Fight

In Kohlua, in central India, with no cars and little electricity, emissions of carbon dioxide, the main heat-trapping gas linked to global warming, are near zero. But soot “” also known as black carbon “” from tens of thousands of villages like this one in developing countries is emerging as a major and previously unappreciated source of global climate change.

While carbon dioxide may be the No. 1 contributor to rising global temperatures, scientists say, black carbon has emerged as an important No. 2, with recent studies estimating that it is responsible for 18 percent of the planet’s warming, compared with 40 percent for carbon dioxide. Decreasing black carbon emissions would be a relatively cheap way to significantly rein in global warming “” especially in the short term, climate experts say. Replacing primitive cooking stoves with modern versions that emit far less soot could provide a much-needed stopgap, while nations struggle with the more difficult task of enacting programs and developing technologies to curb carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels.

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Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson is officially confirming today that greenhouse gas pollution endangers the health and welfare of the American public, finally obeying the mandate set down by the U.S. Supreme Court on April 2, 2007. Following a review from the White House and agencies across the administration, Jackson is announcing this morning that she has signed the Clean Air Act endangerment finding for six greenhouse gases. By the time the decision is finalized after two months of public comment, it will have been nearly two years since the EPA was blocked by the Bush White House from issuing such a finding.

The definition of “welfare” in Section 302(h) of the Clean Air Act states:

All language referring to effects on welfare includes, but is not limited to, effects on soils, water, crops, vegetation, manmade materials, animals, wildlife, weather, visibility, and climate, damage to and deterioration of property, and hazards to transportation, as well as effects on economic values and on personal comfort and well-being, whether caused by transformation, conversion, or combination with other pollutants.

From soils and water to weather, economic values and, of course, climate — all of these elements of our welfare have been unequivocally damaged by manmade global warming already, with much worse to come if the pollution is not arrested.

This decision comes more than 16 years after the United States ratified the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in 1992. As Center for American Progress senior fellow Robert Sussman — now the EPA senior policy counsel — explained last year, the EPA will be able to move forward with regulations to limit greenhouse gas pollution to build a clean-energy economy:

The Clean Air Act, for example, imposes emission performance standards on new major sources of pollution and modifications of existing sources with emission increases over a set threshold. It should be possible to limit these standards to large power plants and other facilities that are significant emitters of CO2, and to exclude smaller sources, such as the hospitals, schools, stores, and apartment buildings of concern to the president. And it should be possible to implement a trading system for large sources that provides flexibility and reduces compliance costs. That is not to say, of course, that large sources would be off the hook from controlling their CO2 emissions — why should they be? — but it does mean that meaningless requirements with no climate change payoff can be avoided.

The Obama administration is finally removing one of the great blots of the George W. Bush legacy with this action.

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One of the biggest flaws in most of the major “hard” geo-engineering schemes is that they don’t stop carbon dioxide emissions from rising.  Injecting vast amounts of aerosols into the atmosphere or launching millions of tiny sun shields might theoretically reduce planetary warming a tad, but it doesn’t stop ocean acidification (see “Geo-engineering remains a bad idea“).

Yet, as Australia’s ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies warned in 2007:

When CO2 levels in the atmosphere reach about 500 parts per million, you put calcification out of business in the oceans.

We’re at more than 385 ppm now, rising more than 2 ppm a year (see “World carbon dioxide levels jump 2.3 ppm in 2008 to highest in 650,000 “” if not 20 million “” years“).  Worse,

It isn’t just the coral reefs which are affected “” a large part of the plankton in the Southern Ocean, the coccolithophorids, are also affected. These drive ocean productivity and are the base of the food web which supports krill, whales, tuna and our fisheries. They also play a vital role in removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, which could break down.

In short, too much acidification, and the ocean may turn from a major carbon sink to a carbon source!

So it was a bombshell when Energy Daily (subs. req’d) reported yesterday:

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Fueling stations for fuel cell cars — even ones that generate hydrogen from fossil fuels and emit large amounts of greenhouse gases — cost 1000 times what charging stations for electric vehicles and plug in hybrid electric vehicles cost.

There are countless reasons hydrogen fuel cell cars are not going to achieve significant market penetration or be a major contributor to reducing CO2 or oil use for many decades, if ever (see “The Last Car You Would Ever Buy “” Literally” and links below).

One of those reasons is the incredible cost of charging stations — especially relative to the competition (see “California Hydrogen Highway R.I.P.“).  Two news items that recently popped up in my inbox underscore this fatal flaw.  On the one hand, Energy Daily reports:

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