Conservation: One of the Best Kept Secrets of
the 21st Century
In
1992, over fifteen hundred of the world’s scientists—including more than half
of all living Nobel Prize Laureates—signed The World Scientists’ Warning to
Humanity. This document reflects growing concerns
about the state of the biosphere:
Human beings and the natural world are on a
collision course. Human activities inflict harsh and
often irreversible damage on the environment and on critical resources. If not checked, many of our current practices put at
serious risk the future that we wish for human society and the plant and animal
kingdoms, and may so alter the living world that it will be unable to sustain
life in the manner that we know. Fundamental changes
are urgent if we are to avoid the collision our present course will bring
about.
In an unusual joint statement of the same
year, the Royal Society of London and the U.S National Academy of Sciences
concurred:
The future of our planet is in the balance. Sustainable development can be achieved, but only if
irreversible degradation of the environment can be halted in time. The next 30 years may be crucial.
The facts speak for themselves. The chances of contracting cancer, emphysema, or asthma
are far higher now than they were a century ago. Human
sperm counts in many localities are worrisomely low. Many
of us suffer from premature hearing loss traceable to excessive noise. We work longer hours than our parents did and spend more
time getting to and from work. We are troubled by the
effects of such things as lead and dioxin on our children’s intelligence and
health. We think twice nowadays before plunging, on
hot summer days, into possibly contaminated rivers, lakes, or seas. We can no longer experience true wilderness. We are uneasy about poisons in our food and drinks; in our
homes and workplaces; in our air, water, and soil; in our brains and livers; in
our pets, domestic animals, lawns, and farms.
We are surrounded by signs of global
environmental decline. Worldwide, some species of
frogs, salamanders, and penguins are declining. We
have apparently learned nothing from the extinctions of the dodo and the great
auk, of the passenger pigeon and the moa. The
continued existence in the wild of the most human-like minds we know of—those
of apes and cetaceans—is in doubt. Entire fisheries
are collapsing. Every hour we add 10,000 people to our
numbers, acting as if there are no such things as carrying capacity and future
generations; as if we have learned nothing from the environmental failures of
earlier civilizations. We squander numberless
resources unnsustainably, acting as if each and every
resource is replaceable. We continue to produce
plutonium and other long-lived poisons, even though we know that nothing on
earth can be safely sequestered for millennia. We
continue to litter space. When we fight pollution, we
typically try to partially clean things up after the fact, instead of opting
for the cheaper and healthier path of prevention. More
harmful ultraviolet rays from the sun reach us nowadays, raising the specter of
skin cancer and cataract epidemics. Soil erosion,
desertification, and deforestation are proceeding apace. We
are seeing already the first signs of human-induced climate change, doing
little more than crossing our fingers and praying that dire predictions of
sizzling temperatures, floods, tropical diseases, and mass migrations will
prove wrong.
Many people suspect that the situation is
serious, but few realize just how serious it is. I
shall say nothing further about this curious gap between the near-consensus of
the independent scientific community, on one hand, and the picture that emerges
from prolonged exposure to the mass media, on the other hand.
For the moment, let us concede that environmental threats are real and
that they already exert a significant toll on the biosphere and our health, and
let us move on to the best kept secret of the twentieth century.
The secret is this: These threats can be
averted at a profit. I want to say it again. The steps needed to avert environmental decline will save
the USA alone trillions of dollars. Environmental
action, like good sleeping habits, can make a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.
It will take too long to demonstrate this
miraculous attribute of environmental action as a whole. Instead,
permit me to unearth this secret gold mine with just one environmental
peril—the greenhouse effect.
The most striking thing about the greenhouse
effect is uncertainty; we simply do not know how severe its consequences will
be. Still, most independent scientists are
apprehensive. On May 21, 1997, twenty-one leading
ecologists sent the president of the USA a letter. This
letter warned that the enhanced greenhouse effect must be slowed down, in view
of its potentially severe consequences. Moreover, and
despite pressures in the scholarly community to qualify and hedge one’s
beliefs, some observers take a cataclysmic outcome seriously.
Here are just two disturbing quotes: "The continued habitability of
the earth is clearly in question." "Is it
possible that we will someday destroy Earth’s good health and turn our home
into a runaway greenhouse? Will the human volcano heat
Planet Earth until all the seas go dry and lead melts in the sunlight? Are we already on the downhill path to Venus? . . . judging by our neighboring world, we are playing
with fire." We may note in passing that
everything pales into insignificance compared to this (admittedly unlikely)
apocalypse.
The powerful coal, oil, and car industries,
some economists, countries like Australia and Kuwait, America’s two most recent
Republican presidents, and countless congressmen avow that cutting greenhouse
gases may cost trillions of dollars and millions of jobs. This
is an untruth. In a moment of candor, in 1992,
Newsweek explained the suspect origins of the Amazing Bush Doctrine:
During the early Bush Administration,
estimates batted around for greenhouse reductions ran from $100 billion to a
mind-bending $3.6 trillion. Such calculations
contained an astonishing omission. The way to control
carbon emissions is to make energy use more efficient. The
big numbers took into account the capital costs of new conservation technology,
but not the value of the fuel saved.
The importance of this question of costs can
hardly be exaggerated. If Newsweek is right, if it can be shown that cutting greenhouse emissions will save
money, then the greenhouse controversy vanishes into thin air, for how can one
oppose steps that would ward off the greenhouse threat and save money?
And, indeed, on September 25, 1997 the U.S.
Department of Energy, in a voluminous report involving numerous reputable
experts, agencies, and organizations, said in effect that America can become
richer by reducing greenhouse emissions. Like earlier
claims, this report was virtually ignored by the world’s mass and scholarly
media. Consequently, only few people know that
greenhouse actions can simultaneously protect their health and pocketbooks.
The history of energy conservation provides
yet another proof that rich peoples can cut greenhouse gas emissions while
running all the way to the bank. This historical
lesson appears in any would-be holistic discussion of greenhouse policies, and
in many introductory college textbooks. The U.S.
Department of Energy study put this indisputable historical fact thus:
"Between 1973 and 1986, the nation’s consumption of primary energy froze .
. . while the GNP grew by 35% . . . the country is saving $150 to $200 billion
annually as a result of these improvements." (italics added).
Thus, the view that curbing greenhouse gases
will save consumers money is not only backed up by commonsense, not only by the
views of the most respected scientific bodies of the United States of America,
not only by the views of most independent energy experts, not only by the
experiences of more energy-efficient nations, but by history.
This is a fact: Each American household this year will save well over
$1,000 thanks to VAST gains in energy efficiency. At
the very least, those who claim that averting the greenhouse threat will now
cost the average U.S. household $1,000 a year, or that it will cost that nation
one red cent, need to show how and why the historical process of saving money
through greater energy efficiencies would somehow, and quite miraculously, make
an about-turn and start costing money.
But what does the U.S. Department of Energy
have in mind when it says that greenhouse actions save money?
This claim can be brought home through one case study.
Next time you find yourself in a hardware store, look around for compact
fluorescent light bulbs. The label on the one I have
just bought for $11 tells me, correctly, that despite the stiff price, over
this bulb’s lifetime, and owing to its greater efficiency and longevity, I
shall save $39 (if I buy this bulb instead of the standard bulb still widely in
use now). My human ecology text says: "Replacing
a standard incandescent bulb with an energy-efficient compact fluorescent saves
about $48-70 per bulb over its 10-year life and saves enough electricity to
avoid burning 180 kilograms (400 pounds) of coal. Thus,
replacing 25 incandescent bulbs in a house with energy-efficient fluorescent
bulbs saves $1,250-1,750." Energy efficiency
lighting could likewise save U.S. businesses some $18 billion a year and could
make an appreciable impact (through reduced emissions of CO2) on the greenhouse
effect.
Let me note here that the point is neither
incandescence nor fluorescence, neither heat nor light. One
could carry out virtually the same analysis for home insulation, or miles per
gallon, or cogeneration, or electric motors—in each case showing that the
majority of energy experts are right, and that the greenhouse problem can be solved at a stupendous profit!
Some people will dismiss my choice of the
best kept secret, asking: Didn’t the media of many countries cover up Nazi,
Chinese, and Soviet atrocities? How many among us know
the realities of income distribution in the world? Had
not the U.S. and U.K. kept their publics (but not Stalin) in the dark about the
Manhattan Project? Didn’t the KGB and CIA together
obfuscate the permanent loss to radioactivity of hundreds of square miles in
the Urals? Haven’t the media hushed up for decades
American culpability in the incarceration of Mandela, assassination attempts of
Castro, murder of democratically elected Allende, or the setting up of the
Somoza, Pahlavi, and Marcos dictatorships? Once it is
conceded, however, that secrets are known by their
fruits (and not by their immorality or repugnance), one contender for the title
of the best kept secret of the twentieth century surely emerges: We can heal
the biosphere and ourselves at a profit.