Rep. Stansbury Highlights The Need To Standardize Federal Pollution Data To Avoid Crossing Critical Climate Tipping Points

Statement

Today, U.S. Representative Melanie Stansbury (N.M.-01), a member of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, highlighted the need to standardize data collection on greenhouse gas (GHG) pollution across federal agencies to urgently address the global climate crisis. Rep. Stansbury additionally raised the possibility for Congress to act in coordination with the Biden administration to establish a network of carbon emission and sink monitoring to fight the ongoing climate crisis as New Mexico faces unprecedented wildfires and the worst drought in over a millennia.

In Congress, Rep. Stansbury is the author of the recently-introduced bipartisan Water Data Act, which would standardize federal water data across agencies to empower governments, farmers and ranchers, communities to manage their water resources most effectively.

"As we all know, we're at a global tipping point," said Rep. Stansbury. "We know that we have to take action as quickly as possible, and part of being able to take effective action on climate change requires that we know that the methods and tactics that we're using to tackle emissions and sinks is actually effective and that we're making the investments that have the biggest bang for our buck."

Rep. Stansbury continued by questioning the witness panel, asking, "Are there things that we can do as a federal government, either as Congress or in the administrative branch that would help to standardize the way that we're doing emissions tracking and that would help to being more coherence to all of the science that you all are talking about today?"

Dr. Eric K. Lin, Director of the Material Measurement Laboratory at the National Institute of Standards and Technology responded, stating, "It's very difficult to pull all these multiple measurements and different points of view into a coherent whole that's precise, transparent, and we have enough confidence in it. But a tremendous amount of progress has been made, and certainly there's more room to go."

Several federal research and development organizations are currently working to advance GHG monitoring, measuring, and verification. Analyzing and exploring entities such as Environmental Protection Agency, National Institutes of Standards and Technology, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Department of Energy, are currently partnering within an Interagency Working Group to create opportunities to coordinate necessary research to monitor and understand GHG emissions.

Rep. Stansbury's remarks as delivered can be found below.

Thank you to all of our esteemed panelists for being here today. You know, we've been talking a lot this morning about the science specifically and how we address the issues around monitoring, around standardization of how we measure greenhouse gases. And then what do we do with that information to help inform our climate action?

And I want to kind of direct the panel towards the policy side of the equation now and specifically science policy. You know, we all know we're at a global tipping point--we know that we have to take action as quickly as possible, and part of being able to take effective action on climate change requires that we know that the methods and the tactics that we're using to tackle emissions and sinks is actually effective and that we are making the investments that had the biggest bang for the buck.

And so I know we've already touched on some of this this morning. But I want to ask each of the panelists as you sit in different agencies and work on these with your other agency partners, are there specific policy actions that you feel Congress or the federal government as a whole could take that would help to standardize the way that we do measurement, the way that we deploy instrumentation across the U.S. on measuring carbon emissions and sinks is a sort of network of monitoring? And as I said, standardizing the ways that we do it, and then how we deploy that information in terms of determining where to make investments is the federal government in both emissions reduction and in sinks. So if we could, why don't we go ahead and start with the panelists from NASA and go down the line?

Thank you. And I know I'm out of time, Madam Chairwoman, but I just want to add that myself and other colleagues are very interested in looking at opportunities for Congress to partner with the administration to help bring a policy framework to coherence in how we measure and deploy different climate strategies.

Obviously, the most important pressing question of the day is how do we meet our goal of reducing our carbon emissions by 2035, 2040 so that we don't cross this catastrophic tipping point? And so I look forward to working with all of you on that, as well as climate resilience and climate justice, and really thank all of you who are working in our federal agencies for your service in this area. You are doing some of the most important work on the planet and we thank you for your service.

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