Last month, we both received
the Environmental Protection Agency’s Climate Protection Award. The
EPA awards are meant to encourage individuals and institutions
leading in the fight against global warming, which has emerged as
the greatest threat to planetary security that we face. Selected by
an international panel of judges, our fellow awardees included the
Rev. Sally Bingham, a leader in the faith community’s efforts to
address global warming; Zhou Dadi, director of China’s Energy
Efficiency Research Institute; and Ron Sims, who has made King
County, Wash., a leader in climate action.
But while
we’re grateful, something about this award troubles us. Why isn’t
the EPA itself in this fight? The sad fact is that under its
current leadership, the EPA could not qualify for its own award.
That’s right: We have just won a climate award from an
agency that had to be sued to act on climate change. For six years,
the EPA’s current leadership has denied that it has any power to
curb global warming pollution. It took a ruling by the Supreme
Court to set the EPA straight that carbon dioxide is an air
pollutant and that the EPA has always had the power to curb global
warming pollution under the Clean Air Act. Why was it necessary for
a broad coalition of states, cities, environmental organizations,
and friends of the court, to take EPA administrator Stephen Johnson
to the Supreme Court on such a blindingly obvious question?
When a Senate panel asked Johnson when he would carry out
the Supreme Court ruling, he rejected any timetable. “I’m not going
to be forced into making a snap decision,” Johnson told reporters.
A snap decision? In President Bush’s first year in
office, he asked the National Academy of Science for advice, and
the nation’s leading scientists told him global warming was real
and caused by man-made pollution. This year, the world’s scientific
experts sounded even louder alarm bells, reporting that the role of
heat-trapping pollution is “unequivocal,” that the impacts are
already being felt, and that they will fall most heavily on poor
nations and poor communities within rich nations.
Meanwhile, the EPA administrator is not only dragging his feet, but
is also standing in the way of states that want to act. For more
than 40 years, California has taken the leadership role in curbing
motor-vehicle emissions. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has asked
Johnson for what is usually a routine waiver allowing California to
set new standards for vehicles’ global warming emissions. The
state’s new standards would cut those emissions by 30 percent over
the next eight years. Thirteen other states are ready to follow
California’s lead. But the EPA’s Johnson has let the governor’s
request sit on his desk for more than a year. Gov. Schwarzenegger
said “the clock is ticking,” and promised to go to back to court if
he doesn’t get action.
It’s because of this inaction that
we have signed a joint statement, along with other individual award
winners, calling on the EPA to act on climate change, and in
particular to grant California’s waiver request and let states
create as big a market as possible for low-emission cars and
trucks.
Back where we come from, in the mountain West,
our forests are being ravaged by spruce beetles as a result of
prolonged drought and warmer winters. Long-term trends show less
rain and, especially, less snow. Spring runoff is happening earlier
and earlier. As skiers, we can relate to the new saying out here:
“April is the new May.” It adds up to a threat that cannot wait any
longer for action.
The EPA has hundreds of committed
employees who want to get to work to solve the climate problem.
Tens of thousands of U.S. autoworkers are ready to meet the growing
demand for hybrids and other low-emission vehicles. Now, the
Supreme Court has given Johnson a remarkable second chance to make
the right decision.
We’d be the first to nominate him for
next year’s award if he does.
The writers are
contributors to Writers on the Range, a service of High Country
News (hcn.org). Robert Redford is an actor, director, and trustee
of the Natural Resources Defense Council who lives in both Utah and
California. Auden Schendler is environmental director at Aspen
Skiing Company in Aspen, Colorado.
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