Thursday, 21 May 2009 23:31
By Sally Deneen
PostGlobe
As a mountaineer who moved to the Pacific Northwest to enjoy the outdoors and climb the majestic Cascades, Ed Henderson says he’s seen the effects of global warming firsthand: Some glaciers that challenged his skills and endurance a decade ago “no longer exist.”
As a Seattle-based commercial fisherman since 1972, Pete Knutson fears the global-warming effects on his industry. Oceans already are acidifying as carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases spew from tailpipes and smokestacks and fall into waters. That spells trouble for mollusks like the “sea butterfly” – an important food for salmon; the acidifying waters increasingly will make it difficult if not impossible for them to build their calcium carbonate shells.
“If we lose that sea butterfly, we endanger the salmon,” Knutson said Thursday at an all-day public hearing of the Environmental Protection Agency at the Bell Harbor Conference Center in Seattle. That, in turn, he said, has ramifications for “the human, the orca, the bear, the eagle and the cedar tree, and the whole living web of the North Pacific rim.”
“If unregulated dumping of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and the ocean continues,” Knutson warned, “we will lose fisheries, jobs and a food source.”
Seattle was center stage in the global warming debate this week. As a noon rally at Pier 66 on Thursday drew big crowds, Knudsen and Henderson numbered among the 200-plus people who were signed up to give their two cents at the EPA public hearing inside the conference center.
It was one of only two hearings held in the nation to let the public have its say about EPA’s tentative decision that greenhouse gases emitted by vehicles threaten public health. Deeming vehicle emissions a public nuisance “would not itself impose any requirements on industry or any other entities,” states an EPA fact sheet. Left unsaid tho
ugh is that the move, in response to a Supreme Court ruling, represents the Obama administration holding a club over Congress to make it take action on the regulation of greenhouse gases and deal with climate change.
Mayor Greg Nickels, Gov. Chris Gregoire, Starbucks manager Jim Hanna, various state officials and environmentalists numbered among the many people urging action.
But also taking the microphone were people who identified themselves as more ordinary folk including moms, a farmer who trains far mers, a commercial fisherman and a mountaineer.
“I’m here as a mom,” said Seattleite Terri Glaberson, executive director of Coolmom.org, who had young daughter Sydney in tow. “This hearing is not about you and me. It’s about our children and our children’s future.”
Henderson, a past president of The Mountaineers, noted that one of the joys of mountain-climbing is observing plants and critters above the treeline “where existence is barely possible.”
But those plants and critters stand to be “driven off the mountaintops into extinction,” he told EPA officials. “Scientists estimate that if the present warming trends continue, the average annual snow level – presently at about elevation 3,000 feet – will rise over 1,000 feet to over 4,100 feet by mid-century. The rising snow levels will drive successive ecosystems into isolation on the peaks until they’re driven off the mountaintops into extinction.”
Knutson, whose great-grandfather built fishing boats and son has a fishing business, says his family has had lots of good seasons fishing and feeding thousands of consumers. But he pointed out that a study by Oregon State University researchers published last year found high levels of acidified waters within 20 miles of the coast.
If left unregulated, carbon dioxide and other greenhouse-gas emissions will cost jobs, he argued. “We will impoverish the marine environment.”
“When I started fishing commercially in 1972, I was told many times that fishing was a dying industry. … Yet we find that Mother Nature surprises us with her resilience,” he said.
“This battle is not over. We should not be paralyzed by the enormity of the problem that we face.”
But he urged the EPA to defend the ocean.
"It is time to act.”
--
YOUR TURN TO SPEAK
How would you fix global warming? You didn’t have to go to the EPA hearing to give an opinion about whether carbon dioxide and five other greenhouse gases emitted by vehicles should be deemed a threat to public health.
You can submit a comment at Regulations.gov or send an e-mail to GHG-Endangerment-Docket@epa.gov. Deadline is June 23. (Refer to the issue as “Docket ID No. EPA-HQ-OAR-2009-0171.”)
