MSNBC posts on the EPA’s latest declaration.

U.S. declares warming gases are health threat

Obama administration move is aimed at prodding lawmakers to regulate

Charlie Riedel / AP

This coal-fired power plant is one of some 600 across the United States that together provide half of the country's electricity — and much of its greenhouse gas emissions.

WASHINGTON - Having received White House backing, the Environmental Protection Agency declared Friday that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are a significant threat to human health and thus will be listed as pollutants under the Clean Air Act — a policy the Bush administration rejected.

The move could allow the EPA to regulate greenhouse gases, but it's more likely that the Obama administration will use the action to prod Congress to pass regulations around a system to cap and then trade emissions so that they are gradually lowered.

The EPA last month sent its proposal to the White House Office of Management and Budget, which reviewed and approved it. By law, the decision includes a public comment period before being finalized.

The heat is going to turn up to think about how you are going to green your data center, and there will be no shortage of new news on this topic.  Data Centers watch out as you are target rich.  Growing faster than anyone else, and being operated by the richest companies – Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Ebay, Yahoo, and many others.  It used to be I would list financials, but given the current climate the gov’t would be going after their own ownership.

Get ready for energy and carbon audits and compliance as more of what you need to think about in data center operations.

Scientific American has an article where two group debated combating climate change.

On the table for debate: Major reductions in carbon emissions are not worth the money.

The audience, a packed house composed primarily of residents of the Upper West Side of Manhattan but also everyone from an Environmental Protection Agency staffer to a busload of students from Penn State, initially didn't favor the motion, with 49 percent opposed, 35 percent undecided and only 16 percent supporting it.

After the debate.

The sentiments of the crowd changed after the debate, with 48 percent still for paying to cut carbon while 42 percent now convinced it wasn't worth the price. (Ten percent said they were still undecided.) After the debate, participants decried the format as no way to get at ideas and Huber had an inkling why his side succeeded: strategic voting. In other words, many of those already convinced that cutting carbon is a boondoggle pretended to be undecided. That's a strategy that may find its ultimate expression in the Congress in the near future.

One voice of logic said.

At present, companies, donors and the like prefer to be politically correct than effective, he argued. "Do what's rational, not what's fashionable."

Keep this in mind if you are effective, you’ll have a higher probability of saving costs. 

But, for some going Green is a popularity contest.  Those are the ideal customer for the greenwashers.

MSNBC/Washington Post report on the latest Science Advisers providing additional momentum for change in environmental policies.

Obama chooses top science advisers

Selections send signal that president-elect is set to reverse Bush policies

Albert Gea / Reuters

Oregon State University marine biologist Jane Lubchenco is expected to be named head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

View related photos

  The Washington Post

By Juliet Eilperin and Joel Achenbach

updated 9:06 p.m. PT, Thurs., Dec. 18, 2008

WASHINGTON - President-elect Barack Obama has selected two of the nation's most prominent scientific advocates for a vigorous response to climate change to serve in his administration's top ranks, according to sources, sending the strongest signal yet that he will reverse Bush administration policies on energy and global warming.

The appointments of Harvard University physicist John Holdren as presidential science adviser and Oregon State University marine biologist Jane Lubchenco as head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which will be announced tomorrow, dismayed conservatives but heartened environmentalists and researchers.

Like Energy Secretary-designate Steven Chu, who directs the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Holdren and Lubchenco have argued repeatedly for a mandatory limit on greenhouse gas emissions to avert catastrophic climate change. In 2007, as chairman of the board of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Holdren oversaw approval of the board's first statement on global warming, which said: "It is time to muster the political will for concerted action."

This move will make the environmentalist happy.

'A sea of change'
The Bush administration's political appointees have edited government documents to delete scientific findings and to block scientists' recommendations on issues involving climate change, endangered species, contaminants in drinking water and air pollution.

"The Bush administration has been the most remarkably anti-science administration that I've seen in my adult lifetime," Nobel laureate David Baltimore, former president of the California Institute of Technology, said in an interview. "And I do think that there will be a sea change in the Obama administration with the respect shown for the findings of science as well as the process of science."

But Bush's science adviser, John H. Marburger III, challenged that assessment. "There are stupid and foolish things that have been perpetrated by employees of the federal government in the executive branch, but it doesn't mean that the president is anti-science," he said. "The president is getting blamed for every little thing that happens that people don't like in the administration."

Marburger added that because of the president's opposition to federal funding of embryonic stem cell research and mandatory curbs on greenhouse gas emissions: "It was easy [for opponents] to infer that he was negative toward science. . . . The president respects science; he likes science."

Government regulations are right around the corner.  Get ready for additional reporting requirements.

MSNBC.com has a post on the EPA’s equivalent to the FBI fugitive’s list.

Eco-criminals get their own most-wanted list

EPA profiles 23 fugitives, including suspect in ValuJet blast that killed 110

EPA

The EPA unveiled its most-wanted list Wednesday with information about 23 fugitives as well as two who have been captured this year.

updated 8:08 a.m. PT, Wed., Dec. 10, 2008

WASHINGTON - The government is starting a different kind of most-wanted list — for environmental fugitives accused of assaulting nature.

These fugitives allegedly smuggled chemicals that eat away the Earth's protective ozone layer, dumped hazardous waste into oceans and rivers and trafficked in polluting cars.

And now the government wants help in tracking them down.

If you want to see the list.

In its own version of the FBI most-wanted list, and the first to focus on environmental crimes, the Environmental Protection Agency on Wednesday unveiled a roster of 23 fugitives, complete with mug shots and descriptions of the charges on its Web site at http://www.epa.gov/fugitives.

And, the article closes with a question.

Will it matter?
The launch of the most-wanted list comes as EPA's criminal enforcement has ebbed. In fiscal 2008, the EPA opened 319 criminal enforcement cases, down from 425 in fiscal 2004. And criminal prosecutors charged only 176 defendants with environmental crimes, the fewest in five years.

EPA officials defend the agency's record, saying the agency has focused on bigger cases with larger environmental benefits.

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But Walter D. James III, an environmental attorney based in Grapevine, Texas, says the EPA is critically understaffed to investigate environmental crimes. While the budget for the division has increased by $11 million since 2000, there are only 135 criminal investigators, far fewer than the 200 Congress authorized in 1990.

James said that while the list could prompt the public to turn people in, he questioned whether it would deter others from committing environmental crimes.

"It's like telling John Gotti he is a bad man," James said. "Is that going to matter to John Gotti?"