Testimony 

of 

James B. Dougherty, Director 

Sierra Club 

At the 

EPA Carbon Pollution Hearing 

Thursday, May 241

h 2012 

Good afternoon. My name is Jim Dougherty and I am a member of the Board of 

Directors of the Sierra Club. On behalf of the Sierra Club and its 1.3 million members 

and supporters, I'm here to express strong support for the Environmental Protection 

Agency's first-ever carbon pollution standards for power plants. 

The science before us is conclusive: Climate change is real, it is happening, and it 

presents enormous threats to our way of life and societal well-being. A warmer world 

will mean more extreme weather, damage via wildfires to private property and public 

lands, water shortages and reduced crop yields, an increase in pest populations and a 

higher prevalence of insect-spread diseases, and intensified precipitation events such as 

hurricanes, storm surges and flooding. 

Additionally, doctors and nurses tell us that as temperature rise, so will the instances of 

smog-induced asthma and respiratory illness. In areas like my home here in Washington, 

DC, where a disproportionately high number of children suffer from asthma, a warmer 

planet means reduced public health, more lives lost and an increased burden on our 

already strapped health service programs. It will also hurt our economy by costing us 

billions of dollars in damages. 

As the U.S. Supreme Court recognized in the case of Massachusetts v. EPA, greenhouse 

gases are pollutants that threaten public and the environment. But it is one thing to 

recognize a problem, and another to address it. It has now been five years since the 

decision in Mass v. EPA, making it high time that EPA move forward, as it is now doing, 

to reduce carbon pollution and to hold industrial polluters accountable for the carbon 

pollution they spew into our air. Let this be the end of the era in which big polluters are 

given a free pass to poison our communities. And let it represent a new beginning for 

American innovation and clean energy production. 

As EPA is well aware, the United States emits more carbon pollution per capita than any 

developed country. This must change. The automotive and truck fuel economy 

standards proposed by the Obama Administration represent an important first step toward 

a clean energy future. A vital second step is the regulations we consider today. These 

regulations must be promulgated promptly. 
Let me close on a personal note. I worked for EPA in the 1970s, the I 980, and the I 990s. 

I had first-hand involvement in the Agency's efforts to implement the new pollutioncontrol regimes that were created by Congress in the realms of air pollution, water 

pollution, hazardous waste management, and the like. Not once in the past 40 years has 

EPA set forth a comprehensive regulatory package that was subsequently judged by the 

public to have been too rigorous or too expensive. Though industry claimed, at every 

turn, that the proposed regulations would be unaffordable, this consistently proved to be 

not true. 

Do not be fooled by alarmist calls from a handful of backward-thinking utility companies 

who claim that regulating carbon emissions will place a drag on our economy. The 

opposite is true. As we learned every time in the past, new regulatory regimes benefitted 

public health, improved the quality of the environment, and positioned our nation as an in 

Please do not pull your punches on what subsequently prove to be the most important 

regulatory initiative in the Agency's storied history.