PSA Sends Letter to Congress on Climate Change and Energy Trading
EPSA Sends Letter to Congress on Climate Change and Energy Trading

WASHINGTON, D.C. - The Electric Power Supply Association (EPSA) this week sent a letter to Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works Chairman Barbara Boxer (D-CA) supporting passage of a cap-and-trade bill to regulate greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) consistent with EPSA's previously released policy principles.

Commenting on the letter EPSA President and CEO, John E. Shelk, said "EPSA is proud to have been the first national multi-fuel electricity trade association in January 2007 to support federal legislation to reduce GHG emissions and we look forward to continuing to work with Congress on this historic legislation. EPSA believes that a market-based approach to GHG regulation provides the best opportunity for innovation and lowest reasonable costs to consumers over the long-term. Inclusion of our guidelines for allocations to LDCs as well as allowances to merchant coal generators and merchant generators under long-term contracts are necessary to ensure an efficient transition to a lower-carbon economy."

In 2007, 26 million people were driven from their homes by conflict. The effects of climate change - and conflict over limited resources like water, food and land - mean that every year, larger numbers of people are likely to be displaced.

But recently, renowned Department of Defense planner Andrew Marshall sponsored a groundbreaking effort to come to grips with the question. A Pentagon legend, Marshall, 82, is known as the Defense Department's "Yoda"--a balding, bespectacled sage whose pronouncements on looming risks have long had an outsized influence on defense policy.

Turning inward, the U.S. effectively seeks to build a fortress around itself to preserve resources. Borders are strengthened to hold back starving immigrants from Mexico, South America, and the Caribbean islands--waves of boat people pose especially grim problems. Tension between the U.S. and Mexico rises as the U.S. reneges on a 1944 treaty that guarantees water flow from the Colorado River into Mexico. America is forced to meet its rising energy demand with options that are costly both economically and politically, including nuclear power and onerous Middle Eastern contracts. Yet it survives without catastrophic losses.

While the content of this release raises the alarm, Marshall is sending multiple messages. The timing of the Fortune article, for instance. For a man of Marshall's long legacy of discretion to directly challenge the current administration's line on global warming at the beginning of a presidential election year speaks volumes. That he chose to do so by releasing a report by respected business consultants in Fortune magazine seems to say he wants the business world, Bush's most important constituency, to understand clearly that the status quo is untenable.

Almost 250 children under the age of five have died in a wave of intensely cold weather in Peru.

Children die from pneumonia and other respiratory infections every year during the winter months particularly in Peru's southern Andes.

But this year freezing temperatures arrived almost three months earlier than usual.

Experts blame climate change for the early arrival of intense cold which began in March.

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The extreme cold, which has brought snow, hail, freezing temperatures and strong winds, has killed more children than recorded annually for the past four years.

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Meanwhile in the capital, Lima, it has become an annual ritual for businesses and ordinary citizens to donate blankets, clothes and food for the victims of the cold weather in the south of the country.