Abby L. Harvey
GHG Monitor
1/30/2015
John Holdren, Assistant to the President for Science and Technology and Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, highlighted this week the importance of the Environmental Protection Agency’s proposed carbon emissions standards for new and existing coal-fired power plants to meeting the goals of the Obama Administration’s Climate Action Plan. The damage that has already been done over a long history of unabated fossil fuel use cannot be undone, but further damage may be avoided through proactive measures to cut pollution contributing to climate change, Holdren said in remarks at the National Conference and Global Forum on Science, Policy, and the Environment. The EPA regulations would mandate the use of carbon capture and storage technology on all new-build coal-fired power plants, and require states to develop action plans to meet EPA set state-specific emissions reduction targets.
Science supports the fact that extensive fossil fuel use has led to the conditions contributing to climate change, Holdren said, briefly explaining how scientists are able to determine the source of carbon within the atmosphere. “Human activities are the primary driver of what we have been observing,” he said. “If you look at the 10,000-year record of atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide and methane, you see this extraordinary spike that started about 250 years ago, completely out of sync with the natural variations over a very large period of time. We know in fact, in the case of the CO2 spike, that fossil fuels were largely responsible for that,” he said. “We can use the concentration of radioactive carbon-14 in the atmospheric CO2 to determine how much came from fossil fuels. Carbon-14 only has a half-life of about 6,000 years when it’s sequestered away from the atmosphere in the materials, the biogenic materials, that ultimately form fossil fuels. It’s all decayed away by the time that fossil fuel is exploited and burned, so there’s zero carbon-14 in fossil fuel and you can see the dilution affect readily in the atmosphere.”
This scientific basis creates a case for immediate and long-term mitigation and adaptation efforts, Holdren said. “We know that these [climate] changes are already causing harm in many parts of the world and many parts of the United States. We know that the harm will continue to grow for decades to come because of the time lags in both the climate system and the energy system,” Holdren said. However, through technology improvements, there is a chance that the world could avoid additional effects. “There is an enormous difference between the additional harm we can expect in the absence of vigorous remedial action, versus what we can expect if vigorous remedial action is initiated promptly,” he said, later nothing that “understanding the technological possibilities for both mitigation and preparedness … reveals what is really a wide range of options both for cutting the pollution that’s driving climate change and for better preparing society to deal with the changes that we don’t avoid.”
