Triple Crisis blogger Sunita Narain published the following opinion article in Business Standard on legislation attempting to remove the EPA’s power to regulate carbon dioxide as a pollutant in the U.S.
Last fortnight, the final nail was driven into the action on climate-change coffin. In the US, a crucial vote in the house sub-committee decided that the country’s Environment Protection Agency (EPA) would no longer have the power to regulate carbon dioxide as a pollutant. The committee voted we say that the threat from climate change was not real, urgent or even serious. They said that any steps to curtail emissions would impact manufacturing and energy industry in the US. This was not negotiable. In other words, the world is back to square one — where it started in 1992, at the Rio Conference and where US president George Bush said that his country’s lifestyle was not negotiable.