Touting President Obama's upcoming announcement on greenhouse gas regulations, Judith Enck, the Environmental Protection Agency's Region 2 administrator, told a conference at Columbia University on Thursday there's still time to reverse some of the effects of climate change.
"E.P.A. has effectively regulated pollutants from (power) plants for years," she told environmental and legal professionals at Columbia Law School. "Now we will be doing the same for greenhouse gases."
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Enck was keynote speaker for the "Key Environmental Issues in U.S. E.P.A. Region 2," conference, which hosted a half-dozen panels of government regulators from the federal, state and city level.
"In my view, the time to act was yesterday," she said. "I'm particularly concerned about sea-level rise in the Virgin Islands, the Caribbean and the small island of Manhattan."
She said higher sea levels and warmer temperatures mean more intense storms, such as Hurricane Sandy
"One storm, primarily two states, 60 billion federal tax dollars," she said, citing the destruction Sandy caused in New York and New Jersey.
Still, Enck said, it is not too late to curb the effects of global warming and said the president's upcoming announcement will be an historic step in that direction.
"This is the first time that we're going to have carbon reduction regulations across the board," she said, adding that similar federal programs have gone a long way to alleviating global climate threats. "Remember the hole in the ozone layer? Well it's closing. ... Acid rain is down 65 percent from what it was in the 1990s. ... Only the E.P.A. is in a position to tackle this."
Enck also discussed the E.P.A.'s work in Puerto Rico, where agency officials are trying to increase recycling; clean up Vieques, the island that was used for many years as a Navy bombing range, and protect coral reefs off the coast.
Puerto Rico is an outlier in Region 2—the region includes New York, New Jersey, the U.S. Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico.
Residents of Puerto Rico were not used to federal officials asking for their input and in some cases were suspicious of their intentions, Enck said. She recounted one meeting with locals during which a translator told her: "This gentleman believes you are a running imperialist dog and you should never return to the island."
The work is daunting, she said. Children often wade through rivers of sewage, unexploded munitions are collected in buckets, and coral reefs are deteriorating.
But she said, "I think we're winning over hearts and minds."