The Environment - Fighting the Faith - Column - Short Story

President Bush is learning how dangerous it is to let faith-based organizations and ideas get too close to government. Not churches trying to help drug addicts, but environmentalists.

The blizzard of midnight regulations that Bill Clinton signed at the end of his presidency included a new EPA standard on arsenic in water, knocking the accepted level down from 50 parts per billion to 10, in order to avoid risks of cancer. This was done even though no studies have suggested cancer effects at the old level, and despite the fact that the costs of compliance could raise rates in small towns where fewer consumers would bear the increase, or could even force utilities to cut off service. Bush wanted a harder look at the problem. He got rewarded by bad headlines, jokes about drinking poison, and antsy Republican moderates.

Bush is preparing to back down on another issue-drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) on the north coast of Alaska. As the Washington Post editorialized in 1987, ANWR "is one of the bleakest, most remote places on this continent, and there is hardly any other where drilling would have less impact on the surrounding life . . ." Fourteen years later, right-thinking folk have decided that the frozen caribou commuting corridor is a "unique, wild, and biologically vital ecosystem" (the Post today), and Bush's campaign proposals to allow drilling there were greeted as Earth-rape. Bush has decided to look elsewhere for natural gas.

The president did take a tough shot, however, at the Kyoto protocol on carbon-dioxide emissions. Kyoto would have given the United States and Europe until 2010 to reduce these emissions from 1990 levels by 7 and 8 percent respectively. The advanced world would suffer a 2 to 4 percent shrinkage of GDP if it implemented the Kyoto cutbacks (the Third World was given a free pass). No politician could face slamming on the brakes that hard, and in fact European nations have not put in place the legislation necessary to lower their levels. Bush acknowledged the fact, declaring that "we will not do anything that harms our economy." For his blunt honesty, he was showered by abuse from hypocritical Europeans.

That reaction will seem like a serenade if Bush follows through on an energy strategy being developed by an inter-agency task force led by Vice President Cheney. The Cheney group has concluded that natural gas cannot make up all of America's energy needs, and that some of America's new power plants should be nuclear. Nuclear power is clean and safe; France has relied heavily on it for decades without ill effects. But it has been a dead letter in this country since the Three Mile Island mishap, which the press treated grotesquely with stories of glowing fish and atomic clouds converging on New York City.

Radical environmentalism is a religion. Its version of original sin is human existence itself, which disturbs the balance of nature. Any specific instance of pollution, or supposed pollution, activates the crushing sense of guilt that devotees labor under. Only a handful practice the faith in its purest form. But even the mild, establishmentarian version to which politicians pay lip service-the equivalent of church attendance as a social function-limits options and leads to crises. California's rolling blackouts have been caused, in part, by a failure to add generating capacity.

The special case of California-which will seem less special, as spring passes into summer, and other parts of the country experience their own shortages-has, to be sure, been exacerbated by another religion: populist opposition to rate increases. Gov. Gray Davis fought against raising rates even as his cities went dark, and criticized his own Public Utilities Commission in March when it proposed to raise them. A week later, he reversed himself, signing on to rate increases as high as 34 percent for large consumers. The governor belatedly discovered that the market is an engine of conservation. The pixilated California GOP was no smarter, having opposed rate increases itself.

George W. Bush showed impressive toughness in junking Kyoto. It may be a defining symbol, as abandoning the Law of the Sea Treaty was for Ronald Reagan. But fighting the religion of the environment will call for more than economic arguments, however stubbornly made. A pernicious philosophy has to be understood philosophically. There is a case for conservation, based on aesthetics, market economics, and Biblical stewardship. Making it will mean countering irrational convictions, not just end-running them.

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COPYRIGHT 2001 Gale Group