Getting it Wrong: How Our Politicians Could Spoil Our World

One of the more difficult areas of our national environmental discussion is that of government. As we try to attack our own environmental excesses and control the companies involved in the worst breaches of our new protocols, naturally we turn to our elected leaders to make sensible laws and enforce the laws that are already on the books. This is a period of flux for our country as we look at the effects we have had on the world around us and decide whether we need to make changes, and where these changes need to be made. But who makes these decisions? The Congress makes the laws, but what criteria are they basing these laws on - and are they the right people, as individuals, to be making the laws at all? Are we picking the right candidates for our Congress and Presidency? How do we know?

The pressing need for sustainable consumption of resources, and the need for changes in markets and business practices that must go along with this, is driving us into precipitous action when it comes to electing our legislators. Those of us who don't really want to be bothered with politics elect our officials based on sound bites, because it's easy to do; we hear something out of an aspiring politician's mouth that pleases our sense of outrage or promises positive change, and we react accordingly. The most skilled of our politicians, of course, learn how to use these sound bites to compete in elections by manipulating us.

We don't elect these people because we expect to hear a few platitudes and forget about the problem; we elect them because they presumably have the power to take care of problems we care about, but can't touch. But are they doing their job? According to Michael Spector in his article "Big Foot," the acid rain epidemic of the 1970's was permitted to continue by lack of regulation of the sulfur dioxide level in emissions produced by coal-burning plants. Spector says an effective law to control acid-rain-producing emissions was finally passed in 1990, which led to smokestacks being fitted with measuring devices to help control sulfur dioxide. This took more than ten years to accomplish, which brings me to one of the issues confronting us as we look at who we elect to office.

When scientists examined the causes of acid rain, it became clear to those working on this problem that this was a human-caused disaster. Even with this clarity, however, there was no consensus on how to address the problem: whether the health of the markets or the health of the world should come first. Now that we are giving more moral priority to our environment, we have begun to elect more environmentally-conscious public officials. But how much is too much, and how far isn't far enough? When is the truth simply twisted to meet the political need of the moment? What grade do many of our officials get when we look at the truth of their public statements? PolitiFact.com, a site associated with the St. Petersburg Times, has what they call a "truth-o-meter" for the purpose of examining the claims made by a list of major politicians, including Sarah Palin, Nancy Pelosi, Lamar Alexander, and John Kerry, among others. John Kerry, in a Huffington Post op-ed piece in 2009 (quoted on PolitiFact), says climate change "is not an abstract concern for the future. It is already upon us and its effects are being felt worldwide, right now. Scientists project that the Arctic will be ice-free in the summer of 2013. Not in 2050, but four years from now. Make no mistake: catastrophic climate change represents a threat to human security, global stability, and - yes - even American national security."

Is this a true claim? PolitiFact's truth-o-meter gives it the rating of "barely true." In giving this statement the qualifier "scientists project...," Kerry keeps this statement just within the boundaries of truth. He leaves out the fact that this is a single projection by a single group of scientists, mostly based on the work of Wieslaw Maslowski, whose projections were made in 2007 (Richert). According to PolitiFact, NASA climate researcher Gavin Schmidt states that the opinion of the scientific community is more focused toward a date range of 2040-2060 when discussing Arctic ice melt rates. If this is true, why would Mr. Kerry choose the uncorroborated opinion of a single group of scientists on which to base his claims? Should he not take the more measured view, if he is supposed to be representing the interests of his entire constituency?

One answer to that question might be, "Kerry is just trying to jump-start our reaction to climate issues." However, it's as damaging to the climate discussion to hype the danger of our situation as it is to play it down. Artificially inflating the severity of a problem may lead to draconian actions that not only damage the economic workings of our society, they don't address the real issue because they are aimed at a different target than they should be.

One glaring example of this is the debate over the use of ethanol to replace gasoline in our cars. H. Joseph Hebert, writing for the Associated Press, quotes the Energy Department as saying that it has set a goal for the year 2030 that 30% of the fuel used by U.S. Motorists must be ethanol, either cellulosic or corn-based. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the law requires the use of renewable motor fuels to be increased from the 2004 level of 4 billion gallons to a level of 7.5 billion gallons in 2012, after which the rate expands at a rate equivalent to the growth of the gasoline pool (Gross). Hebert cites two researchers from Polytechnic University in New York as stating that use of these fuels at such levels could have a "devastating" impact on agriculture. "Ethanol from 300 million acres of switchgrass still could not supply our present gasoline and diesel consumption, which is projected to double by 2025," Hebert quotes James Jordan and James Powell as saying. They state the concern that the acreage required to produce the biomass for these mandated levels of ethanol will impact the amount of land available to grow food crops. Indeed, Hebert notes that nearly all the ethanol we use today is made from corn, despite Jordan and Powell's reference to switchgrass.

Other drawbacks include "markedly greater" runoff of fertilizers into waterways, polluting rivers and eventually wetlands, and the documented fact that ethanol produces more smog-causing pollutants than gasoline does on a unit-for-unit basis (Hebert). Also, corn-based ethanol produces only 25% more energy than is consumed in the process of growing it. Add to this the fact that according to a study by Jason Hill of the University of Minnesota, if every acre of corn we use today were used for ethanol, it would only replace 12.3% of our present gasoline usage (Hebert), and one comes out with the distinct impression that the ethanol bandwagon clattered on a bit too far ahead of the science our politicians cited as they rode it to re-election.

What could have prevented this? Time and study. Neither of these benefit the careers of our politicians as they seek office. They leapfrog over our heads in the race to win elections, using emotion-driven crisis politics, framing everything as an emergency, promising to fix the problems within their terms in office using nothing more than The Law. It is absolutely necessary to our own health, the economic health of our nation, and the environmental health of the small piece of the Earth under our control that we think more carefully than this, and elect politicians who will do the same, no matter how badly they may want to keep their jobs.

Sources

Gross, Peter. "Federal and State Ethanol and Biodiesel Requirements." U.S. Energy Information Administration. Legislation and Regulations, AEO2007. n.d. Web. Mar 9 2010.

Hebert, H. Joseph. "Study: Ethanol won't solve energy problems." USA Today.com. July 10, 2006. Web. Mar 9, 2010.

Richert, Catherine. "Kerry claims the Arctic will be ice-free by summer 2013" PolitiFact.com. St. Petersburg Times, Sept. 2, 2009. Web. Mar 9, 2010.

Spector, Michael. "Big Foot." The New Yorker. 25 Feb. 2008. 84:2. EBSCOHost.