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Fighting global warming

Building support for new pollution cuts

Amid a steady drumbeat of alarming news about global warming, Environment Massachusetts campaign staff spent the summer building up support for taking action to combat the problem.

Our top priority is to cap global warming pollution from all sources—cars, power plants, building energy use and more. The goal is to achieve the necessary reductions to avoid the worst impacts of global warming—at least 20 percent by 2020 and 80 percent by 2050.

Campaign staff went door-to-door across the state to build support for our plan to cap global warming pollution, talking to tens of thousands of citizens and generating more than 11,400 petition signatures to policymakers.

Recent research has underscored the need to take swift action to avoid the most extreme effects of global warming—the highest sea level rise, the most severe storms, the most ecosystem damage and species extinction. Scientists in the Northeast recently quantified what the impacts on the region would be as a result of global warming.

Among other things, they found that rising sea levels caused by global warming are projected to increase the frequency and severity of damaging storm surges and coastal flooding. What is now considered a once-in-a-century coastal flood in Boston is expected to occur, on average, as frequently as every two to three years by mid-century—and once every other year by late-century. (Visit www.climatechoices.org, a project of the Union of Concerned Scientists, for more info.)
 
“The environmental impacts are huge,” said Gorke. “But the thing that we can’t lose sight of is how disruptive global warming will be to our economy if we fail to get on a more sustainable path soon. This kind of flood damage is obviously expensive to fix, and more frequent and severe flooding is just one impact of global warming.”

The Legislature and Gov. Patrick are evaluating our pollution cap proposals. California, New Jersey, Hawaii and Florida have all adopted similar pollution limits.