Clean-water laws: The second front in the war on greenhouse gases

http://grist.org/climate-energy/clean-water-laws-second-front-in-the-war-on-greenhouse-gases/

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Necessity being the mother of invention, congressional inaction on climate change has forced environmentalists to be creative. Since Congress won’t pass a cap-and-trade bill to control atmospheric emissions, activists are trying to apply existing laws to the problem. In 2007, the Supreme Court ruling in Massachusetts v. EPA forced the Environmental Protection Agency to examine whether greenhouse gases harm the public. Since — surprise! — they do, the EPA will now regulate them like every other pollutant.

First air, now water. A federal lawsuit against the EPA, filed last week by the Center for Biological Diversity, may do the same for ocean acidification under the Clean Water Act that Massachusetts v. EPA did for climate change under the Clean Air Act. And since acidification is caused largely by CO2 emissions, the results could help combat climate change as well.

As a 2010 report from the National Research Council explains, “The ocean absorbs approximately a third of man-made CO2 emissions. The CO2 taken up by the ocean decreases the pH of the water and leads to a combination of chemical changes collectively known as ocean acidification. Since the beginning of the industrial revolution, the average pH of ocean surface waters has decreased approximately 0.1 unit — from about 8.2 to 8.1 — making them more acidic. Models project an additional 0.2 to 0.3 drop by the end of the century.”

In other words, thanks to all our cars, agriculture, and industrial pollution, ocean waters are becoming overly acidic. Acidity causes aquatic species such as oysters to die out, and the problem will grow a lot worse unless we dramatically scale back CO2 emissions.