The Pity Party (25 page)

The environmentalist movement has long indulged a penchant for preening over efficacy, however. John Tierney, for some years the
New York Times
's token libertarian/contrarian, wrote an article for its magazine in 1996, “Recycling Is Garbage.” It contended that mandatory recycling programs—such as municipal regulations requiring households to put glass and plastic garbage in this bin, yard waste in that one—“may be the most wasteful activity in modern America: a waste of time and money, a waste of human and natural resources.” The programs are based on the false premises that America is running out of landfill space, and that landfill is inherently dangerous. But America had a population density of 104 people per square mile if we exclude Alaska and Hawaii from the equation, according to the 2010 census. If America needs radical changes to meet its waste disposal needs, then the Netherlands (400 inhabitants per square mile), South Korea (500), and Taiwan (650) would have to devote all their political energies to dealing with a permanent garbage crisis. As for their safety, “there's little reason to worry about modern landfills, which by Federal law must be lined with clay and plastic, equipped with drainage and gas-collection systems, covered daily with soil and monitored regularly for underground leaks.”
⁴⁹

Apart from the cost to the cities of running several trucks on each route, and sorting garbage that usually has little market value for recycling, there is the unquantifiable cost of residents' time spent sorting their own garbage. For the many Americans who treat recycling as “an act of moral redemption . . . a rite of atonement for the sin of excess,” however, the inconvenience is not a cost but a benefit. Tierney learned the importance of that sacrament after the publication of his essay, which elicited more letters of condemnation than any other article in the newspaper's history.
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By the same token, the imperative to save the planet by reducing carbon dioxide emissions argues for reaching attainable goals and relying on available technology. Instead, environmentalists prefer to talk about transforming human civilization by relying on technology that has not yet undergone the formality of being invented or made feasible. In the
Index of Leading Environmental Indicators
,
2008
, published by the Pacific Research Institute, Steven Hayward examined one of the key transformational aspirations: America's carbon dioxide emissions in 2050 should be 80 percent lower than they had been in 1990, a goal endorsed by former vice president Al Gore and all the leading contenders for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination. What would it mean to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from 1990's 5 billion metric tons to 1 billion over a sixty-year span? Hayward calculated that if the Census Bureau's projection that the U.S. population reaches 420 million by 2050 proves correct, the 2.4 tons of CO
₂
emissions per capita required to meet the overall goal would give America per capita emissions 75 percent lower than they were in 1910, and about equal to what they were in 1875. Of course, in either 1910 or 1875 all but a handful of Americans were living below today's poverty line. Twenty-first-century nations that emit less than 2.4 tons of CO
₂
include Grenada and Botswana, both of which have per capita GDPs about one-tenth of America's.
⁵¹

In 2006, according to Hayward, the United States had CO
₂
emissions of 19.4 tons per capita, much higher than those in Europe. Some of these differences have less to do with energy efficiency than with affluence (Americans have more cars and larger homes than Europeans), climate (cooler summers in Europe lead to less air-conditioning than in America), and geography (a bigger, more sparsely populated nation consumes more energy transporting people and goods than a smaller, more densely populated one). Even prosperous countries with much lower CO
₂
emission rates than America's have ones more than twice as high as the 2050 goal of 2.4 tons per capita, however. Switzerland's rate was 6.1 tons per capita and France's was 6.6, but Switzerland generates most of its electricity from nuclear and hydroelectric power, while France derives 80 percent of its electric power from nuclear energy.

The low-hanging fruit for the reduction of carbon dioxide emissions is to replace coal with cleaner sources for generating electricity. One kilowatt hour generated by coal causes 2.1 pounds of CO
₂
emissions, while the figure for natural gas is 38 percent less, 1.3 pounds. And the development of hydrological fracturing—“fracking”—has made that substitution even more attainable, since America turns out to have enormous reserves of natural gas not recoverable before the advent of that means of extraction.

The urgency of doing something
right now
about the biggest humanitarian crisis of our time should lead environmentalists to encourage the development of nuclear power and fracking in order to decommission as many coal-fired power plants as possible, as quickly as possible. “One cannot logically claim that carbon emissions pose a catastrophic threat to human civilization and then oppose the only two technologies capable of immediately and significantly reducing them,” argue Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger of the Breakthrough Institute. Given the still more compelling force of liberal bullshit, however, unyielding opposition to these two alternatives “is precisely the position of Al Gore . . . the Sierra Club, NRDC, and the bulk of the environmental movement.”
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Environmentalists oppose nuclear power and fracking in part because they believe reliance on imperfect improvements will postpone the adoption of superior alternatives, such as wind and solar power. But if there were a linear relation between how ardently a scientific breakthrough is desired and how quickly it materializes, cancer would have been cured long ago. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, all forms of renewable energy accounted for 12.4 percent of America's electrical output in 2011. Two-thirds of that total was from “conventional hydroelectric power”—dams, that is, which environmentalists have come to revile. Wind power contributed 3 percent of the total, and solar power accounted for less than half of one percent. Coal accounted for 43 percent, natural gas for 24 percent, and nuclear energy for 20 percent.
⁵³
Because large-scale electrical storage is also among the technologies that have not yet gone through the formality of being invented, increasing reliance on variable energy sources like wind and solar necessarily means perpetuating reliance on conventional sources of energy as a minute-to-minute supplement.

To some extent, the environmentalist agenda aligns with the sociology of the gun control agenda. The difference is that while the majority of NPR listeners and donors are already in complete compliance with the most stringent gun control laws that might be enacted, they
would
be affected by enacting the entire Sierra Club agenda, albeit less profoundly than most NASCAR fans. The blue-state types who own few guns and want to restrict the red-state types who own many are also more likely to reside in cities or inner-ring suburbs than in exurbs or sparsely populated rural areas. They can, therefore, readily endorse policies that would favor public transit over private transit, and smaller multiple-family dwellings over larger, single-family ones. The red states also have, as a rule, hotter summers, so would be more affected by regulations that rendered electricity and, in particular, air-conditioning more expensive.

The knottier problem is that the NPR listeners are disposed to think as they have been encouraged to think: the sacrifices needed to arrest and reverse global warming are comparable to sorting trash for recycling, duties that leave behind the warm glow that comes from advancing a sacred cause through noble but not onerous deeds. Journalist Megan McArdle refers to “the preferred Democratic politician mode of pretending that [the actions needed to halt global warming] will be some minor adjustment.”
⁵⁴
In fact, as Michael O'Hare, a professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, argues, “Climate stabilization advocates, members of my intellectual and political tribe,” routinely delude themselves about how easily the burdens needed to reverse carbon dioxide emissions will be borne. “If I thought it would work, I might join this chorus and preach that we will all get rich making windmills, but it won't fly.” The reality, O'Hare contends, is that “climate stabilization will be very expensive.”

We will have to liquidate enormous capital investments in car-dependent suburbs and coal plants, and we will have to learn to live with less stuff of every kind, and we will deny people who never got to drive cars a future they have every right to. Then we will have to buy enormous amounts of expensive stuff like a smart electric grid and trains. Habits and aspirations that almost reach the level of identity definition will have to be abandoned, like driving wherever we want alone and parking free when we get there, and living in a big house with rooms we hardly ever sit in.
⁵⁵

The items O'Hare leaves off his list make the task of cooling the planet sound even more daunting than the ones he mentions. McArdle gives one example: divide the carbon a jet airplane emits over the course of a single round-trip commercial flight from San Francisco to New York by the number of customers on board, and each passenger ends up adding between two and three tons of carbon to the atmosphere. By contrast, the average annual carbon emission of an American passenger car is 5.1 tons. If you drove your Prius to the airport even one time during the course of the year, in other words, you would have been kinder to the planet if you had skipped the plane trip, driven away from the airport, and traded the hybrid in for a SuperPolluter SUV on your way back home.
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None of these obstacles factor in an even more daunting impediment: abating greenhouse gas emissions is the collective action problem from hell. Absent mechanisms never yet seen in human history to develop and then enforce multilateral agreements among all nations that pollute, each nation will plausibly fear that its own sacrifices will be pointless. Unlike many pollutants, whose “neighborhood effects” do indeed stay localized, a ton of greenhouse gases emitted anywhere has effects on global warming that are felt everywhere in roughly the same way. Because (a) slightly less than 5 percent of the world's people live in America; and (b) American democracy militates against policies that burden large numbers of people without providing offsetting benefits, the politics are extremely difficult. Since 95 percent of the benefits of an American program to reduce greenhouse gases are going to be enjoyed by people outside the United States, in other words, the costs of that program are going to be electorally feasible only if its benefits to America are twenty times greater than its costs. The list of options meeting that criterion is not long.
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And, to recall our friend Mpinga Bomboku, any global regime that allows poor countries to pursue economic growth by relying on cheap but carbon-intensive sources of energy is going to require even more stringent controls on energy usage by already prosperous countries. Offsetting new coal-fired power plants in the Global South, however, would require America to find policies with a benefit/cost ratio exceeding 20:1. If, as will almost certainly be the case, such a challenge proves politically impossible, the implementation of less ambitious but politically attainable policies will be a net plus for the global environment only if poor countries can be induced to stay poor longer, or get rich slower, than they would by relying on fossil fuels.

Environmentalists who disdain the trade-offs of mitigations like nuclear energy and fracking, which would buy time for the development and adoption of less problematic technologies, traffic in liberal bullshit, preferring to feel good than to do good. The hazy, hopeful agenda they endorse instead, consisting of ineffectual gestures on the one hand and political, administrative, and technological nonstarters on the other, is akin to the “politician's syllogism” popularized by the BBC program
Yes Minister
.

Major Premise
(uttered with gravity): “Something must be done.”
Minor Premise
: “This [with a wave of the hand to indicate whatever policy alternative happens to be under discussion] is [resigned shrug of the shoulders] . . . something.”
Conclusion
(again with gravity and finality): “
This
must be done.”

As with gun control advocates who want to abolish the private ownership of firearms in America, the maximal environmentalist position also has an intellectual coherence and moral integrity not discernible among the “realistic” incrementalists. Seeking, against formidable odds, a position more provocative that Susan Sontag's declaration that whites are the cancer of human history, Paul Watson, founder of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, wrote in 2007 that human beings are the “AIDS of the Earth.” That is to say, “Our viral like behaviour can be terminal both to the present biosphere and ourselves.”
⁵⁸
Fortunately, there may be human solutions for the human problem, redemptive choices we can make that will, to some extent, roll back the voracious depredations that have defined the history of our species. “We need to re-wild the planet,” Watson believes, which “will require a complete overhaul of all of humanity's economic, cultural, and life style systems.” For starters, “We need to radically and intelligently reduce human populations to fewer than one billion,” from its present level of 7.1 billion. The last time fewer than one billion people lived on earth, demographers think, was around 1800. The drastic revision of human population must be accompanied by a revolution in human consciousness. “We need to eliminate nationalism and tribalism and become Earthlings,” Watson writes. “And as Earthlings, we need to recognize that all the other species that live on this planet are also fellow citizens and also Earthlings.”
⁵⁹
This characterization of the challenge amounts to the terrestrial outer limit to the project of taking care of our own.