Now What?

By Harry T. Cook

Except for those who believe global warming to be a hoax perpetrated by tree-huggers, there is not a lot of debate about the need to reduce carbon emissions by 80 percent in the next 40 or so years.

The debate is over how to do it and how to absorb the cost involved. An annual report known as the "Index of Leading Environmental Indicators" compiled by Steven Hayward, an American Enterprise Institute fellow, is a help in comprehending the enormity of the task. The first thing we learn is that the desired mark of emissions for 2050 needs to be at the 1910 level, when the U.S. population was approximately 92 million at a time when automobiles with internal combustion engines were a relative rarity.

In 2050, the U.S. population is estimated to be at about 415 million. If you think highways and byways are clogged with cars today, stick around another half-century. What Hayward's analysis clearly shows is that if we do not wish to parboil the planet in our effluent, the growing population would have to do without all its microwaves, computers, televisions, refrigerators, furnaces and air conditioners OR create a demand for energy derived from other than fossil fuels while radically reducing the use of same.

Retail gasoline prices in the U.S., while closer to unsubsidized reality, are beginning seriously to outpace the spendable income of the economically average American. Yet drive we do, and auto exhaust is our national cologne. Added to that is the burning off of the Amazon rain forest and a resurgent China's billowing smokestacks, both of which pump huge amounts of greenhouse gases into the planet's atmosphere. Hayward, speaking only to the issue of automobile transportation, points out that if every motorist in 2050 drove the equivalent of a 2008 Toyota Prius, we would still surpass the allowable amount of emissions to get us to the desired 2050 levels.

So, Houston, we do indeed have a problem. What do we do now? Look to our presidential candidates? Not when two of them wanted to suspend the 18 percent-plus gas tax for the summer. That would do no good even in the short term. It would be the silly equivalent of the tax rebates now being drooled over by cash-starved Americans.

That funny looking, mutant light bulb about which everyone is talking is also not the answer, though it is a small part of a much bigger answer. And I guess the bigger answer is that our material binge is over. It's morning in America, all right, but not the way that Ronald Reagan meant it. It's the morning after the night before, and if we have any intention of leaving this planet in decent shape for our progeny and their progeny, new habits will have to prevail. We need to enter a kind of 12-step program to help us recover from conspicuous consumerism. We can and probably should start with the consumption of gasoline. I am just old enough to remember gasoline rationing during World War II. Even though the economy had been revived from its near-death state during the Depression and people had money to spend, they could not spend much of it at the filling station pump because gasoline was a rationed substance.

The culture did not collapse. Public transportation systems flourished. People got to work. Got to church and temple. Got to the grocery store. Got pretty much where they needed to go. A recent news story about the uptick in the use of mass transit systems in cities around the country was heartening in its own way, even though it had to do with $4-a-gallon gasoline. My hometown of Detroit, once but no longer accurately known as The Motor City, does not like this kind of talk, because it's the internal combustion engine-powered cars that help make the difference in our local economy. Yet maybe the yell "Get a horse!" addressed to the first Henry Ford, as he putt-putted his maiden way down the streets of old Detroit a century and more ago, was an unintended vox clamantis in deserto.

Yes, I know this all sounds somewhat apocalyptic and would be dismissed by many as warmed over Al Gore. But if a guy named Ralph Schmedlap had written Earth In The Balance, its message might have gotten through.

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© Copyright 2008, Harry T. Cook. All rights reserved. This article may not be used or reproduced without proper credit.