Choke, Cough, Sneeze, Wheeze, and Criticize

05/27/2008

Paul Munnis


As we might suspect there are a lot of politics being played over the subject of global warming and climate change.

Consider just this one vignette. In the U.S. Senate a Right Wing GOP Conservative group called “The Club for Growth” wants to scuttle a bill by Sens. Joe Lieberman, an independent from Connecticut, and John Warner, R-Va., that the Senate is scheduled to begin debating next month. They have launched an ad campaign designed to block the Bill but despite the GOP ad campaign, the bill seems to lack the votes needed to overcome a filibuster.

With $250,000 in radio and television spots, the Club for Growth is targeting Republican Sens. Elizabeth Dole of North Carolina and Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, and Democratic Sens. Robert Byrd and Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia and Max Baucus and Jon Tester of Montana. Dole, a co-sponsor of the bill, as well as Alexander, Baucus and Rockefeller face re-election this year.

In other words this is a GOP battle among GOP candidates up for re-election. It is doing nothing to combat global warming not to help our climate. It is a waste of Senate time when we have real issues of global warming to deal with.

Meanwhile meetings are going on in Asia dealing with global warming and the activities and press releases coming out of there are real busy bashing Bush for his failure to involve the U.S. in the Kyoto Protocol designed to fight global warming.

Now we bash Bush too, yet when we look at the realities of the U.S. and its carbon footprint on the ground it is marked by three significant events:

a) the U.S. has been closing smokestack industries all over the nation for the last twenty years and those that remain are going over to the use of natural gas and clean low sulfur coal.

b) We are converting from big cars and trucks to smaller more fuel efficient vehicles and the by-product is expected to be a major reduction in carbon dioxide emission from American transportation sources.

c) We are rapidly bringing online alternative energy solutions using renewable energy that have low to no carbon footprint. The cost of energy is providing Americans with all of the motivation that we need to clean up our act.

While Bush has refused to quantify the U.S. participation and put it on a binding timeline, something that seems politically dumb of Bush, the truth is that America has an ambitious program going to combat global warming. It isn’t being lead by Bush or his Administration though. Nevertheless a new Democratic Congress has been working on things since 2006 when the Congress changed hands and Democrats are setting ambitious goals and so are most of our 50 state governments. Consider our own State of Minnesota that has set goals for the rate of incorporating alternative energy into our mix. It is a Democrat, Al Gore, who is leading the parade as head cheerleader for American involvement too.

Those in Asia seeking to put a thumb in America’s eye on this subject need to look to their own backyards at what is being done for the Kyoto protocol is way too little and ambitious efforts are urgently needed abroad.

Consider the growth of China, a nation on a roll to industrialize. Look for a moment at what China has and plans to contribute to the carbon footprint that impacts global warming and then tell me whether the U.S. is the bad guy in the equation.

According to environmental monitoring group, the Worldwatch Institute, China now boasts 16 of the world's 20 most polluted cities.

As much as 70 percent of the country's water is suffering from pollution, with an estimated 300 million people drinking contaminated water on a daily basis, and 190 million people drinking water that is so contaminated that it affects their health.

Crop returns are decreasing both in terms of quality and quantity as a result of polluted land; while approximately 400,000 people in China die annually from respiratory infections directly attributable to air pollution.

"The sheer scale of the economic activity in China means that pollution is as probably bad as it has ever been anywhere in the world, ever," says Lester Brown, head of Washington-based Earth Policy Institute.

"Such is the pollution haze in many of the cities in China that you can't even see the sun.

"A lot of the rivers are so dirty their water can't now be used for irrigation, while some of the soil is so badly contaminated with cadmium and mercury that there is a question as to whether food grown in those soils is safe to eat."

Nor is the cost just human and environmental.

Ironically given that it is China's bullish economic growth that is fueling such high levels of pollution, that same pollution is proving increasingly detrimental to the country's economic well being, with the China's economy losing an estimated $200 billion annually due to the effects of pollution and global warming, almost 10 percent of its GDP.

My point in this is that America is reducing its carbon footprint while China is growing their carbon footprint even with the Kyoto protocol commitments. The propagandists need to point their arrows at the right target. What is being said about China will become obvious to all as the Olympic Games commence and commentators look to background news items. China is surging way ahead of the U.S. in terms of world pollution.

The world desperately needs the U.S. to accelerate its efforts at developing alternative energy and implementing it, not so much for us to reduce our carbon footprint, that is going to happen anyway, but so that we can export the technology to places like China, India and much of Europe and thus save our planet.

If you watch the flow of technology it goes like this: America discovers, innovates, engineers, and proves a technology through applied prototyping. Nations like Japan, China, and India benefit from the invention with jobs to support their starving teeming masses by manufacturing and exporting the products. They manufacture the products and import them to world markets where they are then consumed. This is globalization and our carbon footprint is not going to improve by America going back into manufacturing -- it is going to improve by America inventing clean alternative energy that can be spread rapidly throughout the world and we are in a race that the Bush Administration has been dragging its feet over.

To those who say that America does not benefit in world wealth from our invention because all of the jobs are going abroad then I encourage them to look at who owns the patent portfolio. America is earning wealth with every single unit sold and is doing so with a small carbon footprint coming from us. We are acting as the brains, China and India are acting as the hands, and both of our feet are mired in pollution.

Don’t bash America over our contribution to reducing global warming, instead encourage us in alternative energy development, and then all of us can reap the benefits of clean air, potable water, and good jobs. America is highly motivated to develop alternative energy for we are downwind of the polluters and we are thus invested in reducing pollution in nations like China for our own benefit here in the U.S.