Carol Browner, former director of the White House Office of Energy and Climate Change Policy under President Obama, spoke yesterday at the U. Virginia Law School about environmental protection and public health challenges facing the United States.
Browner, who was also the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency under President Clinton, talked about the environmental apathy before 1970.
“City after city, state after state had essentially failed to protect the environment,” she said.
In 1970, however, the first Earth Day was established, prompting nearly 21 million people across the nation to protest pollution and promote environmentalism, she said. Later that year, President Nixon established the EPA, which works to establish and regulate environmental policy.
Although the EPA has enacted many new environmental policy measures throughout its history, Browner said environmental protection is a continuous process.
“The task of environmental protection can not be completed in a year, a decade, or even a lifetime,” she said. This task has become even more important today with the recognition of global climate change, she added, noting that global carbon dioxide emissions have nearly quadrupled since 1950.
Browner said the emergence of global climate change has more permanent effects, even if people don’t notice all of them. Weather reflects these abnormal changes in the global climate.
“This year in April we had 600 tornados in United States in one month,” she said. Rises in sea level are also indicators of global climate change, and these rises are “not reversible,” she said.
Failing to mitigate climate change now would lead to an “irreversibly changed planet,” Browner said.
Despite mounting evidence of environmental shifts, she said a central problem in changing these shifts is the unwillingness to act.
“We must be prepared, as we have been in the past, to set standards based on the weight of the evidence,” Browner said. She added that 98 percent of scientists agree on the reality of climate change despite the doubts of the minority.
Browner is convinced that American ingenuity can help us “rise to the challenge” posed by global climate change.
She said the relentless nature of the 24-hour news cycle may have confused the public about the importance and implications of climate change, however. Extensive media coverage of the economy has made it hard to sustain a conversation about climate change.
“We seemed to have returned to an old argument in Washington — that we have to choose between the environment and the economy,” she said. Browning said innovative environmental solutions and a strong economy are mutually beneficial, so no choice is necessary.
Despite the challenges, Americans “must rededicate ourselves” to work together to find a solution and rise to the challenge, she said.
The event was sponsored by the Student Legal Forum, a Law School organization dedicated to keeping aspiring lawyers informed. The Environmental Law Forum and the Virginia Environmental Law Journal co-sponsored the event.
Law student Emily Auerbach said she “liked the way that [Browner] was looking towards the future” and that she appreciated her moderate approach to controversial issues. “She had us meet at a middle point where we could all agree that improving the environment is important,” Auerbach said.