In its proposed regulation, the agency argued that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases from power plants that burn fossil fuels \u201cdo not contribute significantly to dangerous pollution\u201d or to climate change because they are a small and declining share of global emissions. Eliminating those emissions would have no meaningful effect on public health and welfare, the agency said.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
But as Friedman points out, those power plants account for a third of America\u2019s greenhouse gas emissions, trailing only transportation (where the government is also throwing in the towel by derailing the EV transition). Here\u2019s the key part of their explanation and the thing that should not go unchallenged:<\/p>\n
In proposing to lift regulations on power plants, the E.P.A. points to the fact that the U.S. share of\u00a0global power sector emissions represented about 3 percent of worldwide greenhouse gases in 2022<\/strong>, down from 5.5 percent in 2005. So, it argued, even if American power plants erased all their greenhouse gases from the power sector, the risk to public health would not be \u201cmeaningfully\u201d improved.<\/p>\n
Attorneys who represent utility companies said they agree that the sector is a small part of the global climate problem. \u201cThe argument is a solid argument,\u201d said Jeffrey R. Holmstead, who served in the E.P.A. during both Bush administrations and now represents utility companies as a lawyer for the firm Bracewell.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
But if you think about it for even a second, you realize it\u2019s the furthest thing from a solid argument. Three percent of the greatest problem the world faces is a big part\u2014bigger than any other single share outside U.S. cars and trucks and China\u2019s power generation and industry.\u00a0The very nature of global warming is that it comes from everywhere and must be solved everywhere. If three percent of the problem\u20141.5 million metric tons\u2014was not significant enough to be worth taking action on, then there would be no need for Japan to do anything at all (everything they do\u2014power plants, cars, factories\u2014adds us to less than American power plants. Ditto Indonesia, Iran, South Korea, Saudi Arabia, every single country in Europe, every single country in Africa, every single country in South America. No one would have to do anything, and there would be no action at all.<\/strong><\/p>\n
The entire point of the entire thirty-five year effort to deal with climate change is that everyone has to be involved. That\u2019s the whole point of the Paris agreement. We\u2019re of course no longer involved in that process\u2014the country that has put the most emissions in the air is also the only one not trying to help solve it. Which is sick. But arguing that no one should do anything: well, what can I say? It\u2019s not just self-serving, it\u2019s intellectually dishonest. Which\u2014well, we should strive not to be. And once upon a time we usually did, back until January 20.<\/p>\n
Not as important but just as egregious was something that energy secretary Christopher Wright said in a\u00a0speech<\/a>\u00a0he gave at Golden Colorado in early April. Speaking to the staff of the Department of Energy\u2019s National Renewable Energy Laboratory, \u201crepeatedly minimized\u201d the impact of climate change. Because many of the lab\u2019s staff had lived through the 2021 Marshall Fire that killed two people and wiped out nearly a thousand homes in one of the fastest-moving and scariest wildfires in American history (if you want to see some scared people, here\u2019s\u00a0video<\/a>\u00a0of parents and children in the local Chuck E. Cheese that day), he addressed that blaze in particular. To attribute it to climate change, he said, was \u201csimply to not look at the data,\u201d because wildfires in America had \u201cpeaked a hundred years ago. \u201c<\/p>\n
This is the kind of lying-by-statistic that has been part and parcel of the climate denial movement from the start. Acreage burned by wildfire indeed peaked in the 1920s, and everyone who\u2019s taken even the slightest look at the data knows the reason. As Jon Greenberg at Politifact explained in 2021:<\/p>\n
In a 2018 article, Randal O\u2019Toole, a senior fellow with the libertarian Cato Institute, included that same chart showing the dramatic fall in wildfires based on federal data. O\u2019Toole is skeptical of broad claims of climate change. But O\u2019Toole offered this chart with a stinging caption.<\/p>\n
“Some people use the data behind this chart to argue against anthropogenic climate change. The problem is that the data before about 1955 are a lie.”<\/p>\n
O\u2019Toole noted that at the turn of the 20th century, Congress told the Forest Service to suppress fires. This mandate put the federal agency in direct conflict with landowners in the southeast. The Forest Service was steadfast in its opposition to all fires. But the southeaster landowners burned their forests every four or five years to control underbrush.<\/p>\n
“Perhaps 20% of forests would be burned each year, compared with less than 1% of forests burned through actual wildfires,” O\u2019Toole wrote. “The Forest Service responded by counting all fires in that state, prescribed or wild, as wildfires.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Across much of the country, the huge fires of the 1910s and 1920s were also linked to the unregulated and undisciplined logging of the period. In the Adirondacks of upstate New York, for instance, where I have spent much of my life, and where the wet woods is sometimes called the \u2018asbestos forest,\u201d there were huge blazes in 1903 and 1908. As the truly wonderful Adirondack history museum at Blue Mountain Lake\u00a0explains<\/a>,<\/p>\n
Adirondack loggers were not known, at the time, for following safe logging practices. Fire prevention was not a chief concern. Most lumbermen were resistant to the idea of \u201climbing\u201d or removing all tree branches, usually from conifer trees, before discarding the tops. This was because treetops were seen not only as waste, but the practice was also time-consuming.<\/p>\n
Woods bosses hated to waste time. Instead of cutting the limbs off of treetops so that they would lie flat on the ground and decompose properly, loggers would simply discard the tops unlimbed. The treetops formed dense tangles of air-dried wood that became huge piles of tinder, needing only a spark to ignite. Often, as seen in 1903, railroad locomotives passing by would supply this spark.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
The fires of the last few decades, by contrast, are caused\u2014and no one except ideologues like Wright argue with this\u2014by the change in temperature, which extends fire season and has also allowed infestations of insects like the pine bark beetle that kill trees and leave large tracts of standing tinder. The numbers are insane, and they come from the federal government. Apparently the\u00a0purge<\/a>\u00a0of the NOAA website is not yet complete, because you can still find a\u00a0page<\/a>\u00a0there with this account:<\/p>\n
A 2016 study found climate change enhanced the drying of organic matter and\u00a0doubled the number of large fires between 1984 and 2015offsite link<\/a>\u00a0in the western United States. A 2021 study\u00a0supported by NOAA<\/a>\u00a0concluded that climate change has been the\u00a0main driver of the increase in fire weather<\/a>\u00a0in the western United States.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
The Marshall Fire in particular has been studied in depth, and here is an\u00a0account<\/a>\u00a0by wildfire scientist Natasha Stavros (who has been evacuated in a number of fires) that calls the Marshall blaze the \u201cperfect example\u201d of a climate-caused conflagration. After aggregating the relevant data about snowfall, rainfall, and temperature, she wrote \u201cthis fire is the definition of a climate fire.\u201d<\/p>\n
So Secretary Wright was gaslighting the NREL community\u2014which doubtless included survivors of that fire; that the audience knew he was gaslighting them made it worse. This was a power move, a way of declaring that the work they did, the truths and technologies they had uncovered, did not matter.<\/p>\n
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