In May 2010, the National Academy of Sciences joined a nearly unanimous scientific community in finding that the world must dramatically reduce climate change pollution in order to avoid climate catastrophe that will kill millions of people, wipe out whole cities and cost trillions of dollars in damage.

Already, climate change is causing more than 300,000 deaths from floods, drought and disease, and about $125 billion in economic losses each year. 2010 was the hottest year ever measured, and nine out of ten of the hottest years on record have all been in the last decade. Floods are becoming larger, droughts longer, and wildfires and storms, more severe. In Pakistan, 2010 saw the largest downpour and floods in the history of the country, with 20 million people driven into homelessness. Australia was also flooded, with the area underwater the size of Germany and France combined.

The US is not immune from this destruction either. This spring’s wildfires in Texas that have already brought down nearly 100 homes and scorched 1.6 million acres are the result of an unprecedented drought. In April, the largest outbreak of tornados in United States history hit Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, and several other states throughout the Southern and Eastern US, leaving behind an estimated 346 deaths and an enormous swath of destruction.

If we do nothing, half the world’s population will face severe food shortages and rapidly spreading disease before the end of the century.

What can we do?

Each year of delay in reducing emissions will require steadily more drastic, difficult, and expensive action even as the amount of devastation that can no longer be prevented at all grows. The International Energy Agency reports that every year the world fails to seriously deal with climate change raises the price tag by $500 billion. Meanwhile, the US falls steadily further behind as a competitor in the enormous global green energy economic sector. Although the US House of Representatives passed comprehensive climate change legislation in 2009, the threat of a Republican filibuster prevented any such legislation from being considered in the Senate. Given the current composition of Congress, that is unlikely to change in the next few years.

Fortunately, the Clean Air Act provides another way to begin the job of reducing global warming and making investments in clean energy and green jobs economically viable. In 2007, the Supreme Court ruled that the Clean Air Act, enacted in 1963, requires the Environmental Protection Agency to determine whether climate change pollution harms human health, and if so, to issue regulations protecting the public from that harm. As a result of that ruling, the EPA has begun to issue regulations for some of the biggest and dirtiest sources of pollution. For more detail, click here.

In 2010, all Republican Senators and six Democrats tried unsuccessfully to prevent the EPA from regulating climate change pollution by trying to overturn the EPA’s scientific finding that this pollution is harmful to human health. In April 2011, we helped defeat four more amendments that would have put various limits on EPA regulation of climate change pollution, including a proposal by Senator Rockefeller (D-WV) that would have prevented the EPA from regulating global warming pollution for two years  that was supported by nine Democratic Senators, and would have come very close to passing had Sen. Mitch McConnell and the Republican caucus not withheld their support (holding out instead for something even more drastic).

Although we are grateful that these efforts failed, we expect to face more determined efforts in the House and Senate to restrict and de-fund the EPA and the Clean Air Act over the next few years.

The Obama Administration has made clear that it will veto such restrictions in a standalone bill, and it thankfully refused to accept them on the fiscal year 2011 spending bill. We applaud the White House for not allowing this ideological policy rider into an unrelated bill, and will continue to urge the President and Congress to forcefully reject these restrictions, even if they are attached to must-pass legislation.

The Clean Air Act is one of America’s most successful laws. Weakening the EPA’s ability to act in accordance with that law would have tragic consequences for millions of people.

January 2012