As we’ve been reporting the past few days, the Senate is set to take up a pretty major piece of climate change legislation (S. 2191) beginning as early as Monday of next week.
As our friend Donny Shaw of OpenCongress realistically notes, the bill is basically dead on arrival since the President has said he would veto it. That also assumes that both the House and Senate can find enough support for passage, which may be difficult. He does, however, rightly point out that work on the bill may provide a roadmap for future climate change legislation in the next Congress, especially if an enhanced Democratic majority is present.
In advance of this debate, the White House has released a new report on the possible impacts of global warming on the United States, the New York Times reports. Here’s an excerpt of the article which highlights some of the key information from the report:
Most of the findings, like the spread of warmth-loving pests and the inevitable loss of low-lying lands to rising seas, are not new. But the report included new projections of how the poor, elderly and communities with lagging public-health and public-works systems will face outsize health risks from warming.
Among the report’s new conclusions on health: “An increased frequency and severity of heat waves is expected, leading to more illness and death, particularly among the young, elderly, frail and poor.” It added that deaths from cold would decline, but said uncertainties on both projections made it impossible to characterize the overall risk.
It gave high odds (essentially a two out of three chance) that Lyme disease and West Nile virus would have expanded ranges because of warming. The report gave the same odds that some food- and water-borne diseases would also increase among susceptible populations, but said “major human epidemics” were unlikely as long as public-health systems remained effective.
The timing of this report appears to be coincidental and not necessarily related to the bill being authored by Senator Lieberman (ID-CT) and Senator Warner (R-VA). Because of a 1990 law, the President must submit a report to Congress every four years on the impacts of climate change and other environmental issues on the U.S.
The last comprehensive report was issued in 2000 by President Clinton’s Administration (although NYT notes that it was released in the first few days of President Bush’s takeover). In 2006, environmental groups sued the Bush Administration for not complying with the 1990 law.
The White House argued, according to the NYT article, that a series of more than 20 studies as requested in 2003 by the President were sufficient enough to meet the requirements of the law.
In August of last year, a California District Court judge ruled that the law had been violated and ordered the President’s Administration to complete a new report by May 31 of this year. You can read the full report here.
