Hot Air And Global Warming
By Derrick Z.
Jackson
27 March, 2005
Boston
Globe
Every time the world calls for action
on climate change, the United States emits more White House gases. The
latest puff came from James Connaughton, the director of environmental
quality, during last week's conference of 20 nations that met in London
to attempt once again to make global warming a global priority.
At the conference,
British economic minister Gordon Brown said, ''Climate change is a consequence
of the build-up of greenhouse gases over the past 200 years in the atmosphere
and virtually all these emissions came from the rich countries. Indeed,
we became rich through those emissions." Connaughton's response,
in an interview with the British Broadcasting Corporation, was, ''We're
still working on the issue of causation."
Brown said, ''We
now have sufficient evidence that human-made climate change is the most
far-reaching and almost certainly the most threatening of all the environmental
challenges facing us." Connaughton's response as to what he referred
as ''the extent to which humans are a factor," was, ''They may
be."
Brown said, ''The
industrialized countries must take responsibility first in reducing
their emissions of greenhouse gases." Connaughton complained instead
that the target in the Kyoto treaty for the United States to reduce
emissions ''was so unreasonable in our ability to meet it that the only
we could have met it was to shift energy-intensive manufacturing to
other countries."
Two days after dismissing
coalition building, the United States went back to emissions building.
The Senate, by a vote of 51-49, finally approved oil drilling in Alaska's
Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. On efforts to stop global warming,
Connaughton said, ''We are trying now to find a portfolio in which three
words are important: technology, technology, and technology."
He meant drilling,
drilling, drilling. Two years ago the National Academies of Science
said that even with improved technologies, drilling on the north slope
of Alaska has degraded the tundra, altered wildlife patterns, and has
resulted in social problems that blunt claims of unqualified economic
progress. Many scientists have said that the oil in the refuge is so
relatively minuscule that we would be better off if we simply made our
cars more fuel efficient.
Although Connaughton
claimed we are ''trying to find" technology, we refuse to use it.
The National Academies has for years said the technology exists for
more fuel efficient cars. But Congress and the White House, imprisoned
by the oil and auto lobby, refuse to raise them.
The vote to drill
in Alaska was parallel to another Senate vote to deny an additional
$1 billion for Amtrak when studies show that well-developed rail systems
can slash traffic and thus global-warming pollution. The United States
consumes a quarter of the world's oil and produces a quarter of the
planet's greenhouse gases despite being 4 percent of the population.
Yet when Brown said that the industrialized countries must take responsibility
first, we become the most immature adolescent on Earth, doing precisely
the opposite of what we need to do.
Earlier in the month,
the former chief scientific adviser to the British government, Lord
May of Oxford, bluntly compared Bush to a modern-day Nero. Last fall,
British Prime Minister Tony Blair said, ''If what the science tells
about climate change is correct, then unabated it will result in catastrophic
consequences for our world. The science almost certainly is correct."
At the recent London
conference, Brown said, ''Environmental issues including climate change
have traditionally been placed in a category separate from the economy
and from economic policy. But this is no longer tenable. Across a range
of environmental issues, from soil erosion to the depletion of marine
stocks, from water scarcity to air pollution, it is clear now not just
that economic activity is their cause, but that these problems in themselves
threaten future economic activity and growth."
Nero and his fiddlers
would hear none of that. Asked last month what the science was on global
warming, Connaughton said on CNBC, ''There are many different views."
The science ceased
to have many views years ago. The very first sentence in the executive
summary of the 2001 National Academies of Science report on climate
change begins with, ''Greenhouse gases are accumulating in Earth's atmosphere
as a result of human activities . . . " The report further said,
''Global warming could well have serious adverse societal and ecological
impacts by the end of this century." The science continues to choke
under the White House effect.
© 2005 Boston
Globe