[Mb-civic] Cheer Up, Earth Day Is OverBy JOHN TIERNEY

[Michael Butler]

The New York Times
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April 23, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
Cheer Up, Earth Day Is Over
By JOHN TIERNEY

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.

Frank Rich is on a book leave.

David Brooks is on vacation.