WASHINGTON (AP) — The Trump administration’s Environmental Protection Agency on Wednesday unveiled a proposal asserting that emissions of heat-trapping carbon gases from power plants using fossil fuels “do not contribute significantly to harmful air pollution.”
The Associated Press reached out to 30 experts in fields such as climate, health, and economics to gather insights on the scientific basis of this proposal. Of the 19 who responded, all disagreed with the proposal’s validity, with several labeling it as misinformation. Here’s a summary of comments from eight of these professionals.
“Claiming this is akin to saying smoking doesn’t lead to lung cancer,” remarked climate expert Zeke Hausfather from the tech company Stripe and the temperature monitoring initiative Berkeley Earth. “Scientists have understood the link between CO2 emissions and global warming since the late 19th century, and coal combustion is the leading source of global CO2 emissions, trailed by oil and gas. It is completely illogical to argue that CO2 emissions from power plants are not a major factor in 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 interests of our children and grandchildren.”
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Matthew Daly and Michael Phillis contributed from Washington.
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