Rogue Nation: American Unilateralism and the Failure of Good Intentions (2003) (16 page)

The pattern, then, is to use as much as we want, produce as much as we can, and fight for the right to do both with whatever military muscle it takes. When we invite our allies to fight with us, we mark any hesitation as wimpish and anti-American. But many of our foreign friends wonder whether it would be necessary to fight if we acted more like them and less like a spoiled rogue.

In any case, there is a real problem with the traditional U.S. approach to energy: It threatens to become prohibitively expensive. Consider the global situation over the next ten to fifty years. The current world population of about 6 billion people is expected to hit 9.3 billion around 2015.
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This growth, coupled with increasing global industrialization, will drive a rapid rise in global oil demand, from the current 77 million barrels per day to 120 million in 2012.
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The Middle East currently contains 63 percent of the world’s oil reserves, and unless massive new fields are found, the decline of U.S. and North Sea production will drive that figure to 70 percent within ten years.
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Saudi Arabia alone will contain 25-30 percent of global reserves.
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The increase in world demand will thus be met almost entirely from the Middle East and primarily by Saudi Arabia. Because it is the only player with substantial spare capacity, Saudi Arabia, like the old Texas Railroad Commission, will have enormous market leverage. Former CIA Director James Woolsey has called this leverage the ‘equivalent of a nuclear weapon.’
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Japan is already completely dependent on this oil. Europe, the United States, China, India, and others will soon be nearly so.

For years, the United States has had that special relationship with Saudi Arabia. Not only do the Saudis sell oil to the United States for a dollar a barrel less than to anyone else,
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they also price their oil in dollars, which helps the United States to maintain the dollar as the world’s main unit of account. This is a great advantage. If oil were priced in euros, for example, and the United States had to pay in euros instead of dollars, the implications for us would be dire: Given our huge trade deficit, we would run out of euros very quickly. The Saudis have also been there when the United States needed money for forming the muja-hedin in Afghanistan or the Contras in Nicaragua, or to pump extra barrels when the market needed stability. In return, the United States has protected Saudi Arabia and assured a safe haven for its investments.

But in the future, will the Chinese, Indians, and others be comfortable with the U.S. Navy as the main guarantor of Gulf stability? Keep in mind that for ideological and geopolitical reasons, the United States may from time to time find itself at odds with suppliers who have perfectly good relations with other customers. Will the United States be able to maintain the special quality of its relations with Saudi Arabia in the future? In the wake of September 11, relations have become strained as Americans lament the kingdom’s promotion of Islamic extremism and its lack of democracy, women’s rights, and religious freedom. Many Saudis have been shocked and hurt by the new American hostility and could easily decide to reciprocate it. In any case, the huge flow of funds to regimes that may be hostile to American interests and values is not desirable. Finally, the U.S. trade deficit and the current value of the dollar may not be sustainable under the pressure of the U.S. oil import levels being forecast for 2012. All this, of course, is not to mention the environmental consequences of burning all that oil.

So America faces a choice. To do nothing is to choose higher trade deficits and, ironically for a nation that prizes independence and freedom above all, greater economic and strategic dependence. To balance this, we will have to maintain and even increase our military power so that in the end, if we have to, we can just take what we need. Down this road lies further entanglement in various jihads, confrontation with Islam, and sticky involvement in the court politics of the Saudi royal family.

If this seems like a can of worms to you, there are two alternatives: to get serious about energy conservation, and to get serious about non-petroleum-based energy development. The two are not mutually exclusive. At the moment, however, the United States is doing neither.

Any serious effort at conservation has to reckon with the United States’ energy-intensive infrastructure and with not only the American but also the global economy’s perverse dependence on that infrastructure. The U.S. economy is the only engine driving the global economy. When you hear critics complain that America has 5 percent of the world’s population but uses 25 percent of its energy, the proper response is that it also produces more than 25 percent of the world’s GDP. Without that production, much of the world would hardly have any GDP to speak of. America’s big houses may be energy inefficient, but they contain not one but two or even three imported TV sets, stereos, computers, and cars. Any quick, dramatic change in this lifestyle is going to hit not just Americans but the whole world.

Still, probably the biggest energy reserves in the world are in American cars, homes, factories, and office buildings. What is required is not so much downsizing as reengineering. During the infamous Senate debate on SUVs and the proposed fuel economy legislation, Senator John Kerry, Democrat from Massachusetts, noted a Ford Motor Company advertisement saying that you can have in your future an SUV that provides all the room and power you want while using half the current amount of gasoline.
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Also cited was a study by the National Academy of Sciences concluding that with technologies currently available, improvements in gas mileage of more than 40 percent are achievable for SUVs and mini-vans on competitive economic terms with no sacrifice in size or horsepower.
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Such improvements alone would reduce projected U.S. oil imports by 6 million barrels a day, nearly as much as Saudi Arabia produces. Even more importantly, that technology, if adopted broadly around the world, would dramatically change all the energy projections.

Even more spectacular conservation gains may be possible with electricity. In the first place, the largest present usage of electric power is for waste. Enormous losses occur as electricity is transmitted over the power grid. As Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute explains, decentralized micro power plants could greatly reduce these losses while also making the power supply much less vulnerable to terrorist sabotage. Even more simple and powerful is the example Lovins cites of the contrast between Seattle and Chicago in the 1990-1996 period. Annual electricity use fell nearly four thousand times faster in Seattle than in Chicago even though a kilowatt-hour cost twice as much in Chicago.
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The reason was that the utilities in Seattle helped people save, while those in Chicago discouraged them from doing so. As Lovins further notes, a decade ago nine U.S. states rewarded the utilities for helping customers reduce usage instead of selling them more power. Today, many states have dropped the practice, but in New England, a regional approach that has utilities doing on-site inspections, and offering rebates for installing more efficient equipment, has prevented blackouts that would otherwise almost certainly have occurred. In the United Kingdom, businesses are allowed to take a tax writeoff for energy-saving investments just as they write off the energy they waste. Applied in the United States, this practice could have dramatic results. Lovins also estimates that adoption in the United States of European-style combined heat-and-power plants could cut U.S. fuel usage by a third. I could go on, but the point is that even without dra-conian measures we can dramatically reduce the usage of energy and the importance of oil, not only for the U.S. economy but for the global economy as well.

By the same token, there are promising technologies that could greatly increase the supply of energy without using fossil fuels at all. Europe and Japan have already demonstrated that nuclear power can be safe and economical, and new technologies for handling nuclear waste promise to greatly reduce its dangers. Denmark already gets nearly 20 percent of its energy from wind power, and the European Union plans to get fully 22 percent of its electricity mostly from wind power by 2010.
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Wind power could also meet a large part of U.S. needs at competitive costs. In recent years, it has been demonstrated that genetically modified biocatalysts can produce ethanol from virtually any kind of woody plant material. The potential exists to obtain large amounts of an environmentally friendly fuel from simply fermenting agricultural and logging wastes. Thermal depolymerization also turns wastes such as animal carcasses and used tires into high-grade diesel fuel.
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Perhaps the most dramatic potential lies in deriving energy from hydrogen through the use of fuel cells. This technology can provide power for plants, buildings, and homes as well as replacing gasoline in autos and trucks. Buses in some cities already run on hydrogen, as do some buildings, like the Conde Nast building in Manhattan.
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All of the auto companies are experimenting with hydrogen-powered vehicles. General Motors recently demonstrated a prototype called the Hywire at the Paris Motor Show. Again, the point is that much can be done with technology to solve many problems at once. While the U.S. government is working in conjunction with the auto companies on fuel cell technology, and President Bush just boosted support for that by $1.2 billion,
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the contrast with our recent military build-up is telling. In the wake of September 11, Congress instantly passed a $40 billion supplemental budget increase, much of which went to the Pentagon, with the Bush Administration proposing an additional $46 billion increase in 2003, the single largest annual increase since 1982.
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The $60 billion we spend as a matter of course on patrolling the Persian Gulf will also be increased to deal with the problems of Iraq. However necessary this may be, we are not spending $50 or $60 billion on developing alternative energy resources. Yet this would seem like a good time to reconsider the proposals that have been made over the years to launch an Apollo- or Manhattan-style energy project. Of course, development of some technologies like hydrogen fuel cells will take time regardless of the amount of investment. But that is precisely why we should start now. In the meanwhile, interim technologies like hybrid cars could be much more vigorously promoted. For if Bubba cannot change his ways and become a good global citizen, he risks looking more and more like the rogues he is trying to discipline.

5

Who Lost Kyoto?

‘
Come see us while we’re still here
.’

—Ministry of Tourism, Maldive Islands

I
f you are looking for the ideal spot to get away from it all, you could do a lot worse than the Maldive Islands. Mere flecks in the Indian Ocean about one thousand miles due south of India, these coral and sand atolls have a beautiful subtropical climate, great beaches, and a population of 275,000 people whose goal in life is to make sure you are completely relaxed and satisfied. If you’re tempted, book your flight now. The islands’ highest point is 5 feet above sea level, and they seem to be visibly vanishing as the coral dies, the sea rises, and the beaches wash away. In 1987, President Maumoon Abdul Gayoom’s car was nearly swept away by a freak wave, and ever since, the islanders have had a more than passing interest in topics like global warming and the melting of polar ice caps.

At the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, President Gayoom told then U.S. President George H.W. Bush that ‘a few feet of rise is the end of our country.’ Not to worry, Bush replied, in unconscious imitation of King Canute. ‘The United States will not allow that to happen to the Maldives.’
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The president then joined with nearly all the leaders of the world in committing his country to take steps that would reduce emissions of so-called greenhouse gases and abate global warming.

Imagine then the shock in the middle of the Indian Ocean on March 28, 2001, when the administration of President Bush the younger announced that the United States would not support ratification of the Kyoto Protocol to reduce global warming. Concluded after laborious negotiations in December 1997 in Kyoto, Japan, the protocol called on its signatories to reduce by 2010 their emissions of climate-altering greenhouse gases to a level 7 percent below the levels of 1990. Although this reduction was substantially less than the 60-80 percent necessary to save the Maldives from drowning, the Maldivans and citizens of other low-lying countries considered it better than nothing. Now Bush’s Environmental Protection Agency chief, Christine Todd Whitman, was saying the Kyoto treaty was ‘dead’ so far as the administration was concerned and that if the Europeans and Japanese wanted an agreement they would have to take a different approach.
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If the Maldivans were dismayed at this news, much of the rest of the world, particularly Europe, was incensed.

The timing did not help. Whitman’s statement came two days before German Prime Minister Gerhard Schroder, who governed by dint of a coalition with Germany’s Green Party, made his first visit to the new Bush White House. (Could this have had something to do with Shroder’s later reluctance to support Bush on Iraq?) It also came only a week after the European Union had sent a letter urging renewed efforts at agreement on global warming issues, and about two and a half months before Bush was scheduled for his first consultations with Europe’s leaders in Stockholm, Sweden. The announcement came across as a slap in the face. Nor was anyone mollified by the president’s speech on June 11, made just a few hours before he left for Stockholm. Calling the Kyoto Protocol a ‘fatally flawed’ treaty with ‘unrealistic targets not based on science,’ the president said he would not comply with mandates that ‘would have a negative economic impact, with layoffs of workers and price increases for consumers.’
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The response from the diplomatic world, where an ‘expression of concern’ counts as a sharp rebuke, was unusually harsh. In Stockholm, the Swedish government called the U.S. decision ‘appalling and provocative.’ Britain’s Environment Minister, Michael Meacher, described the American announcement as ‘extremely serious’ and ‘an issue of trans-Atlantic, global, and foreign policy,’ while the European Union said it was ‘very worried.’ The European Parliament went further, saying: ‘We are appalled that the long-term interests of the majority of the world population are being sacrificed for short-term corporate greed in the United States.’ Japan urged Washington to reconsider; Australia emphasized that, in view of America’s enormous consumption of resources, it had a responsibility to cut emissions of greenhouse gases.
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The
Guardian
, somewhat less restrained, shrieked tfiat renouncing the treaty was a ‘Taliban-style act of wanton destruction.’
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During the 2000 presidential campaign, candidate Bush had actually said he would clamp down on the emissions of power plants, thus giving the impression that as president he would be concerned with the environment. Barely six weeks after his inauguration, however, the new administration had withdrawn certain measures that had been announced previously for protection of endangered salmon and trout. Then, on March 13, 2001, in a reversal of his campaign pledge to reduce carbon pollution, Bush relaxed rather than tightened regulations on power plant emissions. He did this despite a note from EPA Administrator Whitman saying, ‘I would strongly recommend that you continue to recognize global warming is a real and serious issue.’ She added, ‘Mr. President, this is a credibility issue for the U.S. in the international community’ and ‘also an issue that is resonating here at home. We need to appear engaged.’
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The president argued, however, that we had an economic emergency due to lack of electricity, and getting additional power was thus more important, at the moment, than dealing with emissions. He followed this with orders on March 20 to relax regulations limiting arsenic in drinking water and, on the following day, delayed mining regulations designed to protect watersheds.

In the wake of these moves, the Kyoto decision appeared to epitomize a profoundly anti-environment spirit within the administration and became a metaphor for American profligacy, unconcern, and arrogance. Yet this was a great irony. Heretofore, America had always been a leader on environmental matters. Indeed, it had invented environmentalism. Now suddenly we were being seen as the bad guys with our environmental policies somehow symbolic of everything wrong with America. How, I wondered, did we get here?

ENVIRONMENTALISM: MADE IN AMERICA

E
arly Americans fought the French, the Indians, and then the British, but what they fought most was trees. The axe ranked with the rifle as an essential tool of the frontier, and the odor of burning wood hung over the new settlements. It was Charles Dickens who first brought attention to the devastation all this cutting was wreaking in
American Notes
, his account of traveling over the National Road in 1842. By 1864, concern with overcutting was becoming serious, and George Perkins Marsh became America’s first conservationist with the publication of
Man and Nature
, a book arguing that felling the woods was having disastrous consequences for the soil and local climate. In the same year, Henry David Thoreau’s
The Maine Woods
, published posthumously, called for the establishment of national forests. And Congress obliged with legislation granting the Yosemite Valley to the state of California as a public park. Then in 1872, Congress created Yellowstone as the first national park – the first in the world – an act that has been much imitated around the globe since. But the greatest imitator was none other than President Theodore Roosevelt who made himself the conservationist president by establishing seventeen national parks and monuments and laying the foundation for the establishment of the National Park Service. His cousin, President Franklin Roosevelt, followed in Teddy’s footsteps by creating the Civilian Conservation Corps during the Great Depression to provide jobs by building much of the environmental infrastructure on which we still rely.

Then in 1962, Rachel Carson burst on the scene with her blockbuster best-seller
Silent Spring
. Termed the environmental movement’s ‘shot heard round the world,’ it made an airtight case that the chemical agents we had come to view as the basis of our modern, progressive lifestyle were, in fact, poisoning large parts of the food chain, including humans. In particular, Carson traced the deadly trail of DDT from the spraying of elms to control disease to the death of birds, to malignancies of fish, to liver and central nervous damage in humans. When Carson died of cancer in 1964, she had started a ball rolling that led to President Richard Nixon’s establishment of the world’s first Environmental Protection Agency in 1970.

I could go on with more examples, but the point is that for more than a century it was the United States that led the way on environmental questions. Its initial focus was domestic, but it also came to take the lead on the critical global issue of the ozone hole as well.

A HOLE IN THE SKY

T
he June 1974 issue of
Nature
contained an article by F. Sherwood Rowland, a professor of chemistry at the University of California, Irvine, and Mario J. Molina, a postdoctoral fellow in Rowland’s laboratory on a group of chemicals called chlorofluorocarbons. Considering both its subject, the gases invented in the 1930
s
for use in refrigeration and air-conditioning, and the catchy title, ‘Stratospheric Sink for Chlorofluo-romethanes-Chlorine Atomic Catalyzed Destruction of Ozone,’ it’s no surprise that most people missed it. The paper began innocuously by noting what everyone already knew, that these compounds, whose main advantage was that they were chemically almost inert and therefore non-toxic, were being released into the atmosphere in steadily increasing amounts; that their extreme stability meant they would remain there for sixty to one hundred years. The only way these chemicals were destroyed, the authors noted, was if they drifted into the upper atmosphere and were broken apart by ultraviolet rays, a process known as photodissocia-tion. Then the authors unleashed their Sunday punch: ‘Photodissocia-tion of the CFCs in the stratosphere produces significant amounts of chlorine atoms, and leads to destruction of the atmospheric ozone.’
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Well, so what? Few people at the time cared about ozone, a highly unstable form of oxygen that has a bluish tint and an acrid odor and happens to be poisonous. At sea level, it’s used in a number of products such as bleaches, disinfectants, and decontaminants. It also forms naturally about thirty miles above the earth in the stratosphere through a reaction of solar ultraviolet light with oxygen.
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Though extremely thin and tenuous, this stratospheric ozone is nevertheless critical to most life forms, because it blocks most of the solar ultraviolet rays that are harmful to plants, insects, and birds, and that cause cancer in humans. What Rowland and Molina were saying, then, was that an invisible layer of molecules that is more or less essential to life on earth was being eaten away by the action of ultraviolet radiation on CFCs in the stratosphere.

But this was all highly theoretical. Nobody had actually seen any of this bad stuff happening. The overwhelming reaction of industry, the public, and political leaders was if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. And it didn’t seem to be broken.

Until 1985. On May 16 of that year,
Nature
published another paper on ozone, this one by Joseph Farman, a member of the British Antarctic Survey and a faculty member at Cambridge University. Farman had visited Antarctica for twenty-seven straight years between 1957 and 1984, and each year one of his tasks was to measure the level of ozone in the sky overhead. Though aware of the article by Rowland and Molina, Farman was nevertheless dubious when his 1981 readings showed a substantial decline in the ozone layer over Antarctica during the Southern Hemisphere spring. Maybe the instruments were out of calibration, he thought, and he had them readjusted. But they showed the same thing in 1982 and again in 1983. By 1984 the readings were 40 percent below average and the ‘ozone hole’ had enlarged to reach Tierra del Fuego at the tip of South America. Further review of his readings showed Farman that the decline had actually begun about 1977.
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At about the same time as Farman’s paper, the National Academy of Sciences published a paper estimating that the ozone layer would decline only moderately if at all in the coming century.
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But then NASA weighed in. Its Nimbus 7 satellite had been orbiting the earth over the poles every hour and a half since 1978 and was supposed to be monitoring the ozone layer. It had found nothing amiss, but after Farman’s article, NASA checked its instruments and found that the satellite had been told to ignore, as obviously erroneous, any numbers below a certain level. When NASA reprogrammed, its satellite confirmed that the ‘erroneous’ readings were correct, and even worse than what Farman had measured. Of course, there was some initial effort to discount the significance of the findings. President Reagan’s Secretary of the Interior recommended that people just put on hats, dark glasses, and sunscreen. But when doctors projected 130 million additional cases of skin cancer on top of everything else and other damage predicted by other scientists,
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it was hard to be happy.

The sky was, in fact, broken, and it needed to get fixed – fast. International discussions of ozone depletion had actually begun in 1976 under the aegis of the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), and negotiations for an agreement to phase out ozone-depleting substances had started in 1981. They concluded in 1985 with adoption of the Vienna Convention, which encouraged intergovernmental cooperation on research, observation of the ozone layer, and exchange of information. In other words, it was a typical diplomatic toothless tiger with no targets, no controls, and no binding obligations. As a member of the Reagan administration at the time, I remember the concern among staffers over the gravity of the situation. Many thought that because of its general opposition to government regulation and its close relationship with industry, the administration would avoid or water down any remedial action. But EPA administrator Lee M. Thomas insisted that this was something on which the United States had to take the lead. He worked closely with major American CFC producers, and DuPont led the way in committing to develop alternatives and phase out CFC production. At the same time, Ambassador Richard E. Benedick was dispatched to Montreal in the summer of 1987 to lead the U.S. delegation in negotiating a binding international agreement on cutting and eventually eliminating CFC usage and manufacture. On September 16, agreement was reached on the Montreal Protocol, which called for a 50-percent reduction in the 1986 level of CFC consumption by 1999.
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The agreement was intended to be universal, but developing countries were granted an exemption from its provisions for ten years because of both their relatively low level of consumption and the difficulties of converting to the replacement technology. In fact, compliance was much more rapid than anticipated. By 2003, most experts anticipated that the ozone layer would be back to normal by the middle of the twenty-first century.
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