In Brief: Public interest in the environment has increased in the past few months -- how can we encourage discussion on green issues, and not let it lapse into just another fad?

05/11/07

I have been involved in the conservation movement for more than a quarter century and I can say without exaggeration that interest in environmental matters has never been higher than it is right now. All manner of companies are touting their organic, recycled, post-consumer, earth-friendly, carbon-neutral products. Newspapers are publishing supplements about how to live greener. The majority in Congress is holding hearings and pledging new legislation to combat global warming and other ills. (The minority still has a few holdouts who insist that humans' contribution to climate change is insignificant, but they have few adherents and no real scientific support.) The intellectual argument for environmental protection, in other words, has been won.

That's all to the good, and all of us who work on these issues deserve to feel happy about it. But I would add a word or two of caution.

For one thing, we still have the Bush administration to contend with. As you recall, on April 2nd the Supreme Court scolded the Environmental Protection Agency for its position that carbon dioxide and other vehicular emissions are not pollutants as defined by the Clean Air Act and therefore the agency wasn't responsible for regulating them. The court said in fact the emissions are pollutants and, if the agency determines that they're harming Americans, they must be regulated. The science is quite clear that harm is indeed occurring.

When President Bush signs a bill he doesn't altogether agree with, his habit has been to submit as well a "signing statement," which says, in essence, "I'm signing this bill but I don't intend to obey or enforce it." Previous presidents have done this on rare occasions; with this president, it's routine.

The administrator of the EPA, Stephen Johnson, has taken a similar tack, telling a Senate committee in mid-April that he doesn't think the Supreme Court really meant to encourage him to start regulating greenhouse gas emissions from vehicles, though it's pretty clear that's precisely what the court said.

Johnson told the Senate Environment Committee that the court's ruling left him considerable latitude to decide whether to regulate the emissions or not and that he's in no hurry to make up his mind. This elicited an angry response from Senator Boxer (D-CA), who was neither amused nor impressed with the administrator's testimony. This one may well take more litigation before it's over.

Apart from coping with this stubborn administration, we need somehow to ensure that solutions adopted and enacted are the right ones -- and that other environmental problems are not ignored. I speak here of the loss of plant and animal species and habitat and the contamination of air and water by pollutants other than carbon, among many challenges. All these matters overlap one another, but we mustn't be so blinded by the daunting prospect of a changing climate to let other problems fester. And, we must somehow ensure that this incredible surge in interest in environmental matters does not wane.

The good news is that there are ways in which the economy can be changed that will eventually get the climate back in good shape and at the same time bring prosperity and increased equity to the society. I commend to your attention two books and an effort that deserves more recognition than it currently enjoys: Plan B 2.0 by Lester Brown, Deep Economy by Bill McKibben, and The Apollo Alliance, a coalition supporting "clean energy and good jobs."

Vawter "Buck" Parker, Executive Director
buckparker@earthjustice.org