Public Forum on N.C. Greenhouse Gas Plan Set for Thursday

The N.C. Division of Air Quality (DAQ) will hold a public forum in Raleigh this Thursday, May 19 to gather input for a state report on greenhouse gas reductions. Required by the N.C. Clean Smokestacks Act of 2002, the report will consider ways to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases from electric utilities and other sources. The document is due to the state’s Environmental Management Commission and Environmental Review Commission by Sept. 1.

Thursday’s forum will take place from 7 to 10 p.m. in the ground floor hearing room of the Archdale Building at 512 N. Salisbury St. in downtown Raleigh. People who would like to speak must register at the door before the meeting, with registration starting at 6:30 p.m. Presenters should bring hard copies of their statements and limit presentations to three minutes. No PowerPoint exhibits will be allowed.

At a forum on the plan held in Raleigh last month, two paid consultants for an Amarillo, TX-based coal-fired power plant industry group called the Center for Energy & Economic Development (CEED) – economist Anne Smith of Charles River Associates and climatogist Pat Michaels of the University of Virginia – dominated the presentation portion of the meeting with lengthy PowerPoint exhibits in which they argued against taking any state action on greenhouse gas emissions.

Michaels is a leader among global warming skeptics, having written several books critical of mainstream science on the phenomenon. He also has close financial ties to the fossil-fuel industry and is an environmental fellow at the Cato Institute, which has received at least $75,000 from Exxon Mobil since 1998 and which was co-founded by Charles Koch, owner of Koch Industries, the largest privately held oil company in the United States.

Incidentally, while Michaels was in town for the DAQ meeting, he taped a radio show for Raleigh’s John Locke Foundation, a conservative (but not conservation-minded) policy group that has been an outspoken skeptic of global warming while taking money from fossil-fuel interests including CEED, as I report in the May 11 issue of the Independent. Though no one from the JLF spoke at last month’s DAQ meeting, the group distributed its policy paper calling for North Carolina to do nothing on climate change.

The DAQ will hold another meeting to discuss the carbon dioxide emissions report on Friday, May 20, from 9 a.m. to noon in the DAQ Training Room of the Parker-Lincoln Building at 2728 Capital Blvd. in Raleigh. The Friday event is a working session that will focus more in-depth on specific topics including industrial and motor efficiency, power generation, energy savings and green power, transportation, and agriculture and forestry.

"North Carolina has a lot at stake with regard to climate change due, in part, to the large of amounts of coastal lands that could be subject to flooding from rising sea levels and more severe storms associated with global warming," the DAQ notes in the meeting announcement. "A Duke University study of potential flooding from rising sea levels estimated that a 1-foot rise in sea level would flood 1,170 square miles of coastal land and a 3.5-foot rise would flood 2,920 square miles in North Carolina."