Benny Peiser / 28.09.2007 / 15:05 / 0 / Seite ausdrucken

Grüne Realos und der Wandel der Klimadebatte in den USA

Rachel Carson opened Silent Spring, her 1962 polemic against chemical pesticides, with a terrible prophecy: “Man has lost the capacity to foresee and to forestall. He will end by destroying the earth.” She proceeded to narrate a “Fable for Tomorrow,” describing a bucolic American town “where all life seemed to live in harmony with its surroundings.” The nearby farms flourished, the foxes barked, and the birds sang in a kind of pastoral Eden. “Then a strange blight crept over the area and everything began to change. Some evil spell had settled on the community.” Cattle died. Children died. And the birds stopped singing. It was a silent spring.

The moral of the story was obvious: Apocalypse was imminent unless humankind stopped violating nature. And so it came to pass that the environmental movement’s highest priority would be to limit our contamination of the world around us. This “pollution paradigm” worked well enough—for a time. Regulatory legislation of the 1960s and ‘70s cleaned up our lakes and rivers and greatly reduced smog in our cities. In the 1990s, it dealt with acid rain and phased out ozone-depleting chemicals. Given these successes, it’s not surprising that environmental leaders have seen global warming, which is caused by human greenhouse gas emissions, as, essentially, a very big pollution problem.

In the summer of 2006, Carson was resurrected in the form of Al Gore, whose documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, began with images of power plants belching pollution and ended with scenes from the apocalypse: hurricanes, floods, and droughts. In case viewers missed the point, Gore observed, “It was almost like a nature hike through the Book of Revelation.” And he warned, “It’s human nature to take time. But there will also be a day of reckoning.” This narrative had dominated environmental thought for so long that few of us who grew up hearing it ever thought much about it. Nor have many of us questioned what appears to be the obvious solution to global warming: limits on pollution, especially carbon emissions.
 
The problem is that global warming is as different from smog in Los Angeles as nuclear war is from gang violence. The quantitative accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has created something qualitatively different from the pollution problems of old: changing temperatures, which may lead to acute droughts, new disease epidemics, and even wars over resources like water. While dealing with smog and acid rain required relatively simple and inexpensive technical fixes—such as catalytic converters on cars and scrubbers on power plants—oil and coal are central to the functioning of the economy, and their replacements remain far more expensive.

Nor should we want to dramatically curtail energy consumption. Increasing energy use is the primary cause of global warming, but it is also a primary cause of rising prosperity, longer life spans, better medical treatment, and greater personal and political freedom. Environmentalists can rail against consumption and counsel sacrifice all they want, but neither poor countries like China nor rich countries like the United States are going to dramatically reduce their emissions if doing so slows economic growth. Given this, the challenge we face as a species is to roughly double global energy production by mid-century while simultaneously cutting greenhouse gas emissions in half worldwide (and about 80 percent in the United States), so that we can avoid the worst consequences of climate change.

How could such a massive undertaking be achieved? Not, as environmental leaders insist, by limiting human power but rather by unleashing it. In terms of birthing a new energy economy, regulation is important—it’s just not the most important thing. The highest objective of anyone concerned about global warming must be to bring down the real price of clean energy below the price of dirty energy as quickly as possible—most importantly, in places like China. And, for that to happen, we’ll need a new paradigm centered on technological innovation and economic opportunity, not on nature preservation and ecological limits. [...]

To be sure, the effort to reduce and stabilize global greenhouse gas emissions will require a major regulatory effort to make sure that everyone is playing by the same rules, provide a stable investment environment for nations and businesses, and increase the cost of fossil fuels relative to cleaner energy sources. But the conventional wisdom today about global warming is backwards. Environmentalism is not the solution to the crisis of global warming. Instead, global warming is driving environmentalism to evolve into something else.
http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20070924&s=nordhaus092407

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