Accidental Blogger

(Alt. title: your eco-rant for the week)

I wonder, only half-facetiously, whether Verlyn Klinkenborg is one of those “US Americans” who don’t have maps, and don’t know there’s almost a whole planet outside it.
Here he is from a few years ago, on mining in Wyoming:

The mining laws, which assume that mining is the highest, best use of the land, already make ordinary people feel disenfranchised…It’s hard enough to protect the Bridger-Teton National Forest, vastly harder still to protect a place like the Green River Basin. To a driller it’s a wasteland ready for the drilling rig. To an environmentalist, it’s delicate habitat.

The real question isn’t whether Wyoming can stabilize its prosperity. It’s whether it can protect values and resources that are not as easily monetized as coal, oil and natural gas, or translated into the terms of national security. But then this is the question the whole nation faces.

Here he is now, hand-wringing about a plan to get natural gas in New York:

There is plenty of change in the Catskills, much of it driven by energy development. The great scar of the Millennium Pipeline, which will someday bring natural gas from Ontario to New York City, comes straight over the mountains and down to the river. Yet that is nothing when measured against the huge changes that will come if New York State gives the go-ahead to gas drilling in the Marcellus Shale.

It is of course true that acquiring fossil fuels imposes severe costs upon the planet. We should be doing what we can to reduce heating/cooling costs, make cars more efficient, improve public transport, raise gas taxes, research alternative energies, and so on. Meanwhile, we should be trying to optimize the use of what fossil fuel we must.

But none of this accounts for Klinkenborg’s opposition to energy development in the US. Any given unit of oil consumed – however much is consumed in toto – must come from somewhere, and where it comes from, it shall degrade the environment and decimate biodiversity. Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, Russia, the North Sea and Canada all have ecosystems too, and drilling there causes bio-destruction too, just somewhere else. A respectable response to “drill, baby drill” is to try and reduce total drilling consistent with global development, not to insist that that drilling just happen out of American sight.

Now of course in practice such dumping happens in the Larry Summers spirit – ships get broken in Alang, not in Boston. The trash from Beverly (or Malabar) Hills probably gets dumped in some poor locality. I’m even on the whole a realist about this sort of thing – I don’t think it’s unusually wise economically to insist that eco-standards in China be what they are in the US, for instance. But why on earth should such positions acquire a varnish of green virtue? Why should it be a precept of the environmental movement that a nation using a quarter of the world’s oil resources shouldn’t suffer any of the costs? It’s especially galling in that in a related context, that of labor treatment by multinational corporations, you’d expect someone like Klinkenborg to hand-wring the other way, fair-trade coffee-cup firmly in hand.