EPA Official Decries Climate Change

Carol M. Browner, the longest serving administrator in the history of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), spoke about the dangers of climate change in a speech yesterday that combined science and policy with frequent jabs at critics of the science behind climate change.

Speaking to a crowd of 75 at Harvard Law School’s Hauser Hall, Browner, the EPA chief during the entire Clinton administration, said that if “we don’t take action against climate change, we risk being the first generation to pass on to the next generation a problem that it can’t fix.”

Calling for a “bipartisan, multinational, multi-generational” coalition to address climate change, Browner began her speech by rattling off nearly a dozen numbers to highlight the scope of the problem. Among them were the 36 cubic miles of Arctic ice—an amount equal to 225 times the annual water use of Los Angeles—that melted in the past year, and the 27 tropical storms, including four Category 5 hurricanes, that developed in the Atlantic in 2005.

“If you add up all these numbers, you get big trouble,” Browner said.

She went on to excoriate those who question the science supporting global warming, directing sharp criticism at author Michael Crichton ’64 whose book, “State of Fear,” argues that the scientific evidence for climate change is thin.

Browner said that many people who deny climate change are using Crichton, who has no formal scientific training, as their “main source,” and that he has briefed President Bush and testified before the Senate as an “expert witness” on climate science.

“And he’s a graduate of this fine institution,” Browner said, to which Professor of Law Jody Freeman, the event’s moderator and an environmental law scholar, interjected, “It’s not our fault!”

Browner said that she believes there will be federal action on climate change “certainly in the next three to four years,” but that this will only happen once businesses support regulations.

She said that this was likely to end up happening because many states and cities are enacting their own caps on greenhouse gas emissions, and that as a result, many different regulatory systems are being created.

“It is out of a need for harmonized standards across the country that business actually begins to demand regulation,” Browner said.

The largest state effort to regulate carbon emissions thus far is the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), comprised of eight Northeastern states who agreed to stabilize emissions at current levels by 2015 and reduce them by 10 percent by 2020. Massachusetts was set to join RGGI in 2005, but Gov. Mitt W. Romney pulled the Commonwealth from the pact late last year.

Browner said several times that she favors a “cap-and-trade” proposal like RGGI under which each industrial facility would be allocated a certain number of “emission credits,” with the total number of credits set by the government. Plants that emit less than their credit limit of greenhouse gases could sell their unused credits to other companies.

Whatever the means of addressing climate change, Browner said that something must be done.

“Inaction is something that EPA administrators understand [because they] have to deal with the consequences of inaction everyday,” she said, adding that “failure is not an option.”

Browner’s speech yesterday was hosted by the Environmental Law Society. Sameer H. Doshi ’02, a second-year law student and a board member of the Society, said that Browner worked in the Clinton administration with Law School Dean Elena Kagan who had been a domestic policy adviser to President Clinton.

—Staff writer Paras D. Bhayani can be reached at pbhayani@fas.harvard.edu.