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TODAY Monday 29 September 1997 Each weekday. Conn Nugent on what's new in the world, on the site.

 

TODAY IN THE WORLD: Climate Policy: No Pain, Much Gain

Without discussing their practical or spiritual merit, plans to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases by reducing the frequency and incidence of energy-intensive consumer behaviors -- driving cars, using household appliances, buying things -- are doomed to failure in the current political and cultural environment. Whether such plans are based on suasion (consumerism is a mad carousel of unfulfillment) or financial incentives (let's tax carbon), they are non-starters as matters of public policy. For whatever reasons you like, no electable public figure today is going to dwell on the need for frugality at the end of the pipeline.

I don't much like this state of affairs. I believe that consumerism is a mad carousel of unfulfillment (though better than not having money) and that nothing works so well to retard the use of something as the raising of its price. And there's little evidence that changes in materials-use have evolved to the point where buying something -- almost anything -- isn't an act of depleting natural resources.

But you live in your time, and we are all bound up in a national (and maybe even global) society where the democratic will demands environmental protection and increased consumption at the same time. For some environmental problems -- drinking water contamination, for example -- there are no fundamental contradictions in doing both. But for other problems -- climate change, loss of habitats -- it seems hard to protect natural systems when the forces depleting them seem inextricably bound up in economic expansion.

It is in that context that last Thursday the US Department of Energy released a report that says that technological changes in the ways that energy is produced and consumed will allow for significant lowering of greenhouse gas emissions without losses to consumer use and economic growth. DOE commissioned five national laboratories to examine four economic sectors: transportation, buildings, utilities and industry. The bottom line is that by 2010 the United States could reduce emissions to 1990 levels "and avoid huge costs to the economy and wrenching changes in the American lifestyle," in the dramatic words of Martha Hamilton in the Washington Post.

The DOE study notes a large potential on the energy-supply side through increased use of wind, natural gas, and agricultural byproducts as fuels. They also found relatively simple opportunities for improvements in generating efficiencies and the development of more co-generating facilities. On the energy-demand side, they found technically easy strategies for more efficiencies in automobiles, lighting, heating-and-air-conditioning systems, and home appliances.

Enviros have been saying this for years, most recently in the excellent "Energy Innovations: A Prosperous Path to a Clean Environment," a collaborative report by the Alliance to Save Energy, the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Tellus Institute, and Union of Concerned Scientists. The authors of that report describe an "Innovation Path" whereby a dual national commitment to prosperity and conservation could lead, by 2030, to a virtual revolution in the effects on nature of material well-being.

Who will argue (from the enviro side, at least)? We're Americans, after all, and we are true to the national character when we express optimism about the untapped potential for cleverness and know-how. Certainly Bill Clinton knows this better than any of us, and we can assume that he will sell climate change policy to the American electorate as a dazzling opportunity for investing in the future without jeopardizing the day after tomorrow. For the moment, at least, the voices of frugality and doing-without are muffled. The anti-consumerism movement will have to lead more by example than by exhortation. And the chronic malcontents who think that the key question is the price of a barrel of oil will have to bite their tongues for a while more.

 

TODAY ON THE SITE:

We can't keep David Tenenbaum off the site. The editor "The Why Files" -- multi-awarded science information Website -- this week weighs in with an op-ed on weeds. The introduction of non-native plant species poses a danger to biodiversity second only to loss of habitat, reports Tenenbaum, and there are some situations when application of an herbicide is less worse than tolerance of the invader.

 

Recent "Today" columns:

9/26: Darwin and Bug Spray
9/25: The Cooling of Los Angeles
9/24: The Boy Who Stalks California
9/23: Fire!
9/22: More Logging and Fishing
9/19: "Here, Sir, the People Rule"
9/18: Dr. Pangloss and the Land Mine Treaty
9/17: Outsourcing Pollution
9/16: In the Preservation of the Funky
9/15: The Problem With Health

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