Congressional attention to energy policy enables the oil and gas industry to address an environmentalist agenda hostile to its interests. In August, the House of Representatives passed energy legislation embracing much of the Bush administration's energy policy and generally favorable to the oil and gas industry. The issue now goes to the Senate, which will be more accommodating than the House to environmentalist pressure.
The environmentalist energy agenda receives clear expression in the Sierra Club's response to the Bush energy proposal. The Sierra Club document misfires in many ways and is wrong to the core in at least two areas. First, it flows from an unscientifically static view of nature. Second, it counters the Bush plan with a self-contradictory proposal that can't deliver on its promises.
The static view of nature will be examined here. The Sierra Club's counterproposal will be critiqued in this space next week.
Environmentalism has become obstructionist melodrama. It proposes that vulnerable nature requires protection by heroic humans-environmentalists-against the ravaging balance of humanity.
The proposition is not altogether unsound. When careless, humanity can indeed corrode natural values. Careless people are messy. There's nothing wrong with suppressing carelessness and asking mess-makers to clean up after themselves.
By those measures, environmentalism has accomplished much. Most people, companies, and industries are far more careful with nature now than they were before environmental concern coalesced into a political movement.
But environmentalism didn't stop there. It now tries to govern human behavior. Its arguments proceed from the double-barreled assertion that the environment hangs in fragile suspension and that human influence-any human influence-is destructive. Environmentalist rhetoric rings with references to delicate balances, fragile ecosystems, and pristine landforms. In this virginal view of nature, humanity can play no innocent role.
The Sierra Club thus challenges the Bush energy plan's suggestion that 21 "wild areas" be opened for oil and gas leasing, asserting that those areas "could be irreversibly damaged if his plan were implemented. We don't have to sacrifice these lands to meet our nation's energy needs."
Sacrifice? To what?
Drilling and production require much less space than they used to. Surface disturbance from those activities doesn't last long on nature's calendar. Reclamation capabilities are impressive.
A few special places of natural wonder should never be touched. Everywhere else, oil and gas drilling and production can occur with minimal disturbance and should, in the interest of human well-being, be allowed to do so. Yet environmental politics measures success by how many hundreds of thousands of acres it can lock away in a growing national hoard of untouchable land.
In all but a few areas, the only value sacrificed by allowing drilling and production would be environmentalism's holy notion that where nothing has ever happened, nothing ever should. That's obstructionism. And it's scientifically unjustifiable.
Environmentalism idealizes nature as a perpetually calm system subject to upset by people. Human activity can only violate the stasis, disturb the balance, wreck the fragile ecosystem. In environmentalist orthodoxy, when humans intrude, nature is spoiled forever.
Bunk.
Humans are part of nature. And nature itself isn't static. The relatively new human ability to catalog natural systems and identify balances doesn't imply fragility or delicacy. In fact, nature changes all the time. Some changes are subtle. Some are cataclysmic. Some changes are abrupt. Some occur over millennia.
Humanity doesn't exist apart from this natural dynamic. It's part of the system. And it is the height of human arrogance to suggest otherwise.
Having succeeded in persuading humanity to behave with proper care in nature and to clean up after itself, environmentalism now winces over every sign of human consequence. The whole controversy over global warming, for example, pivots on the 4% contribution humanity makes to carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. And the Sierra Club resists drilling and production as sacrificial activities. There's no perspective here.
Environmentalism needs what business calls rationalization. It needs to do something more constructive than get in the way. It needs to acknowledge that nature changes, that nature grows back, that when humans do make a mess, nature gets over it.
Nature can accommodate humanity's need for affordable energy. Groups like the Sierra Club perform no service pretending otherwise.
