Global Warming : Climate Change |
| Suagee : Pulling our heads out of the sands of global warming Do ostriches really stick their heads in the sand to avoid danger? Having never personally witnessed an ostrich doing such a thing, I suspect they only do it in cartoons. I mention this because the approach of the Bush administration and its congressional allies to energy policy makes me think of those cartoon ostriches. An energy policy bill that ignores global warming? A bill that ignores the connection between the burning of fossil fuels and the increasing concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere? Even if it seems it's only in cartoons that ostriches stick their heads in the sand, apparently in real life, so do some policymakers. Perhaps I'm jumping to conclusions, having not yet seen an administration-backed energy bill in the current Congress. Given the administration's record over the past four years, its rhetoric about drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, emphasis on drilling on public lands and its silence on conservation-oriented measures such as increasing the corporate fleet average fuel economy standards, I am willing to risk the embarrassment of being wrong in print and predict that when we do see such an energy bill in this Congress, it will ignore the obvious fact that the wasteful ways in which we consume fossil fuels are contributing to long-term changes in Earth's climate. As the climate changes, ecosystems around the world, with their interwoven communities of plants and animals and other living things, are becoming unraveled. As ecosystems unravel, ancient human cultures are also at risk: cultures that are interwoven into the ecosystems where they have developed, ecosystems from which they derive material existence and spiritual well-being. Indigenous cultures around the world have been under assault, of course, for centuries, and many of the kinds of assaults that present-day indigenous cultures face are more abrupt in the ways they inflict disruption than global warming. For example, these include massive hydroelectric projects, deforestation, oil spills in tropical rainforests or off the coast of Alaska and laws enacted by national governments that permit multinational corporations to exploit the resources of indigenous territories. I am afraid, though, that the kinds of changes wrought by global warming will prove even more challenging for the survival of indigenous cultures than the various faces of industrialization and imperialism - and just as unrelenting. The connection between our wasteful consumption of fossil fuels and the environmental and cultural disruption caused by global warming is particularly frustrating because so much of the solution has been fairly obvious, and well documented, for more than a quarter century. What we need, what the world needs, is a national commitment by the United States to achieve a transition to an energy economy based on efficiency and the use of appropriately-scaled solar and other renewable energy technologies. Global warming is just the most recent reason why, as a nation, we should make this commitment. Some of the other reasons include saving money, building local self-reliance, recycling energy expenditures in the national economy rather than shipping money overseas, creating employment and business opportunities, enhancing national security, avoiding the environmental impacts associated with conventional energy and, in the case of solar design techniques for buildings, creating wonderful spaces within which to live and work. Twenty-four years ago, the federal research laboratory known as the Solar Energy Research Institute (predecessor of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory) completed a comprehensive study of the potential energy savings through promoting efficiency in buildings, transportation and industry, and potential contributions of renewable energy sources. That report, published with the title ''A New Prosperity: Building a Sustainable Energy Future'' (often referred to as the SERI Solar/Conservation Study) concluded that ''through efficiency, the U.S. can achieve a full-employment economy and increase worker productivity while reducing national energy consumption by nearly 25 percent'' and that ''20 to 30 percent of this reduced demand could be supplied by renewable sources.'' In March 1981, when the SERI Solar/Conservation Study was finished, the incoming Reagan administration attempted to keep it from seeing the light of day. (At the time, I worked in the central office of the BIA and, having been involved in the Carter administration's Domestic Policy Review of Solar Energy, obtained a copy from a friend at SERI the day before it was embargoed.) The study was subsequently published by a private company featuring an introduction by then-Congressman Richard Ottinger who, as chair of the relevant subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, had requested the study in the first place. Years before the scientific community reached its current degree of consensus on the reality of global warming, Ottinger drew attention to what he called ''our greatest economic conflict: our economy is hemorrhaging as we devote a larger and larger percentage of our gross national product to the purchase of imported oil, competing for scarce capital needed to rebuild our industrial and economic base.'' Among other things, this shows that the current administration has no claim to originality in its imitation of cartoon ostriches. Achieving a transition to widespread reliance on solar and renewable energy resources would require a comprehensive set of incentive programs. There are many reasons for this, but a big part of it is that the transition will involve millions of purchasing decisions by consumers of energy services and buyers of buildings and products that consume energy. Most people do not have the time to become informed about the environmental implications of their choices, and even if they do, they typically do not have extra money to pay for up-front extra costs of solar and renewable energy technologies - even if they could realize substantial savings on a life-cycle basis. Moreover, energy consumption purchases are not made on a level playing field. Rather, the marketplace has been distorted by decades of subsidies to conventional energy technologies and regulatory regimes designed to promote conventional technologies. To some extent, a transition toward efficiency and renewable energy has been occurring, driven largely by market forces. Market forces are not enough, though, and the enormous ''external'' costs of global warming are not taken into account in the marketplace. This strikes me as a classic case in which government policies should be fashioned to compensate for the marketplace's shortcomings. With a national commitment to energy efficiency and the widespread adoption of appropriately-scaled solar and renewable energy technologies nowhere on the horizon, what can American Indians and their tribal leaders do? While the energy market is largely driven by federal and state laws and policies, tribal governments can use their sovereign powers to deal with parts of the problem that occur close to home. In fact, many tribes have been using federal grant programs to promote solar and other renewable energy technologies, although there has not been much effort to draw lessons from tribal demonstration projects and publicize the results. We could do more talking about these local experiences and drawing attention to the global implications. One idea for starting at home, literally, is to write tribal building codes so that they include solar design performance standards, drawing on energy design software that has been developed with support from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. This way, a tribe could make solar design the standard in new construction. This is but one way tribal governments could help lead the way to the widespread use of appropriately-scaled renewable energy technologies. The possibilities are all around us, but we have to look for them for ourselves. We cannot afford to wait for national politicians to get their heads out of the sand. Dean B. Suagee is counsel to the firm Hobbs, Straus, Dean & Walker, LLP in Washington, D.C. He is a member of the Cherokee Nation. |