Hearing of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform - Black Carbon and Global Warming

Interview

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REP. BETTY McCOLLUM (D-MN): Thank you, Mr. Chair. This is a very interesting discussion. And I want to thank Mr. Waxman for having it.

Dr. Schwartz, I was feeling pretty good about turning off the air conditioner, leaving the windows open on a main street in D.C. where I hear a lot of trucks, and I know I have a lot of soot because I have to clean there more than I have to clean in the city of St. Paul, Minnesota.

But -- so my trying to save burning fossil fuels running an air conditioner might lead to my increased risk of a heart attack. So thank you very much for not making me feel much better about my decision. (Laughing.)

MR. SCHWARTZ: Yeah, unfortunately turning on the air conditioner and closing your windows cuts the particle concentrations coming into your house from outside in half.

REP. McCOLLUM: And I point that out because this isn't a one- pick solution. This is going to take a lot of different scientists, such as yourself sitting around the table, and a lot of different people willing to look at different ways to change their lifestyle and businesses in a way that they operate in order to really tackle this. So this is, like I said, a very interesting discussion. I thank the chair for having it.

In Minnesota, we decided to retrofit our school buses. We're calling it Project Green Fleet, to do what we could to reduce the amount of carbon. Has there been any studies done? For example, if all the school districts were to retrofit what kind of impact it could have. Would that be a model that we could look at to maybe figure out some targeted ways where we could start doing things and also get the word out?

MR. SCHWARTZ: I don't know of any studies that I've looked at what the impact of just targeting school bus fleets are. I think that, you know, it's such a small fraction of the diesel fuel used in a given city that you're not going to see very much if you go after the school buses as opposed to the construction equipment and the heavy duty trucks and all the other things as well.

REP. McCOLLUM: But sometime the way to address the problem is to get people to realize that there is a problem to start talking about it.

MR. SCHWARTZ: That's absolutely true. And there have been retrofit programs. And EPA funds some retrofit programs to go after school buses.

You know, one thing that we can do that's a double winner is, you know, all the buses you see lined up on, you know, Independence Avenue idling for three hours while the people that they drove to the museum are inside and touring. I mean, you know, if you just turn off the engines of buses when you're not actually driving someplace then you save the CO2, and the carbon, and also some other stuff. So awareness would be useful.

REP. McCOLLUM: We've done that as well in Minnesota to turn the buses off.

The developing world discussion is very interesting. I've had a fortune of traveling, both in Asia and in Africa. And it seems to me that we need to look at doing something similar to what we did with ozone, with the Montreal Protocol on this.

And Dr. Raman, you've done a fabulous amount of work on this. Can you share with this committee -- I also serve on State and Foreign Operations Appropriations -- what we can do in working with partner countries to help them reduce their health effects and carbon?

MR. RAMANATHAN: Thank you very much for the question. I first want to profess that there is one thing we have to be aware of. This outdoor haze or this pollution contains not only black carbon, other particles, sulfates, nitrates et cetera. These are all cooling particles. The black carbon is heating. When you add all of them together they have masked as much a 50 percent of the global warming from greenhouse gases.

What that means -- Jacobson alluded to that. What that means is that we have to be careful when we reduce these particulates. See, the EPA, not only in the U.S., the EPAs of the world, they are focusing in air pollution.

Traditionally, when they air pollution its sulfates. For example, I've seen the American media complain about sulfate emissions from China. The problem is, if you cut the sulfates and leave the black carbon behind you can at least a factor as to amplification in the warming, what we have seen just from air pollution regulations, because we are drawing the -- you know, taking off the cooling particles.

So we have to make sure -- I'm not saying we should leave the sulfates behind, they have other ecosystem destruction. But we should make sure when we remove the sulfates we also remove the black carbon. That's number one point.

And I have not seen -- in fact, Dr. Schwartz and I were in a big intercontinental air pollution meeting in Australia. We tried to bring it up, we tried to educate the air pollution community be careful, what you do has implications for climate change.

The second point I want to make is that -- so again, I don't want to be misunderstood. We have to cut down sulfate emissions because of acid rain and others. But, please let's take out the black carbon at the same time because the sulfate, if any, is shielding the planet from the global warming.

So the second is, the black carbon emission, and I was in a meeting last week where the prime minister of India was there, the finance minister as well as Mr. Jeb Bush former governor of Florida. We -- I was surprised how receptive they were when I talked about what the black carbon, the haze, is doing to the regional climate and glaciers.

And, as you know, China is now trying to reduce the emissions that are in Beijing just before the Olympics. And some of us are thinking this is a fantastic natural experiment to see down when what happens. For example, we published a study last year, 75 percent of the black carbon over the west coast of the U.S. during spring time comes from long-range transport from East Asia. So we are trying to see, do we see an impact on air pollution just for the one month period.

Although I have not moved in government circles, my assumption is that they would be very receptive to U.S. and European governments trying to approach India and China on this issue and see how collaborations and resource sharing would brings them -- help them bring down the black carbon emission. And -- yeah, it's --

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