Environmentalism bearing fruit

A sad fact of American public debate is that only the dubious claims get heard today. In issue after issue, discussion is dominated by extreme statements disjunct from the middle ground where truth usually resides. Nowhere is this worse than in environmental affairs. A law of motion now seems to control environmental thinking: For every improbable claim from the left of doomsday for nature, there must be an opposite, equally improbable claim from the right of regulatory doomsday.

As we approach the 25th anniversary of Earth Day, on April 22, dubious claims about the environment have become so widespread they now cause us to miss the leading ecological truth of our age. That truth: In the nations of the West, nearly all environmental indicators are now positive — air and water are getting cleaner because most anti-pollution initiatives are working very well.

Institutional environmentalism resists this good news — because belief in an instant doomsday is what powers fund-raising appeals. Business lobbies and the Newt Gingrich faction resist the same good news — because it shows that sometimes government regulations are good for you. There’s no room in contemporary environmental debate for an inconvenient notion like environmental optimism.

The time has come for a new middle path to understanding the ecology — a point of view acknowledging that society must have strict environmental regulation but also aware that nature is resilient and will, in the long run, benefit from the arrival of genus Homo. I call this new middle view “ecorealism.” Ecorealism would acknowledge that conservation problems are genuine and must be addressed, yet hold as well that nature is robust and around for the long haul.

Myopic anti-environmental initiatives, such as those currently being pushed in Congress by doctrinaire conservatives, would not be possible if it were commonly understood that most environmental trends are now positive. But a weird intellectual inversion has occurred among liberals — good news about the environment is treated as some sort of unfair trick, or at least as inappropriate information to be hushed up.

Not only is this wrong analytically; it now boomerangs politically, by giving ammunition to forces eager to turn back the clock. If it were commonly understood that U.S. ecological initiatives are making air and water cleaner at a spectacular pace, GOP plans to undo those initiatives would lose their appeal.

Many environmentalists are wary of ecorealism, scientific rationality or any form of environmental optimism — because they assume such forces will breed complacency. But the reverse is true. An important message of ecorealism is that the first round of conservation initiatives worked — so let’s have more!

One example is the phenomenal progress against ozone-layer depletion. Ozone depletion, widely depicted less than a decade ago as a doomsday threat that could “never” be stopped, is nearly solved. U.S. and Western European emissions of the chemicals called chlorofluorocarbons, which deplete stratospheric ozone, peaked in 1988 and have declined rapidly since.

At the end of this year, CFCs will go out of production in the United States and most other countries. Studies already suggest ozone-layer replenishment may begin within a decade — with the complete rebound of the stratosphere possible by the early 21st century. Nonetheless, the left downplays the successful phase out of CFCs, because this positive development suggests that nature and the industrial lifestyle can find ways to coexist. The right downplays the same success story, because it shows rational regulation can protect public health and safety.

A smaller example of the same ideological blind spots on ecological progress concerns the new low-pollution “reformulated” gasoline that recently went on sale in many large cities. Right-wing activists have been all over reformulated gas, calling it a costly regulatory excess. A common claim is that the new gas contains dangerous chemicals that “smell funny” and cause toxic headaches. Conservative reaction has induced some cities and counties to withdraw from the reformulated-fuel program, with local officials theatrically lambasting “the Feds” who imposed this nightmare.

Totally overlooked is that reformulated gasoline is a leading environmental success story. Invented in Southern California by Arco, this fuel has been on sale in the Los Angeles Basin since 1990. Its track record at reducing pollution is exceptionally good. Reformulated gasoline is a reason Los Angeles smog has declined by more than half since the first Earth Day — even as the car population of Los Angeles nearly doubled.

Moreover, reformulated gasoline is a low-cost means of pollution control. Widely expected to add 20 cents to the price of a gallon, in Los Angeles it only costs an extra five cents — an added $25 annually for the typical driver. Already, the price premium is declining toward five cents in the rest of the country.

Reformulated gasoline is also attractive because the national program for this fuel was put together in 1991 using a non-bureaucratic “regulatory negotiation” — environmentalists and petroleum lobbyists hammered out a deal acceptable to both sides, then promised not to sue one another. No top-heavy federal pandects were required: It was just the sort of deal regulatory reformers should love.

Gregg Easterbrook is a contributing editor to the Atlantic Monthly.