The Unknown Candidate: Cockeyed Environmental Optimist

Sunday, April 23, 2006

Cockeyed Environmental Optimist

Tierney's answer to the environmental challenge is simplistic, insufficient, and, as usual based on picking and choosing information to fit his point of view. If only the problem and the solution were as simple as Tierney's mind.

Cheer Up, Earth Day Is Over
By John Tierney
The New York Times

Now that we have survived another Earth Day — the annual attempt to heal the planet by making its human inhabitants feel worse — I have a short quiz to cheer you up:

1) In most places in the United States, is the air dirtier than it was two decades ago?

2) Has the amount of forest land in America been shrinking?

3) To combat global warming, which country is leading new international efforts to reduce annual emissions of greenhouse gases by a greater amount than the Kyoto Protocol?

If you correctly answered "no" to the first two questions, you're doing better than the environmental studies class I surveyed during its recent field trip to the American Museum of Natural History in New York. None of those high-school students — nor their teacher — got both questions right. Most got them both wrong.

Most air pollutants have declined sharply in recent decades, and the amount of forest land hasn't been shrinking at all — it's been fairly stable since 1920 and has actually grown in the last decade. But cheery facts like these don't get much attention in environmental studies classes or Earth Day events.

Earth Day has traditionally been the occasion for apocalyptic predictions: global famines due to overpopulation, cancer epidemics from synthetic chemicals, cities destroyed by accidents at nuclear plants, species wiped out by deforestation, crippling shortages of energy. Humans, especially Americans with their technological hubris, were doomed to be punished unless they forsook gas-guzzlers, turned off the lights and toiled in their organic gardens — complete, of course, with compost heaps.

The current apocalypse, global warming, is a more realistic danger than the previous ones. But after all the past doomsdays that didn't arrive, a lot of people are understandably skeptical of the ecoprophets, especially when the prophets start prescribing the same old penance.

The Kyoto Protocol appealed to environmentalists' sense of virtue because it required big sacrifices, particularly from Americans. One reason the United States dropped out is that it couldn't get proper credit for the new growth in its forests. While the growing trees would indeed remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, this solution lacked the requisite dose of masochism.

But even the proponents of sacrifice have a hard time keeping their promises. Europeans are having trouble cutting their emissions to meet Kyoto targets. In America, President Bush is blamed by Democrats for rejecting Kyoto, but how many of the Democrats now howling about high gasoline prices would vote for the best way to comply with it: a stiff tax on gasoline, coal and other fuels?

The most practical way to combat global warming is not through asceticism but through technology — the way we averted the famines and energy shortages forecast on past Earth Days. Air pollution has declined not because Americans drive less and turn off lights but because cars and power plants have become cleaner.

While Europeans have been reveling in their moral superiority in adopting the Kyoto Protocol, the United States has been pushing technologies that involve less pain but more gain, like new nuclear power plants and methods of sequestering carbon. America has offered to help India build nuclear plants and is working in China to generate cleaner electricity. It's leading a 15-nation program to cut down emissions of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, by turning it into a profitable source of energy.

These programs have gotten little attention. (I managed to find a total of one newspaper article devoted to the methane project). But if you add up the projected annual reductions in carbon dioxide from these efforts, the total is greater than what Europeans are planning to cut through Kyoto, according to David Victor, the director of the Program on Energy and Sustainable Development at Stanford.

"The Bush administration's nuclear deal with India by itself could do almost as much as Kyoto," Victor says. "While we should cut our own emissions at home, we need to work on more deals like this in developing countries, because they'll be producing most of the future carbon dioxide and they don't want to address global warming unless it serves their own needs."

It's fine to exhort rich Westerners to live frugally, but people in poor countries will not be swayed by appeals to asceticism. When you live without a car or electricity or running water, every day is Earth Day.

Photo credit: John Tierney (Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times)