Attorneys for two-energy producing states spoke on the legal implications of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean Power Plan—which aims to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from existing fossil fuel–fired power plants 30 percent below 2005 levels by 2030—at a Senate Environment and Public Works Subcommittee this week. West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey, whose state is involved in lawsuits filed against the proposed rule, argued that it is illegal and would cause a loss in jobs and raise electricity rates.
“The proposed rule is actually causing real, tangible harm in the states, and also it’s affecting power plant operations currently,” said Morrisey. “If you go and look at our litigation, we have at least eight declarations from very experienced environmental regulators who talk about the cost of trying to comply with this rule. The other point that I would raise is that the time frames associated with this proposal are hyper-aggressive.”
The rule—set to be finalized this summer—uses an infrequently exercised provision of the Clean Air Act to set state-specific reduction targets for carbon dioxide and to allow states to devise individual or joint plans to meet those targets. It gives states flexibility to decide how to meet their interim and final emissions reduction goals. The goals were set by assessing the ability of states to use four “building blocks”—such as expanding renewable energy generation and creating energy efficiency programs—to meet their emissions reduction goals.
At the same time, a new study in the journal Nature Climate Change finds that the Clean Power Plan would reduce the number of premature deaths in the United States by roughly 3,500 per year. The study modeled three scenarios for reducing carbon emissions. The one that most closely resembled the proposed rule delivered the largest health benefits.
“The general narrative is addressing climate change will be costly, and the benefits will now accrue for generations,” said Dallas Burtraw, study co-author and senior fellow at Resources for the Future. “We take a look at this and see there are important benefits and changes in air quality that accrue in the present and close to home.” He notes that shifts from coal-fired power toward sources such as natural gas, wind and solar would produce health benefits in a “matter of days to weeks.”
Carbon Plans: Are they Enough?
With half a year before countries meet in Paris to work toward a binding global climate agreement, new analysis from the Economic & Social Research Council’s Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment and the Centre for Climate Change Economics and Policy finds that pledges to date are insufficient to keep the planet from warming no more than two degrees Celsius (C) over pre-industrial levels. Current commitments would bring the current trajectory of 70 gigatons of annual carbon dioxide emissions to 55–57 gigatons. That’s still higher than the annual 40–42 gigatons by 2030 goal to hit the 2 degree C target.
“We think that it is important to offer preliminary analysis of how the pledges and announcements by some of the biggest emitters, together with assumptions about current and planned policies by other countries, compare against pathways for staying within the global warming limit of 2C,” the paper notes. “This allows us to confirm that there is a gap between the emissions pathway that would result from current ambitions and plans, and a pathway consistent with the global warming limit 2C. Consequently, countries should be considering opportunities to narrow the gap before and after the Paris summit.”
The paper makes several suggestions to alter this path, including finding credible ways of achieving bigger emissions reductions, creating a mechanism that can be included in any agreement that emerges from Paris for countries to review and ramp up reductions by 2030 and beyond and intensifying efforts to increase investment and innovation.
It comes on the heels of news that March broke a new carbon dioxide record—concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere reached 400 parts per million (ppm) for an entire month at 39 sites around the world. The measure is an indicator of the amount of planet-warming gases man is putting into the atmosphere, and comes nearly three decades after what is considered the “safe” level of 350ppm was passed.
“We first reported 400 ppm when all of our Arctic sites reached that value in the spring of 2012,” said Pieter Tans, lead scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Global Greenhouse Gas Reference Network. “In 2013, the record at NOAA’s Mauna Loa Observatory first crossed the 400 ppm threshold. Reaching 400 parts per million as a global average is a significant milestone.”
Study Comes to “Sobering” Conclusion on Biodiversity Loss
If world carbon emissions continue to rise on their current trajectory, one in six species will be gone or on the road to extinction by century’s end, according to a study published in Science magazine.
“It’s a sobering result,” said University of Connecticut ecologist Mark Urban of his examination of 131 peer-reviewed studies to identify the level of risk that climate change poses to species and the specific traits and characteristics that contribute to risk. The most comprehensive look yet at the effect of climate change on biodiversity, the study finds that the rate of biodiversity loss will accelerate with each degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) the planet warms.
Previous studies had provided widely ranging region- or taxon-specific estimates of biodiversity loss with climate change, making the seriousness of the problem hard to assess. According to Urban’s meta-analysis of these studies, global extinction risks increase from 2.8 percent at present to 5.2 percent at the international policy target of a 2 degree Celsius (C) post-industrial temperature rise; if Earth warms 3 degrees C, the extinction risk increases to 8.5 percent—and to 16 percent at the 4.3 degrees C rise projected for the current emissions trajectory.
With that in mind, he said that his findings should inform the Paris climate summit and that they showed the importance of cutting greenhouse gas emissions now rather than waiting for evidence of warming-related species loss “to become identifiable beyond the background noise of ‘natural’ extinctions,” reported the Guardian.
Commenting on the study, Stuart Pimm, a conservation ecologist at Duke University, said, “We’re not going to go extinct” in the face of climate change and its impact on biodiversity, but he noted that major changes in biodiversity can alter the quality of life. “The question is: What kind of life will we have?”
The Climate Post offers a rundown of the week in climate and energy news. It is produced each Thursday by Duke University’s Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions.