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CounterPunch
September
18, 2002
EPA's Air Quality
Report
Smoking Gun of a Hatchet Job
by Ben Tripp
Let's talk about the environment. For those of
you who don't know, the environment is that large brown thing
outside your window-- unless you live in Manhattan, in which
case it's on the other end of the Triborough bridge; take the
Major Deegan Expressway to the toll road and follow signs. You'll
know it when you see it. It's very dry, except when there are
floods; it's very hot, except at the North Pole, where it's actually
sort of chilly. The temperature at the North Pole can get into
the 40's at night, at least in winter. Winter, which some of
my younger readers may not remember, is that large white thing
outside your window. Or it was. These days it's more of a French
gray, which looks good on everybody. Lucky us.
The Environmental Protection Agency,
which was named back when the government still had a rapier-keen
sense of humor, just released its annual report. If you or me
released something like this in a crowded elevator, all the other
passengers would get off on the next floor and take the stairs.
But there's no getting off this elevator, which is the express
to Hades (Verrazano Bridge to Brooklyn/Queens Expressway southbound
to Flushing Ave.- ask from there). The EPA report covers the
state of the environment for the previous year; this time, "covered"
is the right word. With a tight-fitting lid.
The problem is this: probably due to
a collating error, the EPA forgot to mention global warming.
This is rather like a doctor pronouncing his patient is in perfect
health because he overlooked a trifling case of decapitation.
Forget the headless corpse- global warming is the 500 pound gorilla
in the corner of the room. And don't think this gorilla is going
to stay where it is, because it's out of rye crisps and still
mighty hungry. For the EPA to omit global warming from its report
is tantamount to lunacy, although one can understand its hesitation,
as nobody likes to be called a "Gloomy Gus" just on
account of some old cloud of carbon dioxide floating around somewhere.
Carbon dioxide is the gas responsible
for global warming. It is released when fossil fuels such as
petroleum, coal, and minced clams are burned. The emissions,
a fancy word for smoke, rise into the atmosphere where they are
trapped against a thin membrane composed of moonbeams and Silly
String (the ozone layer). Carbon dioxide is notoriously claustrophobic;
take some on a train and watch it freak out when you go through
the tunnels. So just when it thinks it's free to drift through
the universe, the CO2 (a baby name for carbon dioxide its close
friends still use) is stuck, and starts burning holes in the
ozone layer with a cigarette. This is why cigarettes are bad
for your health.
Automobile manufacturers and the coal
and petroleum industries deny CO2 is a pollutant, because it
occurs naturally in the course of environmental events, like
when a coal seam deep beneath the ground catches fire after it's
been hit by lightning. I say anything that causes the atmosphere
to turn into a poisonous canopy of death is pollution, and I
don't care if it comes from the tailpipe of a car or spotted
owl breath. Be that as it may, splitting owl hairs about what
is or isn't pollution rather misses the point: if we don't cut
down on CO2 emissions, we all gonna die. Back when there were
forests, the trees actually absorbed the CO2. Unfortunately our
redwood patio furniture does not. So it strikes me as awkward,
if not actually punishable by Divine Wrath, that the EPA excised
this part of their report. It's not that they decided beforehand
they'd give the issue a rest and just avoided the subject: it
was removed from the document on purpose, after it was written.
There is proof of this. A couple of references
to the missing global warming section remain elsewhere in the
report, which just goes to show you're better off with a word
processing program that includes the ability to search and replace.
One of the citations runs as follows:
"Although the primary focus of this
report is on national air pollution, global air pollution issues
such as destruction of the stratospheric ozone layer and the
effect of global warming on the earth's climate are major concerns
and are also discussed."
Where there's emissions, there's fire,
as they say.
So there it is: the EPA, undoubtedly
on Administration orders, took out the part where we acknowledge
that our atmosphere (a rectangular area from Baja, California
diagonally Northeast to Quoddy Head, Maine) is connected, even
vaguely, to any other part of the atmosphere. Like the one over
Canada or Mexico. This is the kind of willful omission which
causes once-serious scientists to be called "Silly Billies"
by their peers, or worse.
The reasons for this hatchet job are
obvious. Last year, the EPA put out a humiliating (for the Bush
Administration) report which detailed the catastrophic effects
of global warming, although they still tried to temper the bad
news by pointing out that all properties in the remote Pacific
islands of Tuvalu would soon be waterfront. After a barrage of
grotesque apologies and explanations delivered at gunpoint ("By
'death of all species on Earth' we meant 'yucky species'; cute
animals will remain unharmed") the issue was shot in the
head and buried in a landfill outside Yucca Flats. Blindsided
once, you bet Bush insisted on a look-see at the latest report
before it came out, and then had it read aloud to him- slowly.
This would explain why every copy of the report has several pages
torn out of the middle. The remaining indications of the missing
section might even be a cry for help from the EPA, and maybe
someone ought to go down there and make sure they're not being
held at gunpoint by Dick Cheney.
Not that the EPA report, with or without
global warming, is given much heed nowadays. Most serious scientists
(meaning foreign ones) rely on other sources of data, such as
the Union of Concerned Scientists ( a bunch of old Pinkos if
you ask me).
Cynics might suggest that this represents
yet another derailment of government "For the People, By
the People" in which a venal, money-grubbing oligarchy uses
Orwellian thought control tactics to maintain control over a
fractious populace in the face of ever-mounting evidence that
they are scumbags who care nothing for the future of life on
Earth. Those cynics, I ask you. How can they sleep? I'm sure
it's all just intramural rivalry- the corporate oil guys in the
Executive branch against the corporate oil guys in the EPA. Kind
of a scratch game of volleyball played with the globe instead
of a ball.
But the consequences are too immense
to allow this game to continue. As Bush joked just the other
day while visiting a stand of old-growth redwood trees, "The
problem with climate scientists is I haven't gotten around to
having 'em all killed yet." At least that's what I think
he said. It was hard to hear him over the roar of the chainsaws.
Ben Tripp
is a screenwriter. He can be reached at:
credel@earthlink.net
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