Island Voices
Global warming is coming our way

By Jeremy Harris
Honolulu mayor

Anyone living on an island or low-lying area ought to be worrying about global warming, since an increase of only a few degrees in the Earth's average temperature will result in the sea level rising by several feet, inundating many of the world's coastal communities and destroying entire nations in the South Pacific.

Add global warming's catastrophic impact on agricultural production and public health, and the magnitude of this environmental threat starts to be come chillingly clear.

Make no mistake, global warming has begun. The warming trend has been documented at up to .7 degrees Celsius to the Earth's average temperature just in the last century, and could increase another 3.5 degrees Celsius over the next hundred years.

But the problem is not just the warming of Earth's atmosphere and rising seas. The economic burden of air pollution is estimated to be as much as 2.5 percent of world gross domestic product — perhaps $750 billion per year — and it kills 500,000 people a year. Along with the direct health impacts on people and livestock, the increased release of greenhouse gases causes soil and water contamination, acidification of entire ecosystems and serious loss of biodiversity.

We in the industrialized world depend on fossil fuels for 75 percent of our energy. The United States is especially dependent on these fuels; with only 4 percent of the world population (and 3 percent of the oil reserves), we burn 25 percent of the nonrenewable fossil fuels on the planet. This generates 20 tons of C02 per person in the United States annually, compared with just two tons per person each year in developing countries.

This is why the United States in 1992 entered into lengthy negotiations leading to the Kyoto Treaty. This landmark agreement among 38 nations sets hard targets for industrialized nations to reduce output of polluting greenhouse gases by the the 2008ö2012 time-frame. The U.S. goal was to reduce our emissions 7 percent below 1990's level by 2012; the European Union was asked to trim 8 percent off 1990 levels by the same date.

The United States participated as a full partner in every step of this process, and signed the agreement when it was reached in 1997, despite some reservations. Many people feel the pollution standards should automatically also apply to developing nations, and would like to see the United States work within the framework of Kyoto to make this and other changes.

But President Bush unexpectedly announced in March that the United States is pulling out of the Kyoto agreement altogether, for good. This has left the world's governmental and ecological communities in an uproar, and infuriated our allies who had made great concessions for the sake of reaching agreement.

The same week as dumping Kyoto, the president also retracted his much-touted campaign pledge to seek mandatory emission restrictions for electrical power plants, America's biggest polluters.

In addition, Bush announced plans to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for oil drilling and exploration, even though recent polls show a majority of Americans oppose any drilling in the 20 million-acre sanctuary, which is home to no fewer than 160 bird species, 36 kinds of land mammals, 36 types of fish and nine marine mammal species.

Bush is not only catering to Big Oil and Big Coal by strangling the Kyoto Treaty in its cradle, but he's reneging on his campaign pledge to seek mandatory pollution emission standards for power plants, and opening up the Arctic Wilderness to drillers.

He's also promised to open up yet more fragile offshore habitats for oil drilling and exploration, raising vehement opposition from, among many others, his own brother, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush. And he's told Californians that he'll ease tough auto emission standards, despite their success in noticeably cutting smog over the past 20 years.

Last week, the president gutted the Department of Energy's proposed budget for renewable energy resource programs by chopping $200 million, including almost $69 million for solar and wind research. And he cut another $61 million from energy-efficiency programs.

The proposed exploitation of the pristine Arctic Wilderness and other ecologically sensitive areas isn't driven by a great need for cheaper fuel (U.S. prices are still the lowest in the developed world), but rather by the greed of Big Oil, which sees huge profits and low risk in exploiting the proven, untapped reserves and have no business reason to care about the future ecological health of Earth.

We should be heeding the warning sign sent by skyrocketing fuel prices, telling us that we need to aggressively develop renewable alternative fuel sources and more efficient cars, power plants and appliances in order to ease our dependence on oil and coal burning. Simply exploiting more nonrenewable fuel resources and continuing our rampant consumption is not an acceptable option any longer.

Publicly, Bush cited as cause for some of his actions the fragile state of the economy, and especially the energy crisis gripping California and pushing fuel prices to record highs.

But the president's privately expressed thoughts reveal something even more telling: In a March 13 letter to four conservative GOP senators, Bush stated flatly that further reductions or restrictions on air pollutants weren't needed at this time because of "the incomplete state of scientific knowledge of the causes of, and solutions to, global climate change."

In other words, the paid propaganda and phony science of the automobile and energy industries to explain away global warming appear to have won one disciple.

Bush's denial of the causal link between C02 pollution and global warming is comparable to the tobacco industry continuing to insist there's no scientifically proven relationship between smoking and lung cancer despite overwhelming evidence.

It would be hard to consciously design another set of policy actions that simultaneously infuriates our allies, destroys an international consensus on an issue of such grave concern for all people, harms the planet and the atmosphere — perhaps irreparably — continues to deplete a limited natural resource, ignores the ongoing and promising development of cheaper and more efficient sources of energy, and sets back science and learning 20 years. And this after only three months in office.

Jeremy Harris, in his third term as Honolulu mayor, is a marine biologist by training and the founder and host of this week's Asia-Pacific Environmental Summit in Honolulu.