Edward j Chute, PhD 

904 Valleyview Road 

Mount Lebanon 

Pittsburgh, PA 15243-1022 

724.516.7751 

ejchute@hotmail.com 

EPA Hearing: Pittsburgh, PA 

Docket No. EPA-HQ-OAR-2013-0602 

Docket No. EPA-HQ-OAR-2013-0630 

I am Ed Chute. I live with my wife of 48 years at 904 Valleyview Rd in the 

municipality of Mount Lebanon near Pittsburgh, PA. I vividly remember attending 

elementary and high school in Pittsburgh when street lights were required at mid 

day because of the dense darkness at noon and when the night skies were 

constantly illuminated nearly as well as our daylight hours by the industrial glow. I 

remember being upbraided by my elementary school teacher when I drew a yellow 

line across the page when told to draw a picture of the Sun, rather than the way it 

appeared in our readers. I didn't know the Sun was round because it didn't look that 

way to me through the smoggy air, and I had yet to live or travel beyond the region. 

Obviously, james Parton's nineteenth century description and moniker for 

Pittsburgh as "hell with the lid off' was not just well deserved during my youth but 

also caused by the particulate pollution in the air from the working steel mills and 

industrial factories fueled predominately by coke and coal. Since that time, 

Pittsburgh has undergone two Renaissances, clearing the air so that we can now see 

that the sky is blue not black during the day and the Sun is a round orb. The region 

has refocused, revitalized, and restructured its industrial, economic, and cultural 

underpinnings. We may no longer top the list of most polluted places in the US and 
on the Planet; nonetheless, Pittsburgh still is below the "pass" threshold for every 

measure for air and water quality no matter what our politicians try to tell us. 

Pittsburgh is still trying to move itself politically away from its early and late 

twentieth century political behaviors into an entirely new twenty-first century 

economically, perhaps even politically.! sense that the EPA's proposal suffers from 

an analogous and similar "too much political and economic baggage approach" to 

become effective in dealing with Climate Change. I note that the EPA's plan may 

have a fatal flaw for the Planet's environment because it appears to delay any sort of 

implementation until no sooner than 2025, more than a decade from now at the 

earliest because EPA's plan depends so heavily on a set of successful negotiations 

and state level agreements-prior even to initiating any serious reductions in 

pollutants. The EPA's plan restricts itself primarily to carbon emissions from 

electricity generating plants, essentially ignoring such things as methane and carbon 

dioxide gas emissions, which pose even more serious long-term threats to our 

breathable and protective atmosphere. Any such Top to Bottom, then back up to the 

Top approach, serves mainly to impede initiation and almost is destined to fail 

within our current political framework, populated with so many climate change 

deniers and fiduciary elites who value delay in order to make the proverbial hay 

today more than they do anything else, including their own children's and 

grandchildren's and species' future. Nearly everything about the EPA's proposal 

suffers from that wrong-headedness and mindset. 
The EPA's proposal concentrates fairly exclusively on pollution resulting from 

domestic consumption of carbon fuels while ignoring the reality that the US is not 

the only carbon polluting nation in the world. In fact, the EPA's proposal ignores the 

fundamental source of the problem: extraction. If we leave the coal, oil, and gas in 

the ground, we will have made a giant leap forward in reducing the greenhouse 

effect. Failing to deal with the domestic extraction of coal, oil, and natural gas will 

only encourage the investors who own or are leasing Earth's resources to sell them 

abroad, hence increasing and encouraging the Planet's problem with pollution and 

extinction of its resources. Where is the EPA's recognition and position about the 

value-even necessity-of renewable energy resources within the context of 

Climate Change? 

Rather than focusing on renewable sources of energy, the EPA proposal encourages 

investment in the extraction and exportation of our precious natural resources. 

Certainly, there are even a more substantial number of politicians and economic 

financiers who do and will favor investment in such extraction and export of 

resources than there are even climate change deniers. Such folks potentially are an 

even more significant and powerful opposition to any and all current and future 

attempts to save our one and only Planet Home from ourselves. 

In spite of the flaws I have delineated, I still support the EPA's proposal because to 

do nothing is totally and completely unacceptable to me, my children, my 

grandchildren, and the future survival of our species. Our Planet has and will 
continue to change. It will probably remain for several more billions of years 

without us. The issue is will any living species survive our fecklessness that we 

alone can ameliorate and avoid-if we act immediately and purposefully. 

4:57 

August 1, 2014