Climate Change

EPA Releases Proposed Carbon Sequestration Regulations

On July 15, EPA Administrator Steven Johnson signed a proposed rulemaking package, which would regulate geologic sequestration of carbon dioxide under the Underground Injection Control (“UIC”) Program of the Safe Drinking Water Act. The proposed rules would create a new category of UIC well (Class VI) designed specifically for injection of CO2 into geologic formations.

EPA Climate Change ANPR Released

On Friday, July 11, the Environmental Protection Agency released an Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (“ANPR”) seeking comment on a large number of issues concerning regulation of greenhouse gas emissions (“GHGs”) under the Clean Air Act (“CAA”). The ANPR was ostensibly issued in response to the mandate of the U.S. Supreme Court in Massachusetts v. EPA, in which the Court held that carbon dioxide (“CO2”) is a regulated pollutant for purposes of the mobile source provisions of the CAA and that EPA is required to make a determination as to whether emissions of CO2 from mobile sources endanger human health or the environment.

The Silent Elephant

In his book The Great Warming: Climate Change and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations, eminent anthropologist  Brian Fagan describes the period from about 800 to 1200 AD, in which a small increase in average global temperatures resulted in a warmer, greener and wetter Europe and generations-long droughts in the Americas and parts of Asia.  The more hospitable growing seasons in Europe helped spark the early Viking settlements in Greenland and Vinland (northeast North America).  Erratic and lengthy droughts were instrumental in the collapse of the Maya civilization, the disappearance of Anasazi communities, and the abandonment of the great Ankgor Wat complex.