By Duane Schrag
Salina Journal
Sen. Steve Morris lives only 60 miles from Sunflower Electric's coal-fired power plant in Holcomb, and it's not infrequently that he drives past the plant and sees steam from the 470-foot flue curling into the prairie sky.
"I've never, ever felt there was a damaging presence of anything from that plant," said Morris, R-Hugoton, president of the Kansas Senate.
Rep. Melvin Neufeld doesn't feel especially threatened by carbon dioxide emissions either.
"They tell us that if you jog two miles you emit more carbon dioxide than if you drive two miles," said Neufeld, R-Inglass, speaker of the Kansas House.
And Sen. Jay Emler, R-Lindsborg, chairman of the Senate Utilities Committee, wishes that people calling for a reduction in carbon dioxide emissions would acknowledge that carbon dioxide is necessary to sustain life on Earth.
"The people that are opposed to the CO2 never talk about that aspect of it," Emler said. "I have yet to have any of them mention anything about CO2 being necessary for life. All they focus on is there's too much CO2."
Indeed, running out of carbon dioxide has not been predicted by anyone. And environmentalists might well note that any number of life-sustaining elements can be hazardous at excessive levels. Like water, for instance.
These positions and observations on climate change come from some of the state's most powerful legislators and were offered in the context of discussion about their support for the proposal to build a new coal-fired power plant in Holcomb.
In October Rod Bremby, secretary of the Kansas Department of Health and Environment, overrode his staff's recommendation and denied an air quality permit for the proposed power plant. In explaining his decision, Bremby made it clear that the threat of climate change is the primary reason for his controversial decision.
"I believe it would be irresponsible to ignore emerging information about the contribution of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases to climate change and the potential harm to our environment and health if we do nothing," he said in a press release accompanying his decision.
And so does the U.S. Supreme Court. In a landmark decision delivered in April, the court scolded the federal Environmental Protection Agency for refusing to regulate carbon dioxide emissions from automobiles and ordered it to reconsider its position.
"EPA (cannot) avoid its statutory obligation by noting the uncertainty surrounding various features of climate change and concluding that it would therefore be better not to regulate at this time," the court majority said. "If the scientific uncertainty is so profound that it precludes EPA from making a reasoned judgment as to whether greenhouse gases contribute to global warming, EPA must say so."
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So what information is available about climate change? And how much of it have our legislators studied?
"I haven't received personally enough information to make up my own mind on whether it truly is something to worry about," said Morris. "... People need to look at all the facts involved with this theory, and at some point, I think the consensus will be there, one way or another, about whether this is actually a problem or not."
Actually, there is a wealth of information available on the subject, and there most certainly is a consensus on many points.
The most comprehensive information about climate change may be the work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a collection of hundreds of scientists organized by the World Meteorological Organization and United Nations. IPCC's reports -- and there have been many -- seek to determine whether the climate is changing, and if so to what extent it is thought to be caused by human behavior and what the implications of those changes might be.
The Kansas Department of Health and Environment has posted on its Web site links to three summaries IPCC prepared specifically for policymakers: the physical science basis for climate change, adaptation and vulnerability, and mitigation. They are short documents -- 16 to 24 pages each -- and written plainly.
The summary that provides the scientific basis for the IPCC's conclusions wastes no time in getting to the point. On the first page, in bold, red-faced print: "Global atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide have increased markedly as a result of human activities since 1750 and now far exceed pre-industrial values determined from ice cores spanning many thousands of years."
The report goes on to say that the panel has "very high confidence" -- by that it means the chances are at least nine out of 10 -- that human behavior has caused warming, and that carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere in 2005 were higher than at any time during the past 650,000 years.
It further explains that it is "very likely" -- again, it has concluded the chances are at least nine out of 10 -- that most of the observed increase in global temperatures since the mid-20th century was caused by humans.
"The observed widespread warming of the atmosphere and ocean, together with ice mass loss, support the conclusion that it is extremely unlikely that global climate change of the past 50 years can be explained without external forcing, and very likely that it is not due to known natural causes alone," the report says.
So, has Morris read any of the IPCC summaries?
"I have not," he said. "I certainly think it's something we probably ought to take a look at. Maybe you know of something that's been proven. To me, it's just that -- a theory."
Neufeld said he has passing acquaintance with the IPCC summaries -- "I've scanned over some of those" -- but he's certain concerns over carbon dioxide emissions are overblown.
"It's beyond question that targeting CO2 and claiming that it is somehow evil lacks scientific backing and is not the issue," Neufeld said.
If anyone has claimed carbon dioxide is evil -- Emler used similar language, volunteering that he is not persuaded carbon dioxide "is the root cause of all evil, which is what some people would ask us to believe" -- it's not the IPCC. What the IPCC says is that the normal variations in climate that caused several ice ages cannot reasonably be said to be responsible for the changes being seen now.
Chuck Rice, a professor of agronomy at Kansas State University and one of those IPCC scientists who shared in the Nobel Peace Prize this year, takes exception with the suggestion that the question of humans' role is not a settled issue.
"You are never going to have 100 percent agreement on anything," he says. "There is an high consensus that [climate change] is due to human activity. If you factor out natural variations, it shows that it's due to human activity."
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It's not clear what it would take to convince skeptics that human behavior has played a significant role in altering Earth's climate.
"I am not convinced by either side at this point," Emler said.
But he acknowledged he hasn't read the IPCC summaries, either.
"I am certain there is an issue that needs to be studied but I have not formed an opinion as to what the cause is," he said.
And, judging by what Emler says he hears from constituents, the public isn't persuaded either. Comments he has received on the Holcomb expansion run about eight-to-one in favor of allowing it, he said. Their views on climate change aren't uniform.
"Some of them don't even address it," he said. "Some of them just say they don't believe it's true. Some have attached treatises that indicate it's not nearly the problem that others would have me believe that it is."
What seems clear is that many have no sound scientific understanding of what is even being claimed with regard to the carbon dioxide issue.
Take Neufeld's observation comparing the roles of humans and automobiles in contributing carbon dioxide. According to the Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center, a division of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, humans on average exhale 2.2 pounds of carbon dioxide a day. That's about the same amount created by burning one pint of gasoline, which will take your car about 2.5 miles. You can walk that far in less than an hour.
But this is apples and oranges. The carbon dioxide you breathe out is from food that absorbed the carbon from the air, most likely in the past year or two. It's recycled carbon.
The carbon dioxide your car sends out its tailpipe -- almost 20 pounds for every gallon of gasoline -- was absorbed by plants millions of years ago.
Last year, Kansans burned 3.1 million gallons of gasoline -- every day. Another 1.2 million gallons of diesel were burned every day also. The federal government estimates that Kansas transportation created 19.5 million tons of carbon dioxide in 2003. Kansas power plants created another 37.7 million, the lion's share of that coming from burning coal.
The new Holcomb plants would generate 12 million tons by themselves.
The breathing of Kansans recycled about 1 million tons.
But Neufeld is confident human activities -- or at least, those in the United States -- aren't the problem.
"In Kansas, we actually take more CO2 out of the air than we put in," he said. "So we're a net user of CO2. Every bushel of grain ... removes carbon from the atmosphere and puts oxygen back in. That's how the system works. God created a system that has balance and it works. The fact is, in the United States we are actually net users: we use more carbon dioxide than we emit."
Rice, who is part of a group of scientists studying the role of agriculture plays in mitigating -- or generating -- greenhouse gases, shakes his head.
"That's probably something taken out of context," Rice said. "Kansas doesn't have an inventory -- not one that I'm aware of -- of how much CO2 we're producing."
And the United States generates about 25 percent of the world's greenhouse gases, he said.
Rice said that K-State has for several years been part of the Consortium for Agricultural Soils Mitigation of Greenhouse Gases, which is funded by the federal Department of Agriculture and includes state universities in Colorado, Nebraska, Iowa, Texas, Indiana, Michigan and Montana.
The consortium's Web site (http://www.casmgs.colostate.edu) explains the problem.
"Concern is mounting about the rapid buildup of atmospheric carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases and the implications for our climate and environment," it says. "Agriculture can help mitigate these problems in a cost-effective and environmentally sound way."
Rice said that agriculture and land use have contributed significantly to the increase in greenhouse gases. Earth's soil has a huge capacity to hold carbon -- about twice that of all its vegetation. But farming and land use practices have reduced soil's carbon content by almost a half, the consortium's Web site says. Tillage and clearing accelerate the migration of carbon from the soil into the air.
Thus there exists great opportunity for rolling back some of those changes simply by changing land use practices, Rice said. One study of potential greenhouse gas reductions by the year 2030 estimates that agriculture could reduce greenhouse gases by 4.5 billion tons. Only changes in building design and construction could have a greater impact (5.8 billion tons). Other areas with improvement potential include industry (4 billion), energy (3.5 billion), forestry (2.8 billion) and transportation (2 billion).
The Earth described by the consortium and the IPCC and thousands of scientific organizations appears to have little in common with one inhabited by Neufeld and Morris and Emler. Neufeld doesn't just question whether humans are responsible for climate change; he wonders if they're capable of it.
"In a way, it's egotism on the part of people that actually believe man is so powerful that you can change the climate, forgetting how powerful the sun is and how much that's the real impact," he said.
Neufeld sees things getting better, not worse.
"There's no question [Kansas climate] has improved," he said, noting that he doubts man deserves any credit for the change.
Morris isn't sure there even is any warming.
"You hear a lot about global warming," he said. "We had the worst storm ever that I can ever remember around the first of the year. It was ice and snow and rain, and that certainly, to me, was not a sign of warming."
Actually, it is exactly the sort of event scientists say will be associated with global warming: more weather extremes.
All three legislative leaders said the issue deserves attention, but none had yet studied even IPCC's legislative summaries. And it's not that they don't believe it's an important issue.
"If I thought for a minute that there was real damage possible because of approving permits for those plants, I certainly would not be in favor of it," Morris said.
Stephanie Cole, a regional representative for the Kansas chapter of the Sierra Club, was surprised by the legislators' lack of research. (The Sierra Club was one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit against the Environmental Protection Agency.)
"That's important information that experts are telling us," Cole said. "And it's our hope that legislators would seek that information out and try their best to educate themselves on the best available science."
n Reporter Duane Schrag can be reached at 822-1422 or by e-mail at dschrag@salina.com.
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