The Obama administration's swerve away from extremism on two environmental issues raises hope for improved discourse and consequently better policy-making about an important national interest. It won't squelch environmentalism. No one should hope it will.
As a political force, environmentalism is in decline. The movement's priority issue, climate change, has become yesterday's news. Alarm over the climate has lost its political potency for many reasons, including mischief by activist scientists, the growing prominence of economic concerns, increased appreciation for uncertainties inherent in climate science, and failure of global average temperature to rise as predicted. A recent Neilson survey of 25,000 internet respondents in 51 countries indicated climate change is losing ground to other environmental issues in rankings of popular concern.
All or nothing
Some of this change must be reaction against an all-or-nothing political approach to remediation and acquiescence by some governments, especially in Europe. Activists asserted—and governments accepted—scenarios of maximum calamity and demanded unquestioning response, much of it involving the costly reshaping of energy use. With European energy costs leaping as economies falter, reasons for imposed pain have come under new scrutiny. A backlash is under way.
The politics of climate change—called global warming until worldwide average temperature, while still above historic averages, quit rising—followed a standard, two-part strategy: First incite fear, then stop activity, be it a particular project or the use of fossil energy in general.
That strategy has been in play in the two issues on which the Obama administration now has compromised.
Activists have tried to make a bogey monster out of the proposed Keystone XL pipeline between Alberta and the Gulf Coast. They say it will aggravate climate change by increasing production and use of oil from bitumen deposits. They warn of damage to water supplies along the pipeline route. Both claims are exaggerated. Environmental risks posed by the project are low and manageable. They must be balanced against many advantages, including, from the US perspective, enhanced supply of oil from a friendly neighbor. The Department of State, which still must grant final approval, strongly acknowledged the advantages when it issued a final environmental impact statement late last month.
In the other compromise, the White House ordered the Environmental Protection Agency to stop a statutorily unnecessary review of ambient air standards for ground-level ozone. The review worried businesses by raising prospects for elevated energy costs and, in some cases, new or toughened regulation—now and again in 2013. To its credit, the White House recognized the damage a struggling economy would have sustained from this new and needless burden.
Environmental groups erupted. Typical was Natural Resources Defense Council Pres. Frances Beineke's complaint that "the White House is siding with corporate polluters over the American people." Hyperbole like that discredits environmentalism. The "American people" can read reports about strong and continuing declines in ozone pollution and understand that, notwithstanding the chronic trouble sunny cities have with ozone, associated health risks are diminishing. And they increasingly understand that what activists too frequently stop, with their campaigns against select projects and substances, is not hazard but work.
Spiral of cost
With ozone, as with many other pollutants, the insidious supposition behind policy-making has been that if moderate regulation produces benefit, more regulation must be better. The result is a spiral of rising cost and diminishing benefit. A corollary applies to projects: If lowered risk is desirable, no risk must be better, even if the only way to achieve it is to allow no activity at all.
Debate conducted within these frameworks too frequently yields policies dictated rather than guided by environmental values. In the process, other values suffer. The lesson of the moment is that the US has imperatives besides zero-risk, no-pollution fantasies. If environmental activism now learns—or is forced by circumstances, political or otherwise—to accommodate its agenda to other national interests, some good will have come from a difficult period in US economic history.
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