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Llewellyn
King
Read Llewellyn's bio and previous columns
April 21, 2008
The Pity of Earth
Day: It Brings Out the Crazies
The trouble with
Earth Day, which we mark on Tuesday of this week, is that it has a
powerful hold on crazies. Crazies on the left and crazies on the right.
That certainly is
not what Sen. Gaylord Nelson had in mind when he inaugurated the first
Earth Day in 1970. The senator and others hoped that Earth Day would
attract a serious examination of the stresses on the Earth. Instead, it
seems to attract stressed people.
From the left come
the neo-agrarians, the anti-capitalists, the no-growth proselytizers and
the blame-America-first crowd. From the right come the supporters of the
Competitive Enterprise Institute, a pro-business phalanx that is in deep
denial about man's impact on the environment, and libertarians who
refuse to believe that governments can ever get anything right, or that
government standards can be beneficial.
The fact is that a great majority of Americans are deeply concerned
about the environment and maintaining the quality of life that has been
a hallmark of progress in the 20th and 21st
Centuries. This majority includes electric utility executives, oil
company CEOs and the trade associations to which these industrial
captains belong.
It is notable the
extent to which the energy industries have signed onto the concept of
global warming and other environmental degradation. They know that their
activities often collide directly with the environment and they are,
often to the surprise of the environmental community, keen to help.
British Petroleum is pouring millions of dollars into solar power and
hydrogen. The president of Shell Oil Company in the United States, John
Hoffmeister, is retiring early to devote himself to the task of alerting
Americans to their energy vulnerability and to the environmental story.
Sure, it took
industry a long time to get on the environmental bandwagon. It is the
way of industry that it initially resists any innovation that might cost
money or involve difficulty. Later, it buys television advertising
pointing to its own virtue when it has capitulated.
The introduction of
double-hulled oil tankers in domestic waters is a clear example of this
– conversion in the face of necessity. After the Exxon Valdez disaster
in 1989, the government mandated double-hulling. The tanker industry
moaned and oil spills in domestic waters declined by 70 percent. The
cost of double-hulling is balanced out by the lack of payouts for
spills. Double-hulling ships, like removing lead from gasoline,
introducing the catalytic converter and banning hydro fluorocarbons in
propellants and refrigerants, are major American environmental
successes. We led the world.
But if you listen to
the critics, you would think that the United States was always on the
wrong side of the environmental ledger.
The problem is we
live well and we consume a lot of energy and a lot of goods in our
routine lives. There are about 21 gallons of gasoline in a 42-gallon
barrel of oil. If you calculate your own daily gasoline usage, you will
come up with a pretty frightening number over your lifetime. Likewise
coal burned for lighting, heating and cooling. Residents of New York
City, who live on top of each other and do not drive very much, use
about half of the energy of suburban households.
For a serious
improvement in the environment, just from an energy consumption
standpoint, we need to generate electricity by means other than burning
fossil fuels (nuclear and wind), introduce more electric-powered public
transportation and substitute electric vehicles for hydrocarbon-powered
vehicles. The technology is in sight for all of these. The problem is
that the political will is distracted by the pressure groups on the left
and the right.
Human impact on the
environment can be disastrous or benign, and even beneficial. The
towpath along the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal in Washington D.C. started out
as a purely commercial intrusion on a river bank, but now it is a
recreational magnet. The dams along the Colorado River have boosted
growth in the West, but the river has paid a price. Seattle City Light,
the utility that serves the Seattle area, is now carbon-neutral because
of the large amount of generation it gets from wind and hydro. There is
a debate as to whether damming rivers is justified, but compared with
other ways of producing large quantities of electricity, it is
relatively benign.
Farming is an
intrusion into nature – a constructive one. The challenge for the Earth
Day advocates is to find other constructive intrusions.
© 2008 North Star
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