Link: http://century-club.com/blog3.php/2009/04/24/a-global-warming-story-you-haven-t-heard

Continuing in the spirit of the previous "Earth Day" post, I bring you this action alert from the non-profit environmental legal firm, EarthJustice. They were founded in 1971 as the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund.

EarthJustice Action Alert

The following is from their About Us page.

Earthjustice at a Glance

Earthjustice is a non-profit public interest law firm dedicated to protecting the magnificent places, natural resources, and wildlife of this earth, and to defending the right of all people to a healthy environment. We bring about far-reaching change by enforcing and strengthening environmental laws on behalf of hundreds of organizations, coalitions and communities.

The title from this post is the EarthJustice title for their action alert concerning a form of the greenhouse gas, Carbon Dioxide or CO2. Black Carbon, as it is called in the bill introduced on Earth Day by Senators John Kerry (D-MA), Barbara Boxer (D-CA), Tom Carper (D-DE) and Jim Inhofe, the Oklahoma Republican known as the Senate's chief global warming skeptic, that would require the EPA to study black carbon pollution and within a year come up with solutions for reducing emissions.

I believe this is an important concern. In fact I'm puzzled in how this issue is being framed in the public forum, as an unheard story, and is why I added the question mark to the title.

Black Carbon is more commonly known as "soot". This is stuff that comes out of industrial smokestacks. But it also comes out of automobile tailpipes, and as a result of burning fossil fuels such as gasoline or diesel, bio fuels such as ethanol, and from biomass.

And what puzzles me is that Earth Day was originally able to gain the support it did back in 1970, because at that time air and water pollution were of major concern to the population of the United States and others. The environmental joke of the day was usually about Los Angeles and how narrow was daylight visibility from all the smog. The EPA was created specifically to address air pollution. Apparently they determined that black carbon wasn't a pollutant, and it was this chemical distinction that was obviously lost on me. I have assumed all these years since that all visible pollutants were being regulated, and most of what I was supposedly seeing coming out of the smokestacks was some form or the other of steam. Was I being deluded or have I been deluding myself? What about everyone else?

The important thing is that this is at least being looked at now. And hopefully will be addressed in the final climate bill that is being currently developed in the House of Representatives.

Please click on the link below to learn more and sign the petition. Below that is a short video they put together to playfully illustrate the seriousness of this greenhouse pollutant.

EarthJustice Action Alert