Last Sunday, bells, drums, gongs and horns at churches, synagogues and mosques the world over sounded 350 times to tell the world to lower the volume of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to 350 parts per million. It was a plea for global cooperation to control climate change, as photos from around the world document the stages of that change: melting glaciers at the poles and in the Himalayas; cattle in drought-ravaged African countries dying of thirst; widening outbreaks of dengue fever as warm weather favors the proliferation of mosquitoes.
Earlier, in the U.S., while Republican Congressman James Inhofe was publicizing his plans to tell the Copenhagen summit on global warming that the U.S. Congress would not pass climate change legislation, the Environmental Protection Agency made an historic statement of intention to use the Clean Air Act to control greenhouse gas pollutants. The statement builds on a Supreme Court decision (Massachusetts vs. EPA, 2007) affirming that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are pollutants under the Act.
The EPA's action could have dramatic effects on industry, especially the automobile and power industries. (Notice that Inhofe's largest industrial donors are oil and gas companies and electric utilities.) Representatives of those industries had hoped to avoid regulatory action, which they see as more rigid than the cap-and-trade legislation being mulled in Congress.
And the EPA's announcement gave Obama something to take to the table in Copenhagen even though Congress didn't pass climate legislation in time for the summit. The fact that industry doesn't like the EPA's statement may make it easier for other governments to force their industries to make concessions in order to get carbon dioxide in the atmosphere down to or at least not far above 350 parts per million, a quantity we can live with (it's already 390 ppm).
Cuts currently proposed would still see the volume rising to 450. The last time we had 350 ppm was in 1989; that was 35 ppm over the 1958 figure, 315.
