Energy and the Environment

America will be stronger if it develops coherent technology and market-oriented solutions to environmental conservation and energy consumption. Consider how much better we can do in each field.

It is possible to have a healthy environment and a healthy economy. It is possible to build incentives for a cleaner future. It is possible to have biodiversity and wealthy human beings on the same planet. And it is possible to have free markets, scientific and technological advances, and an even more positive environmental outcome. There is every reason to be optimistic that if we develop smart environmental and biodiversity policies our children and grandchildren will experience an even more pleasant world.

It is clearly possible to combine human progress with biodiversity. There are more trees in Georgia today than there were in 1900 or 1940. The very increase in wealth in America made it possible in 1895 to found the New York Zoological Society (now the Wildlife Conservation Society) and save the American bison from extinction. The application of new technology and new science has cleaned up the air of most American cities (it is far cleaner now than it was twenty years ago even though people are driving more cars more miles).

The greatest dangers to biodiversity on the planet today are poor people cutting down tropical forests for money and killing endangered species for meat. Wealthy people can afford to protect the forests and protect endangered species.

The greatest areas of pollution and toxic wastes on the planet today are the byproducts of the Soviet Empire and a centralized command bureaucracy that was willing to kill the environment to reach production quotas.

Here are a few examples of the kind of science-based, technologically-oriented environmentalism that could improve our quality of life, increase our options, and enhance the natural world.

We have made significant progress in cleaning up places like San Francisco Bay and the Chesapeake but there is much more to be done. Some of it can be accomplished by government’s tapping innovative private clean-up companies.

We must insist that cities meet their obligations in waste cleanup. Atlanta has been a far larger polluter of the Chattahoochee than any private business, yet the federal government has maintained a double standard between what cities and industries are allowed or required to do. Government should be as responsible for running its waste treatment centers professionally and competently as the private sector. The rivers will be cleaner as a result.

We should encourage the kind of public-private partnerships that have enabled the Trust for Public Land, the state of Georgia, the Robert W. Woodruff Foundation, and the federal government to create environmentally sound land use along the Chattahoochee. It is important for cities, counties, and states to buy parkland when it is cheap and easily available and before population growth overwhelms open space.

The world biodiversity hot spots have been identified. These are places where biologists and botanists have discovered unusually rich concentrations of animals and plants. If the United States challenged Europe and Japan to join it in financing a world biodiversity refuge system and tied foreign aid into the process of maintaining biodiversity, we could probably save a very high percentage of the earth’s biological richness for our children and grandchildren to enjoy, study, and learn from at a surprisingly small cost (trivial compared to what the Left would spend through the Kyoto Treaty).

Kyoto is a bad treaty. It is bad for the environment and it is bad for America. It sets standards that will require massive investments by the United States but virtually no investments by other countries. The Senate was right when it voted unanimously against the treaty. We should insist on revisiting the entire Kyoto process and resolutely reject efforts to force us into an anti-American, environmentally failed treaty.

The United States should support substantial research into climate science, managing the response to climate change, and in developing new non-carbon energy systems. It is astounding to watch people blithely propose trillions of dollars in spending on a topic on which we have failed to spend modest amounts to better understand. To its credit the Bush administration has begun to increase funding on climate research but much more needs to be done. Furthermore, it is astounding to have people focus myopically on carbon as the sole source of climate change. The world’s climate has changed in the past with sudden speed and dramatic impact. Global warming may happen. On the other hand it is possible Europe will experience another ice age. The Norwegian politicians who worry much about global warming (the politically correct thing to do even in a cold country that would demonstrably benefit from a warmer climate) may suddenly find themselves migrating south if a new interim ice age were to happen. This point is politically incorrect but the history and science of climate change is far more complex and uncertain than the politically driven mass hysteria of scientists who sign on to ads about a topic for which they have no scientific proof.

The federal government should establish measurable standards for a healthy environment but allow widespread experimentation in achieving those goals. Too much of the conflict between landowners and federal employees and between cities and states and the federal government are a function of a heavy handed bureaucracy. The lengthy process of environmental planning is made adversarial and expensive beyond reason and should be redesigned to have a collaborative style with the goal of having both development and a healthy environment.

Brownfields (abandoned former industrial sites often with toxic and other wastes that need to be cleaned up) need a new federal law to encourage cities to get them cleaned up. The current system favors litigation over cleanup and has kept thousands of sites in our cities from being cleaned up. The trial lawyers have been winning but the people of the cities have been losing. We need litigation reform and financial encouragement for citizens to clean up the sites. This will help create economic opportunity in our cities, and replace blighted, abandoned areas with new development opportunities.

The Bush initiative on healthy forest management is an important step in the right direction. Forests in particular and national lands in general should be run on sound science and conservation principles rather than on emotional rhetoric designed for political effect. The refusal to manage the forests intelligently led to huge beetle infestations in the southwest that produced sicker and poorer forests. The refusal to clear out dead timber across the west led to fires that were hotter, more intense, and therefore more destructive. The left wing of the environmental movement represents a repudiation of eighty years of sound conservation practice that stemmed from the principles laid down by Theodore Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot. The new healthy forest policies are sound steps in the right direction and should be expanded.

These are just a few examples of how a positive, activist, problem-solving environmentalism could give our children and grandchildren a better world. That goal will be even more rapidly achieved if we make dramatic progress on the energy front.

Energy

A sound American energy policy would focus on four areas: basic research to create a new energy system that has few environmental side effects, incentives for conservation, more renewable resources, and environmentally sound development of fossil fuels. To its credit, the Bush administration has approached energy environmentalism the right way, including using public-private partnerships that balance economic costs and environmental gain.

The Bush administration’s investment in developing hydrogen energy resources may be the biggest breakthrough of the next half-century. Hydrogen has the potential to provide energy that has no environmental downside. In one stroke a hydrogen economy would eliminate both air pollution and global warming concerns. Since hydrogen is abundant in the air and water around us, it eliminates both the national security and foreign exchange problems associated with petroleum. Suddenly oil would become a source of petrochemicals and cease to be a source of energy. The relative requirements for oil would shift to making plastics and away from providing fuel. The result would be a lot less reliance on the Middle East and a lot less concern over balance of payments.

A hydrogen economy is probably twenty years away but there seems to be no scientific reason the hydrogen engine cannot be mass-¬produced. General Motors and virtually every other major automobile manufacturer have major programs underway to develop hydrogen energy designs and production. The potential is real that many of the pollution problems of our lifetime will begin to disappear after 2020 or 2025.

Conservation is the second great opportunity in energy. Already the United States has adjusted to earlier oil price increases by becoming a dramatically more efficient user of energy. But companies like Honeywell and Johnson Controls believe we could achieve 30 to 60 percent improvements in energy conservation if our tax policy better encouraged it and if we set the standard by optimizing energy use in government buildings. A tax credit to subsidize energy efficient cars (including a tax credit for turning in old and heavily polluting cars) is another idea we should support.

Renewable resources are gradually evolving to meet their potential: from wind generator farms to solar power to biomass conversion. Continued tax credits and other advantages for renewable resources are a must.

Finally, it is time for an honest debate about drilling and producing in places like Alaska, our national forests, and off the coast of scenic areas. The Left uses scare tactics from a different era to block environmentally sound production of raw materials. Three standards should break through this deadlock. First, scientists of impeccable background should help set the standards for sustaining the environment in sensitive areas, and any company entering the areas should be bonded to meet those standards. Second, the public should be informed about new methods of production that can meet the environmental standards, and any development should be only with those new methods. Third, a percentage of the revenues from resources generated in environmentally sensitive areas should be dedicated to environmental activities including biodiversity sustainment, land acquisition, and environmental cleanups in places where there are no private resources that can be used to clean up past problems.

With these kinds of investments we can have an energy strategy that meets our economic and environmental needs, and a generation from now we can be a healthier and wealthier country that is less reliant on foreign sources of energy.