The US Environmental Protection Agency has the chance to demonstrate judgment when it decides whether air travel threatens humanity.
EPA has given the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) its schedule for considering regulation, under the Clean Air Act, of greenhouse gas emissions from aircraft.
EPA expects a committee of ICAO, which is part of the United Nations, to adopt standards for aircraft emissions of carbon dioxide in February 2016.
Before it can initiate a conforming rulemaking in the US, EPA must “determine whether greenhouse gas emissions from aircraft cause or contribute to air pollution that may be reasonably anticipated to endanger public health or welfare.”
The agency told ICAO it expects to propose findings on the endangerment question late next April and make final determinations in spring 2016.
History suggests it will affirm endangerment. To rule otherwise would anger activist groups EPA has been loath to disappoint. And the agency craves power.
So EPA will argue that GHGs, especially CO2, contribute to observed warming of the atmosphere and therefore threaten health and welfare.
This argument ignores much, such as other influences on globally averaged temperature and the prolonged failure of temperature measurements to rise as computer models underlying scary scenarios say they should.
The very notion that airplane emissions of GHGs endanger health is ludicrous. It embraces the doomsday speculation of activist orthodoxy and ignores scale.
According to EPA, commercial aviation accounts for only 6% of US emissions of GHGs from transportation and less than 2% of all US emissions.
Modern commerce requires movement of people in airplanes that burn liquid hydrocarbons. The only way EPA, in misguided concert with ICAO, can lower GHGs from aviation is to tax jet fuel enough to restrict air travel.
Doing so would have negligible effect on GHG emissions, no effect on temperature, but strong effect on human welfare, thoroughly detrimental.
The endangerment question thus challenges EPA to serve the interests of most Americans and not just activists for a change.
(From the subscription area of www.ogj.com, posted Sept. 12, 2014; author’s e-mail: [email protected])