Local Green Politics: Necessary but not Proper
In an effort to curb pollution, city and state governments are forming agreements with other municipal, state, and international governments to curb greenhouse gas emissions. For example, California Govnernor Arnold Schwarzenegger and British Prime Minister Tony Blair agreed last week to reduce emissions of greenhouse gasses and to trade carbon pollution credits (although I’m not exactly sure how this will work, since the United States, and thus California, are not parties to the Kyoto Protocol). Also last week, President Bill Clinton brokered a deal between 22 of the worlds largest cities to reduce carbon emissions by those cities.
With all of these agreements between cities, it would seem that the nation is on the right track to reducing our greenhouse gas emissions and finally doing something constructive about carbon pollution, right? Wrong.
Before I begin, I should note I applaud any commitment to reduce carbon emissions. Every ton of carbon that is not put into the atmosphere is one ton less that is contributing to climate change. That being said, I believe this patchwork system of agreements and commitments is unwieldy and, ultimately, will fail.
All of the proposed agreements created by the state and local governments is largely symbolic. If the next round of politicians decides to ignore or repeal the agreements, there is no force of law that can stop them. As far as I can gauge, there is nothing at all that can “make” the parties do anything to reduce emissions. The only benefit they have in the short term is to make a good photo-op. Even if the largest U.S. cities were to reduce their carbon emissions completely, there would still be considerable pollution produced in by the burning of coal by power plants. The current EPA policy does nothing to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, although, in theory, it should reduce the emissions of other nasty pollutants, such as sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, and mercury. Carbon dioxide is suspiciously absent from the current policy.
The source of the problem is our national policy towards carbon emissions, especially in the Congress. Why? Other interested parties. It is not uncommon for a politician from Texas or Oklahoma or Alaska to get up and talk about how those crazy hippies are trying to interfere with America’s god-given right to pollute. But why does the self-serving ranting of one politician block progress towards a cleaner, healthier economy? Other interested parties.
I don’t want to sound like some sort of crazy, conspiracy theorist, but there are large, politically powerful parties out there that have a vested interest in not reducing carbon emissions. Those parties have big bucks to spend, and the media [shock] listens to the almighty dollar. The interested parties — petroleum, power companies, and large industry — spend millions of dollars to buy airtime and put forward their message through the use of ipse dixit experts. By using the greatest weapon in the skeptics arsenal, doubt, these so-called experts create a false debate using wildly impossible theories and scenarios, ultimately leading to the logical fallacy of negative proof.
The false debate has even made its way into President Bush’s speeches. Take this Rose Garden address from 2001. Even after the National Academy of Sciences issued a report outlining the impact of carbon emissions on climate change, the President found a way to insert doubt into the mix. From the President’s speech:
There is a natural greenhouse effect that contributes to warming. Greenhouse gases trap heat, and thus warm the earth because they prevent a significant proportion of infrared radiation from escaping into space. Concentration of greenhouse gases, especially CO2, have increased substantially since the beginning of the industrial revolution. And the National Academy of Sciences indicate that the increase is due in large part to human activity.
Yet, the Academy’s report tells us that we do not know how much effect natural fluctuations in climate may have had on warming. We do not know how much our climate could, or will change in the future. We do not know how fast change will occur, or even how some of our actions could impact it.
This is a clear illustration of what is wrong with the way we as a nation approach climate change. We know there is a change, but we don’t want to think that we are causing the change. This doubt over how much damage we are doing is doing the most damage of all.
What needs to happen is that the Congress and the President need to act. We need to make a larger commitment to the environment, since we as a nation are the worst polluter. The problem is that politicians do not believe that our economic welfare and our carbon emissions can move in the same direction. Again from the president’s speech:
Our country, the United States is the world’s largest emitter of manmade greenhouse gases. We account for almost 20 percent of the world’s man-made greenhouse emissions. We also account for about one-quarter of the world’s economic output. We recognize the responsibility to reduce our emissions. We also recognize the other part of the story — that the rest of the world emits 80 percent of all greenhouse gases. And many of those emissions come from developing countries.
Absent from this little factoid is the fact that the United States is less than 5% of the world’s population. Our national policy should not be based upon what “the other guy” is doing. After all, while the remainder of the world’s population is emitting the remainder of the world’s carbon dioxide [real rocket science here], the bulk of the world’s population is not responsible for the emissions. We can only immediately control our pollution, and we can do that today. International law and agreements, such as Kyoto, can help take care of “the other 80%”. The president goes on to complain that China, the number two emitter of carbon dioxide, is exempted from reduction under Kyoto. While that may be true in the short term, China’s rapidly developing economy will not allow it to be exempt for long.
This is an issue that our nation needs to address and soon. Unfortunately, national politics and climate change do not work on the same time-scale. Issues in the United States need to be addressable in less than two-year increments. Climate change works on a decades-long cycle. Thus, there is no incentive to act, since we can address the problem later. But when later arrives, it will be too late.
