By SETH BORENSTEIN
WASHINGTON — The Trump administration’s Environmental Protection Agency on Wednesday proposed a new ruling that heat-trapping carbon gas “emissions from fossil fuel-fired power plants do not contribute significantly to dangerous air pollution.”
The Associated Press asked 30 different scientists, experts in climate, health and economics, about the scientific reality behind this proposal. Nineteen of them responded, all saying that the proposal was scientifically wrong and many of them called it disinformation. Here’s what eight of them said.
“This is the scientific equivalent to saying that smoking doesn’t cause lung cancer,” said climate scientist Zeke Hausfather of the tech firm Stripe and the temperature monitoring group Berkeley Earth. “The relationship between CO2 emissions and global temperatures has been well established since the late 1800s, and coal burning is the single biggest driver of global CO2 emissions, followed by oil and gas. It is utterly nonsensical to say that carbon emissions from power plants do not contribute significantly to climate change.”
“It’s about as valid as saying that arsenic is not a dangerous substance to consume,” said University of Pennsylvania climate scientist Michael Mann.
“The world is round, the sun rises in the east, coal-and gas-fired power plants contribute significantly to climate change, and climate change increases the risk of heat waves, catastrophic storms, infectious diseases, and many other health threats. These are indisputable facts,” said Dr. Howard Frumkin, former director of the National Center for Environmental Health and a retired public health professor at the University of Washington.
Climate economist R. Daniel Bressler of Columbia University, said: “We can use tools from climate economics, including the mortality cost of carbon and the social cost of carbon, to estimate the climate impacts of these emissions. For instance, in my past work, I found that adding just one year’s worth of emissions from an average-sized coal-fired plant in the U.S. causes 904 expected temperature-related deaths and over $1 billion in total climate damages.”
University of Arizona climate scientist Kathy Jacobs said: “Their statement is in direct conflict with evidence that has been presented by thousands of scientists from almost 200 countries for decades.
“It’s basic chemistry that burning coal and natural gas releases carbon dioxide and it’s basic physics that CO2 warms the planet. We’ve known these simple facts since the mid-19th century,” said Oregon State’s Phil Mote.
Andrew Weaver, a professor at the University of Victoria and former member of parliament in British Columbia, said: “President Trump is setting himself up for international court charges against him for crimes against humanity. To proclaim you don’t want to deal with climate change is one thing, but denying the basic science can only be taken as a wanton betrayal of future generations for which there should be consequences.”
Stanford climate scientist Chris Field, who coordinated an international report linking climate change to increasingly deadly extreme weather, summed it up this way: “It is hard to imagine a decision dumber than putting the short-term interests of oil and gas companies ahead of the long-term inters of our children and grandchildren.”
Matthew Daly and Michael Phillis contributed from Washington.
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