Teepen: At last, Bush moves in right direction on global warming
Cox News Service
Wednesday, January 30, 2008
In the energy proposals in his State of the Union address, President Bush offered welcome, if years overdue, steps, but stopped many long strides short of what will be necessary. Crucially, though, he paired reduced oil dependence and a cut in the emission of global warming gases as companion goals.
The president thus did reason and the biosphere a valuable service just by finally acknowledging that policy must "confront the serious challenge of global climate change" and pegging that to national security.
Even there Bush couldn't bring himself to say "warming," but OK. It's the thought that counts, and with that one the president marginalized the GOP right and the conspiracy-theory goofs who have it that warming is a lie made up by closet socialists to kill free-market economies.
And that, finally, could open some political space in which a comprehensive program could be forged.
Bush's push for a 4 percent per year increase in auto and light truck mileage would end a default that this administration has shared with its predecessor. He rightly continued to call for the development of alternative energy sources, which would be swell, but wishing won't make it happen.
The substitution, for instance, of ethanol blends for pure gasoline has promise, but the currently favored corn owes its popularity more to farm-state politics than to science. The conversion process itself requires huge outlays of energy, and the resulting inflation in corn prices will ripple through the economy, from field and feed lot to store. Grasses, not yet technologically tenable, show far better promise, and fairly quickly.
For those and other tactics to pay off, a substructure of policy support will be essential. Here, the president dodged.
The prospects for change repeatedly flop in a familiar pattern. Gasoline and other oil-based prices jump, investors look anew at alternatives, drivers move to higher mileage cars, and then the alarmed producing nations lift more oil, the prices drop and conservation fizzles.
The Saudis are playing that game right now, gimmicking prices to keep demand high. Any hope for systemic conservation and alternate fuels will require a floating gasoline tax that, whatever the ups and downs of producer prices, keeps consumer prices at, say, $4 a gallon.
More: public policies must be scrubbed of the practices and programs that, in effect, subsidize sprawl. Local governments must be encouraged to change zoning rules – lot size, etc. – that have the effect of heedlessly slinging suburbia all over hell's half acre. Funding must be provided for fully articulated public transit systems and ridership supported in the common interest.
There is promising new movement in some previously indifferent or antagonist quarters.
A growing number of evangelicals, harkening to Genesis, are taking the assigned stewardship of Earth seriously. And more corporations have spotted the handwriting on the wall. Ten, including Alcoa, Caterpillar, GE and DuPont, recently announced support for a mandatory cap-and-trade system to limit the emission of greenhouse cases.
Hooray, but we are all called on in this matter. We simply must coalesce around a broad, durable program of conservation and energy substitution. With every U.S. foreign policy trimmed to suit an oil autocracy, with every new failed glacier, the clock bolts forward.
Tom Teepen is a columnist for Cox Newspapers. He is based in Atlanta.
