Massachusetts has a responsibility to reduce its contribution to global warming at the state and local level, and it can do so by cutting its greenhouse gas emissions, lawmakers said yesterday at the first of a series of hearings held by the Senate’s new Committee on Global Warming and Climate Change at the State House.
U.S. Rep. Edward Markey (D-Mass.) said Gov. Deval Patrick’s recent reorganization of the Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs and move to rejoin the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative have pointed the commonwealth in the right direction, though Massachusetts has a long way to go toward improving energy efficiency.
“We import 60 percent of our oil, up from 27 percent just 20 years ago,” Markey said of the United States. “We’re either going to live together or destroy the planet together,” he later added.
Though he said he supports curbing the output of greenhouse gases, Sen. Robert Hedlund (R-Plymouth) raised concerns about how the United States would enforce such standards on developing countries, such as China and India, where he noted many emissions-intensive U.S. manufacturing operations have moved to capitalize on their laxer environmental standards.
The United States must first follow responsible policies before it can have the credibility to impose its rhetoric on other nations, Markey said.
“You can’t preach temperance from a barstool,” he said.
State Assistant Attorney General Jim Milkey — who won a U.S. Supreme Court case earlier this month on behalf of 12 states against the Environmental Protection Agency, in which the court ruled greenhouse gases are pollutants and must therefore be studied and likely be regulated by the federal agency — said the case will spur more comprehensive state-level legislation and help them quickly resolve challenges of such policies by opponents in the auto industry, among others.
Energy and Environmental Affairs Executive Office Secretary Ian Bowles proposed the commonwealth add greenhouse gas emissions to the list of requirements in building contractors’ environmental impact assessments.
“We need to put a tailwind behind renewable energy,” Bowles said.
Boston University geography and the environment department associate chairman Bruce Anderson said at the three-hour hearing that even if Massachusetts reduces its own carbon emissions drastically, the Earth will continue to warm for decades. It is still important to make legislative efforts, he said, because the amount of greenhouse gases released in the atmosphere will only multiply if states do not take action.
This could translate to temperatures of more than 100 degrees Fahrenheit one out of every three days in the summer in the Northeast, he said.
“That’s the kind of scenario we can avoid,” he said.
Tufts University international environmental policy professor William Moomaw called for Massachusetts to phase out old, inefficient coal power plants in favor of energy-efficient technologies and fluorescent light bulbs.
Moomaw said it will take a collaborative effort to combat global warming problems, calling it a mistake to burden only one agency or nation with the responsibility.
“What we need is a multiplicity of sources,” he said.