The current uproar over the posture of the Bush administration on global
warming and, most recently, on power plant emissions vividly illustrates the
political hypocrisy and opportunism imbuing debates on environmental issues.
First take global warming. The charge that the current phase of global
warming can be attributed to greenhouse gases generated by humans and their
livestock is an article of faith among liberals as sturdy as missile defense
is among the conservative crowd. The Democrats have seized on the issue of
global warming as indicative of President Bush's willful refusal to confront
a global crisis that properly agitates all of America's major allies. Almost
daily the major green groups reap rich political capital (and donations) on
the issue.
Yet the so-called "anthropogenic origin" of global warming remains entirely
non-proven. Back in the spring of this year, even the International Panel on
Climate Change, which now has a huge stake in arguing the "caused-by-humans"
thesis, admits in its Summary that there could be a one in three chance its
multitude of experts are wrong. A subsequent report issued under the
auspices of the National Academy of Sciences is ambivalent to the point of
absurdity. An initial paragraph boldly asserting the "caused-by-humans" line
is confounded a few pages later by far more cautious paragraphs admitting
that the thesis is speculative and that major uncertainty rules on the role
played in climate equations by water vapor and aerosols.
It's nothing new to say the earth is getting warmer. On my shelf is an
excellent volume put out in 1941 by the U.S. Department of Agriculture
called "Climate and Man," which contains a chapter acknowledging "global
warming" (that same phrase) and hailing it as a benign trend that would
return the earth to the normalcy in climate it enjoyed several hundred
thousand years ago.
Anything more than a glance at the computer models favored by the "caused
by humans" crowd will show that the role of carbon dioxide is grotesquely
exaggerated. Indeed the models are incapable of handling the role of the
prime greenhouse gas, water vapor (clouds, etc.), which accounts for 25 to
30 times as much heat absorption as carbon dioxide.
Similarly, the International Panel on Climate Change admits to a "very low"
level of scientific understanding on an "aerosol indirect effect" that the
Panel acknowledges is cooling the climate system at a hefty rate. (Aerosols
are particles that are so fine they float in air.)
In a particularly elegant paper published last May in Chemical Innovation,
a journal of the American Chemical Society, Professor Robert Essenhigh of
Ohio State University reminds us that for the last 800,000 years, global
temperature and carbon dioxide have been moving up and down in lockstep.
Since 799,700 of these years were ones preceding any possible human effect
on carbon dioxide, this raises the question of whether global warming caused
the swings in carbon dioxide or vice versa. Essenhigh argues convincingly
that the former is the case, and as global temperatures warm, a huge
reservoir of carbon dioxide absorbed in the oceans is released to the
atmosphere. Clearly this is a more potent input than the relatively puny
human contribution to global carbon dioxide. Thus, natural warming is
driving the raised level of carbon dioxide, and not the other way around.
But science can barely squeeze in the door with a serious debate about what
is prompting global warming. Instead, the Europeans, the greens and
Democrats eagerly seize on the issue as a club with which to beat President
Bush and kindred targets of opportunity.
Now take the latest brouhaha over emissions from coal-fired plants. The
industry wants what is coyly called "flexibility" in emission standards. EPA
chief Christy Whitman is talking about "voluntary incentives" and
market-based pollution credits as the proper way to go. Earlier this week,
aware of the political pitfalls, the Bush administration said that it was
not yet quite ready to issue new rules.
Now, there's no uncertainty about the effects of the stuff that comes out
of a power plant chimney. There are heavy metals and fine particles that
kill people or make them sick. There are also cleaning devices, some of them
expensive, that can remove these toxic substances. Ever since the 1970s, the
energy industry has fought mandatory imposition of such cleaners. If Bush
and Whitman enforce this flexibility, they will be condemning people to
death, as have previous foot-dragging administrations.
Both political parties have danced to the industry's tunes. It was with the
propagandizing of Stephen Breyer (now on the U.S. Supreme Court, then a top
aide to Senator Teddy Kennedy), that the trend to pollution credits began.
And after the glorious regulatory laxity of the Reagan/Bush years, the
industry was not seriously discommoded in Clinton Time. Ask the inhabitants
of West Virginia and Tennessee whether they think that the coal industry
lost clout in those years.
The sad truth of the matter is that many "big picture" environmental theses
such as human-caused global warming afford marvelously inviting ways of
avoiding specific and mostly difficult political decisions. You can bellow
for "global responsibility" without seriously offending powerful corporate
interests, some of which now have a big stake in promoting global warming.
Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill loves the "caused by humans" warming thesis,
and so does the aluminum industry in which he has been a prime player. On
the other side we can soon expect to hear that powerful Democrat, Senator
Bobby Byrd, arguing that the coal industry is in the vanguard of the war on
global warming, because the more you shade the earth perhaps the more rain
you cause. So burn dirty coal, and protect the earth by cooling it.
You really want to live by a computer model that installs the coal industry
as the savior of "global warming"?
Alexander Cockburn is coeditor with Jeffrey St Clair of the muckraking
newsletter CounterPunch. To find out more about Alexander Cockburn and read
features by other columnists and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate
Web page at
www.creators.com.
COPYRIGHT 2001 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.
