Articles by Grist staff

Chinese envoy urges U.S. help on climate change

WASHINGTON — The United States has a profitable self-interest in assisting Chinese efforts to combat climate change, China’s ambassador here said Thursday as global talks loom. Zhou Wenzhong said China must focus on industrial growth to lift millions of its citizens out of poverty but was not stinting in the global warming fight, outlining a […]

Impressions from the Seafood Summit in San Diego

My plunge into the complex world of sea stewardship has been invigorating but also overwhelming. I find myself among literally hundreds of people who know various aspects of the topic intimately. My mind buzzes with ideas to develop and questions to ask -- more than can be done in the span of a few days.

I'll be developing Grist's coverage of the impacts and potential of seafood production over the next weeks. In the meantime, here are some impressions:

Taking a dive into the murky future of extracting food from the troubled sea

In my work on food and agriculture, I've focused nearly 100 percent on land-based issues. But the earth's vast and gaping oceans have always been a major source for human nutrition -- and will be only more so as population grows over the next decades. No one who writes on intersections between food and ecology can ignore the seas. I need to educate myself.

With that in mind, I'm currently attending the Seafood Summit, a confab sponsored by a combination of NGOs (e.g., Marine Stewardship Council), foundations (e.g., Packard), and corporate interests (e.g., Darden, which owns Red Lobster and other restaurant chains).

The hottest topic here is aquaculture -- a truly new practice with a history of around 50 years, compared with agriculture's 10,000-year track record. The question isn't whether aquaculture will continue to grow explosively over the next decades; the question is whether it will mimic the blunders of land-based industrial agriculture, or move in more sustainable directions.

Look for my seafood-ish posts over the next couple of days.

Obama may be able to implement cap-and-trade under the Clean Air Act — but should he?

The following is the fourth in a series of guest posts from the Constitutional Accountability Center, a progressive legal think tank that works on constitutional and environmental issues. It is written by online communications director Hannah McCrea and president Doug Kendall, who also help maintain CAC's blog, Warming Law. (Part I, Part II, Part III)

-----

In previous posts, we've spelled out specific steps President Barack Obama can take to encourage Congress to pass legislation establishing a strong cap-and-trade program. Yet there has been speculation as to whether the President already has the authority, under the Clean Air Act, to establish a cap-and-trade program without waiting for Congress to act.

In actuality, there is no straightforward answer to whether the administration can introduce cap-and-trade for CO2 under the CAA. For one thing, the EPA has never successfully implemented a cap-and-trade program for any pollutant without congressional approval. The Bush administration tried twice, once with the Clean Air Mercury Rule (regulating mercury emissions) and again with the Clean Air Interstate Rule (regulating sulfur dioxide and nitrous oxide emissions), though both programs were ultimately struck down by the D.C. Circuit on unrelated grounds. (Note: The D.C. Circuit temporarily reinstated the Clean Air Interstate Rule in December in order to preserve its environmental benefits while the EPA promulgates new rules. However, the court made clear that it still viewed the program as unlawful.)

The only time cap-and-trade has been permitted to go forward is when it was explicitly approved in CAA provisions, as was the case with the EPA's famous Acid Rain Program regulating SO2 and NOx. Georgetown Law professor (and newly-appointed EPA adviser) Lisa Heinzerling noted in testimony [PDF] before the House Committee on Energy and Commerce that this by itself might be grounds for prohibiting cap-and-trade for CO2 under other sections of the Act, "because [the acid rain] provisions explicitly permit emissions trading, it might be argued that the provisions that do not mention trading do not allow it." (Emphasis added.)

Precedent thus provides little insight as to whether a full-fledged cap-and-trade program for CO2 emissions under the existing CAA would withstand a court challenge. Moreover, Heinzerling's congressional testimony reveals that while certain provisions of the CAA lend themselves to establishing targets for CO2 emissions, the language of the Act only somewhat supports then using cap-and-trade as the mechanism for reducing total emissions. She concedes: