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TODAY Tuesday 23 December 1997 Each weekday. Conn Nugent on what's new in the world, on the site.

 

TODAY IN THE WORLD: Good Year for Vintage Climate

Yesterday the Greenwire people asked analysts and activists of sundry persuasions to name the top enviro story of 1997. Hands-down winner: climate change / global warming / Kyoto. Distant second: the new EPA clean air regulations.

Few of the respondents were so naive that they thought that the Kyoto agreement solved anything. Some criticized it. But almost everyone agreed that the attention given to Kyoto and the education of public opinion that lead up to it marked an important shift in human self-awareness. Our correspondent Bill McKibben had it right years ago: By changing the atmosphere, we were ending "Nature." We weren't ending nature, of course, we were ending "Nature": the concept and reality of a vast non-human physical world that lay beyond our reach.

Even the skeptics -- particularly those who argue against a connection between economic activities and a rise in global temperatures -- admit that the fact that human emissions of carbon dioxide will soon equal non-human emissions could portend some serious consequences. They just don't want to do anything about it yet. At a roundtable discussion of businessmen featured in the current issue of Fortune, most of the moguls were scared to death of killing the goose that's laid the golden egg of '90s prosperity, but almost all of them also admitted that the world had to move to new sources of energy and new ways to recycle consumer materials. They will probably fund the Senators who vote No on Kyoto, but they've learned something this year.

Intellectual hero Amory Lovins says that capitalism's own best interests lie with energy efficiency. "It's quite straightforward to meet or beat the US Kyoto targets at a profit," he wrote Saturday to our Leonie Haimson, in congratulating her on the "great stuff" she's been writing for Lib Tree's In The Trenches. Amory and his colleagues at the Rocky Mountain Institute can and do document this good-news prediction, he says. As far as I can see, Amory simply has to be right: techno-optimism is (maybe ironically) the established church of American environmentalism for the next two years. Whether the people of this country burn less carbon because fossil fuels become more expensive or because non-fossil alternatives become more attractive, or both, changes in values will come mostly from changes in behavior, not vice versa.

Which is one reason why we have to consider Amory's optimism in the light of the pessimism of the energy bureaucrats. In its Annual Energy Outlook (released last Thursday), the US Department of Energy took a very different pose. Energy consumption between now and 2020 will increase steadily, DOE projects; the big gainers will be petroleum and natural gas. Even coal consumption will be up. Renewables will remain a fly speck on the bottom of the graph. Energy use per capita will rise through 2015, though energy use per dollar will go into a modest but steady decline. All in all, say the DOE in-house prophets, US carbon emissions will go up 1.2 percent per year through 2020. This is not what was promised at Kyoto.

So it's been a helluva year, climate-policy-wise, the elders agree. But now what? RMI or DOE? Go, Amory.

 

TODAY ON THE SITE

Interesting new High Five on Permaculture by Eric Werbalowsky. And, of course, a totally revised Earth Mirror, by the protean Fred Hapgood. Other than that, the big news around here is that we're taking a little Prince-of-Peace break: no changes between now and next Monday, when we'll return ten pounds heavier. See you.

 

Recent "Today" columns:

12/22: Save the Reefs
12/19: Mousemobile
12/18: Year of Fire
12/17: Ramblin' Man (Ramblin' Woman)
12/16: Big News on the Margins
12/15: The Hybrid As Savior
12/12: Good Week for the Dragon
12/11: Help Wanted: Unreasonable Extremists
12/10: Oh Boy! A Fight!
12/9: Running Away From It All
12/8: "What I Wouldn't Give for This War to End."
12/5: Feisty Euros at Kyoto
12/4: Beauty in the Bronx
12/3: God from Machine
12/2: Gentlemen's Bet
12/1: Public Opinion
11/26: Sperm
11/25: Sound Sound-Bite Science
11/24: Home Sweet Storage Locker
11/21: Tim Wirth's Inscrutable Adventure
11/20: Better to Receive than to Give
11/19: Wes Jackson's Problem with Agriculture
11/18: "Stay Home and Be Decent"

To access more "Today" columns, click "Archives" below.