September
7, 2001
Hot Air is Bad for Us
By Alexander Cockburn
The current uproar over the posture
of the Bush administration on global warming and, most recently,
on power plant emissions vividly illustrate the political hypocrisy
and opportunism imbuing debates on environmental issues.
Take first 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 is missile defense among the conservative crowd.
The Democrats have seized on the issue of global warming as
indicative of President Bush's wilful 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 as 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
boldy 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. I myself think it is, and has been for
a long, long time.On my shelf is an excellent volume put out
in 1941 by the US 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 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 much 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 round.
But science can barely squeeze
in the door with a serious debate about what is prompting global
warming. Instead, the Europeans, the greens and the 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. Aware
of the political pitfalls, the Bush administration has recently
been saying that it is 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 footdragging
administrations, both Democratic as well as Republican.
Both political parties have
danced to the industry's tunes. It was with the propagandizing
of Stephen Breyer (now on the US 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
(like the nuclear power industry) 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 the more you shade the earth
perhaps the more rain you cause. So burn dirty coal and protect
the earth by cooling it.
The logic of the caused-by-humans models installs the coal industry
as the savior of "global warming"? You want to live
by a model that does that? CP
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