The pressure increases on U.S. President George Bush. He must not waver.
The build-up to june's Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro is generating demands that the White House join an international panic over global warming. Bush has resisted the stiff carbon tax touted as a remedy, calling instead for better understanding of the alleged problem. This is global leadership, and Americans should be grateful. A carbon tax would be another economic disaster rooted in pseudoscientific fear-mongering, of which the U.S. has had quite enough.
WHAT'S CERTAIN
All that is certain about global warming is that scientists can't agree on the nature or extent of the problem-or even whether a problem exists. Last week, for example, former Washington Gov. Dixy Lee Ray, a scientist and author, called global warming a myth. Yet the European Commission proposes a stiff tax on fuels containing carbon, wants the U.S. to share the sacrifice, and will use the Earth Summit for moral leverage.
Nothing would benefit Planet Earth more than an Earth Summit that collapsed under its own weight. It may happen. In preliminary meetings in New York, participants have made clear that money, not the twin environmental monsters of global warming and destruction of tropical forests, is the main point of concern. The danger is what Bush and other politically sweaty world leaders might give away in advance for the sake of righteous standing at the Rio circus.
Science, please! As Ray told the National Petroleum Refiners Association last week, everybody believes global warming represents a threat because everybody says it does. The EC wants to punish carbon fuel users because everybody says that reducing carbon dioxide emissions will fight global warming. But is it so? Is anyone in Europe asking?
Ray is asking questions and raising doubts. Computer models, not actual measurements, assert the global warming phenomenon, she says. Measurements show no temperature swings beyond those known always to have occurred. And a 25% carbon dioxide concentration increase since the Industrial Revolution-presumed to cause warming-does not exceed increases preceding industrialization. Ray attributes temperature change to sunspot cycles and the Earth's shifting position relative to the sun.
What if she's wrong? the global warming theorists will ask. Well, what if she is? The computer models themselves recently have moderated their predictions of likely future temperature gains. The prospects are not dire. Temperatures rise and fall all the time, all over the world, and have for millenia. If human activity plays some role in these extremely complex temperature swings, so what? Why should any temperature change that might result from human activity be treated as more threatening than change that would have occurred anyway?
LURCHING TO SOLUTIONS
The U.S. has lurched into excessively expensive solutions to partially understood or nonexistent problems before. It did so with the apple growth retardant Alar, with structurally entrained asbestos, with dioxin contamination, with acid rain. It is doing so now with what little air pollution remains outside a few chronic problem areas. Each mistake and overreaction has been costly.
By standing firm against the anxious global warming crowd, President Bush is declaring that enough is enough. The U.S. and the rest of the world cannot afford to spend money on each and every theoretical environmental alarm. The world has real problems-problems that science can measure and test, problems that do deserve some diversion of economic resources. So far, global warming isn't one of them.
Copyright 1992 Oil & Gas Journal. All Rights Reserved.
