Washington — In vowing to pull out of the Kyoto global-warming agreement, the Bush administration is once again as the president would say responding to reality. You have to worry about just what we're going to be left with once all these realities have been responded to.
Remember a couple of weeks ago when Bush reneged on his campaign promise about carbon dioxide emissions? Carbon dioxide, you'll recall, is the gas we're pumping into the air as we burn fossil fuels the gas that's trapping heat near the Earth and warming it. If you don't believe this, you either have some economic interest in disbelieving or you've been confused by a misconstruction of "balance" that leads some journalists, confronted with 98 scientists thinking one way and two the other, to give the two equal play.
Anyway, candidate Bush did seem to get the carbon-dioxide problem, along with the fact that power-plant emissions contributed significantly to it. So he was for mandatory emission reductions until March 14, when he announced that this had been "an error."
"I was responding to realities, and the reality is our nation has a real problem when it comes to energy," he said.
Let's think about that. The "real problem" we're having is in California, where electricity is generated primarily by hydropower, nuclear power and natural gas. Yet carbon-dioxide emissions come primarily from coal- and oil-burning plants. So maybe the president was responding to a different reality? Like the fact that the industry hated the emissions-reductions idea. This is a reality that Tom Kuhn, for one a Bush pal and the head of the power plants' lobbying organization would be well-positioned to clue him into.
Threats to industry's fortunes are in any case a more customary concern of Bush's than threats to the environment. He's been a faithful proponent of drilling in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge which raises a comparison worth pondering. Estimates of oil resources in the refuge range between 3 billion and 16 billion barrels of oil.
Any idea where else we could get that kind of oil? Well, almost half the oil we consume in this country is for surface transportation, according to the American Petroleum Institute. The Natural Resources Defense Council tells us that, if we improved fuel efficiency in our vehicles by 50 percent, we could save 10 billion barrels of oil over 10 years.
This particular kind of fact doesn't make the Bush reality inventory because it places demands on industry. Yet some industry leaders, having perceived new realities of public concern and environmental impact, are placing demands on themselves. While automakers have long resisted applying fuel-economy standards to the hugely popular and largely fuel-inefficient SUVs, Ford Motor Co. last year promised to improve the fuel economy of its SUVs by 25 percent; General Motors followed suit.
A fast-growing number of transit-riders are also responding to new realities. Washington's subway is celebrating its 25th anniversary with far more riders than anyone had ever anticipated.
People in other urban areas would likely do the same if they could. A recent Ohio State University poll showed 80 percent of Ohioans want the state government to devote itself to developing passenger rail service just as it does highways. But the trend in spending nationally has been away from transportation choices and yet again toward highways. The Surface Transportation Policy Project says that, in the last two years, the portion of federal funds going to new and wider roads grew by 21 percent, while funds for alternatives fell by 19 percent.
All in all, we're determined to continue using five times more fossil fuels than other mortals. Which is the reality driving the administration out of the global-warming treaty effort, and into the arms of industry, its lobbyists and the politicians beholden to them. Yet, here again, many business leaders are themselves more forward-looking. Companies like 3M, Boeing, BP-Amoco and DuPont have joined in a coalition concerned about the environment and committed to taking a leadership role in protecting it.
Bush's Environmental Protection Agency administrator, Christine Todd Whitman, wrote Bush before his carbon-dioxide about-face that a failure to demonstrate a commitment to cutting greenhouse gases would cause problems both at home and abroad. "We need to appear engaged," she said.
Soon, then, we may see some brushing-up on appearances. But as for reality, Bush is cocooned in a backward-looking one filled with hot air. And bent on pulling us all in there with him.
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