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| Press Release: April 12, 2006 | ||
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| OLVER SPEECH ON CLIMATE CHANGE | ||
WASHINGTON, D.C. ‚ Congressman John W. Olver (D-1st District) delivered the following speech about climate change at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, on April 12 and at Mount Wachusett Community College, Gardner, on April 10: I believe climate change with all its varied impacts will prove to be the great environmental challenge of this century. Thousands of scientists all over the world contributed to the body of climate science built up over the last half century. The body of climate science has produced tens of thousands of research papers. These papers have been peer reviewed, published in scientific journals, open for debate, replication, reinterpretation, and fostered much more research. Two broad indisputable conclusions have been reached: 1. The earth's surface has warmed in this past century by approximately 1C or 2F. 2. The atmospheric concentration of CO2 readily and accurately measurable has risen very rapidly, particularly during the last 40 years to reach about 380 ppm on average. This latter conclusion is often characterized as the "hockey stick". As these basic conclusions became clear, scientists have devised ever more sophisticated experiments to test and explain why this warming has occurred and to understand much longer time changes in climate. Just as examples, 1. In the short term, say hundreds of years, we have accurate recent measurements of CO2, but further back, the indications of climate events may be anecdotal in government and church records. 2. In the longer time range, say thousands of years, we have to use such things as tree ring records, sedimentation in undisturbed lakes in temperate and polar latitudes. 3. Still longer time ranges, say tens of thousands of years, we can look at the deposition sequences in stalactites in caves. 4. And still longer time range, say hundreds of thousands of years, we can look at cores from glaciers that take us several ice ages back, to about 500,000 years ago. The farther these techniques reach back from modern record keeping, the more gaps there are in the record and the more uncertainty, skepticism, and reinterpretation occurs. But, that is the purpose of science, to be skeptical, to explore, to experiment and to reduce the uncertainty open to reinterpretation. As time passes, new experiments and technology allow an ever clarifying picture. As this body of knowledge has evolved, a much more critical job for researchers and scientists has evolved into explaining and educating policy makers and the public to the risks of global warming and the possible consequences of action or of no action. That job entails connecting the dots in a still developing picture and I am going to try to connect some of those dots. For me, the experiments that totally focused my attention were the data from long stable glacial ice cores. These data measuring the ratios of stable C12 and radioactive C13 in ice cores which date back 450,000 years, through four great ice ages, show that CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere from which snow was deposited never varied outside the range of 190 and 280ppm. Now, only in the 20th century, and in a very short period of 30 or 40 years, we have shot through the 280 barrier and reached 380 ppm, which is one-third higher that at any recent time. Seventy-five percent of that rise has occurred in the last 25 or 30 years and continues at about 4ppm/year. Think of it! In the history of our species, of modern man, 100,000 years, and our species ancestors, Neanderthals, atmospheric CO2 never varied outside 190-280ppm. Now, in less than 40 years, something dramatic has happened. The explanation for this lies I believe, in how human beings produce and use energy that drives all of our lives, industry, and commerce. 1. Primitive peoples used biomass, wood, and charcoal for their energy source for heat, running pottery kilns, and early metal processing. 2. By the time the first billion people populated the earth (1820), we began to rely on windmills to grind grains or pump water and water dams to run early machines, but still a lot of renewable biomass. 3. With the growth of large cities, highly specialized occupations, markets, and trading empires, we developed an ever greater specialization for factories and the need for concentrated power to run these systems. We came to rely on oil, coal, and much later, nuclear. 4. By the early 20th century, the great industrializing countries received most of their power from fossil fuelsÖcoal, oil, gasÖall of which produce vast quantities of CO2 that trap heat in our atmosphere and is the largest cause of global warming. There are vast differences in the use of energy in our world. There are 6.3 billion people in 2003 who together consume 420 (420 x 10 15) quadrillion BTU of energy. In this age of globalization, instant real time media and television, everyone all over the world realizes that high energy usage equates with a high standard of living and wealth. We all know that the U.S. is the pinnacle of wealth and riches and data shows that we are the pinnacle of energy consumption. But, just consider hypothetically, if China alone industrialized using energy as we do, and all other countries are frozen constant in time, we would see approximately an 80 percent increase in yearly CO2 emissions. And, if India alone (hypothetically) industrialized using energy as we do, and all other countries are frozen constant in time, we would see approximately an 80 percent increase in yearly CO2 emissions. By such action of India and China, as a first approximation, CO2 in the atmosphere would go up to roughly 1,000 ppm from today's 380ppm. What are already the consequences of the global warming that 380ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere has caused? There are a great many but let me highlight just a few. In February, the California Institute of Technology published a study showing that every 40 hours, the Greenland ice sheet loses a cubic kilometer of water as icebergs crash into the Atlantic. The ice sheet is being reduced by the equivalent of 200 times the annual water usage of Los Angeles. If the whole Greenland ice sheet were to melt over the course of this 21st century, sea level would rise by probably 3 meters, flooding sections of Bangladesh, Florida, Louisiana, Netherlands, low Pacific and Caribbean island, and the Chesapeake Bay and the Delmarva Peninsula. A second study being published in Science, finds that the Antarctic ice sheet is also shrinking rapidly. Each year, approximately the same amount of water melts away in Antarctica as is consumed by the United States in three months. The Antarctic Ice sheet is much vaster than Greenland's. Its melting would take a longer period but would flood a whole lot more. We are seeing serious threats to human health. With hotter, longer and more humid warm weather brought on by climate change, vector-born diseases like Malaria, West Nile Virus, and Dengue Fever that were previously only known in tropical regions are moving into more temperate areas. Forestry scientists in Canada have correlated warming winters with the spread of a mountain pine bark beetle that is destroying lodge pole pine forests through out British Columbia. Millions of acres of Canadaís green forests are turning red and brown with death. U.S. Forest Service officials are watching warily as the outbreak spreads. As a scientist, I believe climate change is the single most critical environmental issue of the 21st century. So let's look at how policy makers have dealt with climate change. The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) was adopted in June 1992 at the Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit and called for a "non-binding" voluntary aim for industrialized countries to control atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases by stabilizing their emissions at 1990 levels by the year 2000. The greatest triumph of the first President Bush was to persuade the American Senate to ratify that treaty. Clearly, these voluntary emission controls had no teeth. As it turns out, American CO2 emissions have risen unabated. Much of the industrial world immediately started pushing for mandatory controls at the next climate meetings at Kyoto. The 1997 Kyoto Protocol goes much further and commits the major industrialized nations that have ratified it to specified, legally binding emissions reductions. President Clinton worked hard on the negotiations of the Kyoto Protocol but the Republican Senate refused to ratify it. From the day George W. Bush was installed as president he has actively tried to scuttle the Kyoto Treaty. Not only did the president reject the Kyoto Protocol in March 2001, our government has put deliberate pressure on countries to withdraw from Kyoto. Furthermore, the Administration has deliberately obstructed subsequent conferences and has tried to pressure American climate scientists to soften or not publish their scientific results. Despite all this, on February 16, 2005, the protocol entered into force, when Russia ratified and 55 Annex I Parties accounting for at least 55 percent of the total CO2 emissions signed on. Currently, 160 nations have accepted the Kyoto Protocol. What other industrial nations have done: European Union
Now, let's take a look at what we've done in the U.S, besides trying to scuttle and now thwart the Kyoto Protocol. The Congress passed the Bush energy initiative, in which 95 percent of the incentives go to: 1. more production and use of fossil fuels that will worsen global warming, and 2. a renewed development of nuclear energy, which produces no CO2 but comes with its own environmental issues. Congress passed this bill with virtually no Democratic votes. This new set of incentives comes at a time when oil company profits are at the highest theyíve ever been and gas prices to the public are at record highs. One highlight in U.S. climate change policy came in February 2005 when Rep. Gilchrest (MD) and I introduced, H.R. 759, the Climate Stewardship Act. The is the House companion bill to McCain-Lieberman, a market-based proposal to cap U.S. emissions of global warming gasses to 2000 levels by 2010. Currently this bill has 112 cosponsors. We will continue to work to build this co-sponsorship list. And then in January, this President Bush made a remarkable statement in his State of The Union address. And I quote, "America is addicted to oil". Everyone was startled, this coming from the oil president from Houston, whose oil vice president comes from Dallas. Was this an epiphany? In a short minute and a half of that speech he went on to pledge:
Including two goals: 1) to make such ethanol competitive within six years and 2) to replace 75 percent of our oil imports from Middle East by 2025. One week later the president's budget for FY07 was released. It is the actual budget, as finally passed, that provides the dollars to accomplish such nice sounding goals. I'm trained as a scientist and a skeptic and I admit that it is not easy to follow a shell game that reorganizes in a complicated budget that moves money from low priority purposes to reassemble the dollars for a new priority. But, I've been able to identify:
All told, I will be greatly surprised if the pledged 22 percent increase in funding for clean energy research actually produces a net increase of $100 million when passed and totaled up. But I do want to examine the president's goal to make ethanol production from switch grass competitive within six years to see what kind of resources would actually be required to make that happen. The Natural Resources Defense Council and the Union of Concerned Scientists have done an in depth analysis (Growing energy: How Biofuels Can Help End America's Oil Dependence and Bringing Biofuels to the Pump) of what it would take to completely replace fossil fuel from American transportation by 2050 by producing ethanol from switch grass. At todayís standards, namely: a. Present fuel efficiency of motor vehicle engines b. Present gallonage of ethanol obtainable/ton of switch grass c. Present tons of switch grass produced/acre d. And assuming no change in life style, i.e. how much we travel This would currently require 1,750 billion acres (2,900,000 square miles) of land, far more than what is available. However, if we: 1. Double the efficiency of our auto engines 2. Double the efficiency of conversion of switch grass into ethanol 3. Increase switch grass production/acre by 2 _ times 4. Change our lifestyle to reduce our travel by half (this entails curing suburban sprawl and increasing telecommuting, among other things) 5. Develop biorefineries that produce a host of new products equivalent to what oil refineries produced in plastics, adhesives, and fertilizers We could accomplish this goal with only 200,000 square miles of land committed. However, to do so we need at least $1.5 billion/year for 10 years. Unfortunately, the president has offered only 10 percent of that, spread in little bits and pieces of the goals he set in his State of the Union message. Indeed, we must establish a national plan of action to design, invent and deploy clean energy technologies. We must increase energy efficiency and we must utilize all types of renewable energy including biomass, geothermal, wind and solar to break our dependence on fossil fuels. And, through the federal budget, we must provide sufficient resources to make these alternative sources viable. The president's proposed budget clearly does not do so. Our president has given us minimalist goals that show no understanding of the scope of the global warming issue. The U.S. will not join the world in serious climate change policy as long as George Bush is president. In the end, only a completely revamped energy policy can eliminate our dependence on foreign oil, counteract global warming, and increase our national security. We must act and we must act quickly. Again, I thank you all for being here and I thank you for your attention to this critical issue. |
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