The Environment

I never really bought into the theory that America is the world's single greatest polluter and is the world environment's greatest enemy. I will say that I've read no impartial statistic that backs me up on that, but I do think that with the Environmental Protection Agency and several environmental non-governmental watchdog groups about, America probably is more environmentally sensitive than it is given credit for. Additionally, the Kyoto Protocols, which were voted down by a margin of 95-0 in the US Senate in 1997 (more on this later), weren't written so much for the good of the planet, but were rather an underhanded way for Western European nations to put a muzzle on the roaring United States economy. Additionally, the Kyoto Protocols left open huge exemptions for perhaps the two biggest polluters in the world, China and India. Today in the news was a story that show that China has a major environmental problem on their hands. We'll see how it all hashes out, but I don't have a good feeling about the outcome. You can read about it here: http://news.ft.com/cms/s/a99bb0f0-5c54-11da-af92-0000779e2340.html


Anyway, as far as the Kyoto Protocols were concerned, President Clinton sent it up for ratification to the Senate, only to have it turned down by 95-0. Losing a vote like that by that kind of margin can mean only one thing: Clinton never picked up the phone and made one phone call to get even one vote. No fool, that Clinton. He knew what it would mean to the American economy to try to fit such a draconian cap on American industry, and he wasn't going to destroy the biggest advantage he had with the public, mainly, the booming American economy at that time. Al Gore goes around these days blabbering like a loon about how the Bush Administration pulled the plug on Kyoto, but the blame for its demise falls not with Bush, who merely stated the obvious (that the treaty was dead, that is), but with Clinton, who did less than nothing to get it through Congress. (I give him credit for this little act of sophistry, by the way.) Whereas I'm sure that America does its fair share of eco-damage vis-a-vis carbon emissions, what I also know is that there are huge swathes of the interior of America that are undeveloped and have more vegetation per acre than both Europe and Asia. And what do all these trees and plants absorb? Carbon emissions, of course! And what do plants and trees expell after they take in carbon emissions? Oxygen! So it stands to reason that despite the massive amounts of people driving cars in America, there is ample vegetation from New York to California to absorb the emissions. This was hardly accounted for in the one-size-fits-all Kyoto Protocols, which though they were ratified by all the western European nations, these same European nations didn't even implement the onerous regulations themselves.

I'm not one of those people who think that everything is hunky dory with the world eco-system. Quite the contrary. But having traveled a fair amount in my adult life (been to South and Central America, as well as Central Europe), I can tell you that of all the developed countries in the world, or even semi-developed, America seems to be the most mindful of its emissions. In Hungary, they still drive cars (Trabant) made in the former East Germany that emit black soot; I joked at the time that these little Trabants in all likelihood emit more carbon monoxide than three New York City buses. And these Trabants are all over Central and Eastern Europe. In Brazil, there's an unbelievable stench that blows onto the beach every afternoon. The stench in question? Raw sewage being dumped into the Atlantic. One can only imagine what the pollution in places like China and Russia must be like. I shudder to think, and unlike here, there's no EPA, Greenpeace, or Al Gore to wail about it.

I'm not in the business of wholly exonerating America from its environmental duties, but if enviro-nuts like Al Gore and the obnoxious wife of Laurie David (who tools around in a private jet) want to make the world a safer place for humanity, they'd be better off attacking the worst offenders in the world. But that'd be hard work, and I have a sneaking suspicion that its not world-wide results they're after, but rather bashing America, and in particular, Bush. Yuck.