EPA moving toward regulation of greenhouse gases

Agency will decide if emissions blamed for global warming are a danger to human health and welfare.

Environmental Protection Agency administrator Lisa Jackson says the agency is moving toward regulating the gases blamed for global warming.In an interview on Tuesday with the Associated Press, Jackson said the agency would decide whether greenhouse gases are a danger to human health and welfare, the legal trigger for regulation under federal law.

Jackson said the EPA owes the American people an opinion. "We are going to be making a fairly significant finding about what these gases mean for public health and the welfare of our country," Jackson said.Recent EPA decisions have hinted that the agency was leaning toward using the Clean Air Act to regulate the gases, a step the Bush administration refused to take despite prodding from the Supreme Court.Jackson took a different position Tuesday during one of her first interviews since winning Senate confirmation Jan. 23."

It is clear that the Clean Air Act has a mechanism in it for other pollutants to be addressed," she said."If EPA is going to talk and speak in this game, the first thing it should speak about is whether carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases endanger human health and welfare," she said. "It is a very fundamental question."Jackson, a Princeton University-educated chemical engineer, headed the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection from 2006 until 2008.

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Tapping Power From Trash

WHEN talk turns to alternative energy and global warming, let us not forget stinking piles of garbage. Buried in airless pockets deep inside landfills, the organic matter in these great mounds of waste is consumed by bacteria that give off gas rich in methane, increasingly used to generate electricity and heat.

In fact, power from landfill methane exceeds solar power in New York and New Jersey, and landfill methane in those states and in Connecticut powers generators that produce a total of 169 megawatts of electricity — almost as much as a small conventional generating station. The methane also provides 16.7 million cubic feet of gas daily for heating and other direct uses.

There is ample opportunity for energy-producing projects at more landfills, according to the EPA's Landfill Methane Outreach Program and officials and groups in the three states. As scouring for alternative energy intensifies, landfill methane is getting more attention from state, federal and local governments together with private energy and waste-management companies, landfill owners and energy entrepreneurs.

If it is not captured, the E.P.A. says, landfill methane becomes a greenhouse gas at least 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide, the principal greenhouse gas, when it rises into the atmosphere. The agency estimates that landfills account for 25 percent of all methane releases linked to human activity.



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Bush Sets Greenhouse Gas Emissions Goal

President Bush called Wednesday for the United States to stop the growth of greenhouse gas emissions by 2025 and challenged other countries, including major polluters like China and India, to abandon trade barriers on energy-related technology and commit to goals of their own.
The White House cast Mr. Bush’s announcement in the Rose Garden as an ambitious effort by a president determined to lead on the climate change issue, even with just 9 months left in office.

But critics — including environmentalists, scientists and lawmakers — said the effort was too little, too late. They accused Mr. Bush of trying to derail legislation that would curb emissions even further. And because he did not offer any specifics for how to reach his 2025 goal, they dismissed the speech as irrelevant.

“It is now time for the U.S. to look beyond 2012 and take the next step,” Mr. Bush said, a reference to his previously stated national goal, announced in 2002, of an 18 percent reduction in the growth of emissions of heat-trapping gases relative to economic growth by 2012. Mr. Bush said the nation was on track to meeting that target.

The speech was intended to influence an international conference on climate change, which is convening in Paris on Thursday. The conference is the outgrowth of a process Mr. Bush initiated last year, when he called together major polluting nations and urged them to come together by the end of 2009 around a common goal for the long-term reduction of emissions.

But Mr. Bush’s talk was also a slap at the Democratic-controlled Senate, which is about to consider legislation that would impose limits on emissions and allow companies to trade pollution credits — the so-called “cap and trade” approach. The White House vehemently opposes that approach, a point Mr. Bush restated on Wednesday.

“Bad legislation would impose tremendous costs on our economy and on American families without accomplishing important climate change goals we share,” Mr. Bush warned. But rather than outlining his own legislative proposal, Mr. Bush emphasized advances in technology, like clean-coal energy, wind power and farm-grown fuels like ethanol, as a means to achieving emissions reductions. As he has in the past, he said the route to reducing emissions was through the free market and incentives for companies to invest — as opposed to mandates or new taxes.

“The wrong way is to raise taxes, duplicate mandates, or demand sudden and drastic emissions cuts that have no chance of being realized and every chance of hurting our economy,” he said. “The right way is to set realistic goals for reducing emissions consistent with advances in technology.”

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