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Being Green In 2001 - environmental policy and practices

Whole Earth, Summer, 2001 by Jon Lebkowsky

HISTORY

In the sixties and early seventies, my own g-g-generation discovered "the environment." We added it to our charm bracelet of concerns, which included world hunger, the Vietnam War, gender and racial inequality, haircuts, junk food, television, processed food, nuclear energy, Republicans and Democrats. We had definite intentions to do something dramatic about all this stuff, but most of us were distracted along the way by kids, car payments, mortgages, alcohol and narcotics, Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous, trips to the mall and our fitness programs. We became young urban professionals defined by consumption patterns and significant debt loads.

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So we forgot, those grand-scale crises, though we kept recycling; signed petitions to save greenbelts, humpback whales, and Black-capped Vireos; bought Sierra Club calendars; and drove the smaller, more energy-efficient SUVs and pickup trucks. We enjoyed the great outdoors, wore rugged clothes, and separated newspapers and bottles from the rest of our trash. We did a rather conspicuous bit to control population (saving many child-care bucks along the way). We took our 2.1 kids to Earth Day celebrations.

But we were also human, fallible, forgetful, cheerfully greedy. We heard that there was a hole in the ozone, but we stopped using chlorofluorocarbons, so that became okay. To do our part, we were thumb-pumping our spray. We didn't think to knuckle down and really check whether that ozone had actually healed. What does an ozone layer do, anyway? Our kids probably knew that.

Our jobs and our lives kept us busy. Time passed.

Scientists were still paying attention. They had been measuring atmospheric [CO.sub.2] at Hawaii's Mauna Loa observatory, and by 1983 they were seriously worried about Greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. These gases are the stuff of life; they are essential to the biosphere because they trap and hold heat from the sun's radiation. However, massively increased volumes of them were causing a warming trend over the Earth's surface.

Soon, the Environmental Protection Agency was soberly reporting, in stiff bureaucratese, that "agricultural conditions will be significantly altered, environmental and economic systems potentially disrupted, and political institutions stressed."

In 1988 the United Nations established the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), comprising the world's leading climate scientists. They organized the Rio Earth Summit of 1999, which acknowledged a pressing need to cut Greenhouse gas emissions--specifically, human gas emissions, primarily from our factory emissions and our car exhausts. In 1997, the Kyoto Protocol was established. Its purpose was to get industrialized nations to commit to curb their spew.

1998 was the hottest year on record, and a megastrength El Nino caused massive storms in some areas, severe drought in others. So much for hand-waving theory and early precursors. Now it was real.

WARMING

I live in Boulder, Colorado, where climate and environmental studies are on the city's doorstep. The National Center for Atmospheric Research and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration both have big facilities in Boulder, and the University of Colorado has one of the best environmental studies programs in the US.

I dropped in on Dr. James White, director of the environmental studies program. He said that the global climate is definitely changing, and there's no doubt that human activity is a significant driver. "If you look at the simple physics around how Greenhouse gases work, if you look at the fact that Greenhouse gases are on the increase, we know we're having an impact on climate," he says. Now the debate is about how that impact is expressed. It might be generalized heat. It might be megastorms. It might be overall climatic instability of some kind we've never seen before.

Can't we have more certainty out of our weather science? Not according to Dr. White. "My own research tells me that climate change is not this give-and-take, push-and-shove kind of linear system, where if we increase [CO.sub.2] by X, we get X climate change; if we increase it by 2X, we get 2X climate change. That is really what the models give us as feedback, because the models don't have mode changes. If North Atlantic deep water fails, a sophisticated model can handle that. But if you look at the way climate has changed historically, going back over the history of the Earth, it's not a little bit here, a little bit there.

"It's more like my little brother, when we were kids. I would pester him, and he didn't respond, and I would pester him more, and he would blow up, and yell and scream at me. When Mom asked me what I did, I said `All I did was poke him once, Mom.' But there was all that energy I built up in my little brother with all those other tormenting little pokes. And it's that kind of nonlinear behavior that makes waiting for the shoe to drop a rather dangerous activity."

Despite the current global warming trend, the southeast US has been actually cooling lately. Temperature trends throughout the US are relatively flat compared to the rest of the world. Though we know climate is changing, we don't know the long-term implications. Lacking clarity about direct, polarizing impacts right in someone's back yard, it's simplest to do nothing.

Health Care Industry

Being Green In 2001 - environmental policy and practices

Whole Earth, Summer, 2001 by Jon Lebkowsky

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