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Government Regulation
Air Quality and Climate Change

Despite news media reports, North Carolina's air is clean and getting cleaner. Emissions of all primary air pollutants as defined by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) are well within federal standards and have been for over 20 years.

Ozone at Its Lowest Levels in Years

Over the last decade, the biggest success story is ground level ozone, more commonly known as smog. Over the last three years ozone concentrations have fallen to their lowest levels in at least a dozen years.

The chart below ("Average High Ozone Days Per Monitor") shows the average number of high ozone days, as defined by the EPA, per ozone monitor in the state. As of the summer of 2005, there were 48 of these monitors. In 2004, when the EPA started enforcing its new tougher standard (known as the 8-hour standard), 14 of the state's monitors recorded measurements out of compliance. At the end of the 2005 ozone season, only five out-of-compliance monitors remained.

Despite what some have claimed, this dramatic reduction has had nothing to do with the state's Clean Smokestacks Bill (CSB). During the relevant time period, only one power plant in the state had implemented any of the changes required by the bill. Furthermore, these reductions in high ozone days were not peculiar to North Carolina, as they would have been if the CSB had been responsible. Similar reductions in smog have been experienced across the country, which suggests that federal policy, not state policy, is primarily responsible.

North Carolina Cannot Affect Global Warming

The most significant environmental policy issue that will face legislators in North Carolina over the coming years will be global warming. In 2005 the legislature created a global warming commission to evaluate the issue and to determine what, if any, policies the state should pursue. So far the commission has heard from scientists on all sides of this issue.

On the one hand, it has been argued, primarily by scientists without a specialty in climatology, that current global warming is out of the ordinary and will be both dramatic and harmful. On the other, the dominant view among climatologists that have made presentations to the commission has been that current warming viewed in the context of tens of thousands of years is not at all unusual (see chart, "Temperature Reconstruction for the Past 1,000+ years").

An important point — one that has not been disputed — is that there is nothing North Carolina can do, either by itself or in conjunction with other states, that will have any noticeable impact on the climate. Dr. Thomas Wigley at the U.S National Center for Scientific Research, in a 1998 Geophysical Research Letter article, calculated that if there were 100 percent compliance by all countries that were party to the original United Nations treaty on global warming (the "Kyoto Protocol"), the effects would be "small" and "undetectable for many decades."

In particular, Wigley calculated that by 2050, average global temperatures would only be 0.126 degrees F less warm than they would be if nothing were done. He also calculated that by 2100, with 100 percent compliance from all Kyoto Protocol parties, global temperatures would be only 0.27 degrees F less warm than they would be if nothing were done at all. Wigley's calculations included emission reductions by the United States, which has since decided not to participate in the treaty.

Such a small amount of cooling amid the overall warming — about one-eighth of a degree less warm in 50 years, barely a quarter of a degree less warm in 100 years — would be undetectable by conventional temperature-measuring devices.

This scientific fact should be considered alongside the conclusions of economic analysis done by Wharton Econometric Forecasting. That analysis estimated that North Carolina would lose over 200,000 jobs by adopting Kyoto-style regulations. The implication is that such policies would be all costs and no benefits for the citizens of North Carolina.

Recommendation

1. The state should do nothing with regards to global warming policy or greenhouse gas regulations.

To view higher quality graphs, download Agenda 2006 [2.7MB Acrobat].