Environment

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Issues are often separated by type:
Global warming
Dirt too?
Biodiversity: More is better
Suburban sprawl and urban development
Population growth and consumption of natural resources
Population growth and sexuality education
Birth rates, death rates, and us
Economist vs. Environmentalist: political agendas
East vs. West
What can government do?

What's the Problem Now?

"The environment" is a general term for all the natural resources which human beings share on this planet. We in the United States mostly don't have to think about them at all, unless the price goes up or our safety is threatened.

Our concerns differ depending on our personal situation, how distant from our own lives are we able to imagine or care, and how far into the future are we able to think and care. But when we have to make safety decisions, we have no choice but to turn to government and there we often run into competing philosophies of individual and collective rights and shifting definitions of security.

The environmental facts of life become political issues when tax dollars are to be spent, safety is up for discussion, and private corporations are involved in providing public services. The Environmental Protection Agency of the federal government gains and loses power to protect depending on the philosophy of the President of the United States and the number of votes in the legislature. At the state level, the agencies act depending on the philosophy of the Governor and the majority of the legislature.

Some environmental issues seem more local: for example, how we dispose of trash, and use our land, both as individuals and as communities. One of the issues that plays out locally in politics is development of new housing, because with housing come new schools, roads, waste disposal, water and gas lines, police and fire departments.

Others depend on where in the country and the continent we live. Are we upwind or downwind of power plants? Where do we live in relation to a river system? How we feel about a dam may depend upon whether we are located upstream or downstream. What if the river crosses state borders or an international border? What if the flow downstream is slowed to a trickle? Or we live in a big city up river that depends upon the river for water?

We’ve all heard about how much trouble our government has securing our borders. That’s because national and state borders are artificial -- they represent wars and deals, not natural boundaries. Preventing pollutants from crossing our state and national borders in this country just isn’t realistic.

Still other environmental issues, like global warming and world population growth, are clearly global in scope

Once we know what issues we care about most and understand the facts and trade-offs about the policy solutions available, we can weigh in with our representatives on the local and national level about the environmental issues that affect us.

What are the Issues?

Waste Management & Recycling

The traditional method of dealing with waste has been to dump it in some "out of the way" spot. Today, we call this method "landfill."

During the end of the nineteenth century, garbage dumps in urban centers became a public health threat, which led to large-scale incineration of municipal solid waste (MSW) as an alternative.

As awareness about air quality surfaced in the 1950’s, the US, started imposing environmental restrictions and closing down incinerators. The cost of installing pollution control devices was high, land suitable for land-filling was still plentiful, and little was known at the time about the negative impact of landfills on the environment.

However, within the past two decades, large cities have been running out of accessible landfill areas. Additionally, it has become known that toxic chemicals leak or leach from landfills and can contaminate groundwater. Congress passed legislation placing new restrictions on landfill areas, which in turn, increased the disposal costs for MSW, creating a near-crisis situation in 1980 as landfill prices dramatically increased.

These factors combined with skyrocketing oil prices in the 1970s, caused the US to take a second look at the incineration option, with emphasis on energy recovery. Modern incinerators, also called waste-to-energy plants (WtE), burn waste to produce energy in the form of steam and/or electricity and incorporate improved pollution controls.

Unfortunately, it was later determined that the pollution controls weren't as effective at containing the toxic air pollutants as was previously thought.

Both land-filling and incineration have serious trade-offs, including severe health and environmental risks. But Americans are also producing more and more waste.

In 1960, the U.S. produced 88.1 million tons of MSW, approximately 2.7 pounds of waste per person per day. Since then, both US population and per capita generation of waste have grown tremendously. By 2005, U.S. residents, businesses, and institutions produced more than 245 million tons of MSW, approximately 4.5 pounds of waste per person per day.

The practice of recycling came into play for obvious reasons: a need to find a better way to manage all that waste, and as way to conserve scarce resources. In fact, science and technology have begun to realize that it is the nature of all Earth's systems to recycle, despite how long term the process may be. After all, many of the earth’s resources that we take for granted are in fact, finite.

However, all recycling techniques consume energy for transportation and processing, while some also use considerable amounts of water. A trial and error process (which is likely to be costly and time-consuming) will be needed to devise a workable system for global waste management in the future.

Click here to see a historical timeline of municipal solid waste management.

Land Use: Dirt Too

Six to eight inches of topsoil is all that stands between much of the world and starvation. However, each year a significant percentage of agricultural land is lost to erosion, salt (salinization), pollution, and other forms of soil degradation. As topsoil is degraded or removed, the land loses its ability to produce food.

Nearly forty percent of the world's agricultural land is seriously degraded and soil degradation has already had significant impacts on the productivity of about 16 percent of the globe's agricultural land according to scientists at the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI). This has led to starvation and socioeconomic problems in developing nations and raised serious concerns about the world's ability to feed itself in the future.

Human activities that have led to soil degradation include: deforestation, agricultural practices, gathering wood for fuel, overgrazing by livestock, and industry. Regulations often are different in different parts of our country, depending how land-use is connected to the local economy, which in turn connects to who has the votes, which political party has the power.

Water Quality: from Commerce to Conservation

Every living thing, including us, needs water. In the United States we have long ago learned how to provide clean water to individual homes. We can travel and turn on the tap anywhere and feel safe. Water systems were considered part of society's shared wealth and we paid for water through our taxes, as a public utility. Yet the issue of water pollution has not gone away. The growth of the bottled water business is a startling comment on the wealth of Americans, but also our growing concern about pollution.

Water in the United States is provided mostly by public agencies. Eighty five percent of the population of the U.S. gets its water from municipal water companies. However, many communities have turned over the management of their water supply to private companies, assuming that these companies can be more efficient and save us tax dollars – and many of these companies are foreign owned. For example, Veolia Water, the U.S. subsidiary of a French firm, serves more than 600 communities and 14 million people through public-private partnerships with local governments, including the nation’s largest water partnership in Indianapolis.

Many cities prefer to maintain control over the ownership of the public water supply and engage in more limited forms of privatization, including private contractors investing capital in public utilities.

Privatization of water supplies in this country is closely linked with increasing pressure on water utilities to replace aging infrastructure and to comply with stricter regulations for water quality.

Water companies in the United States are always subject to government regulation, because in the end water provision is a monopoly. We have public utilities commissions and government oversight to ensure that water quality is monitored to certain standards, that rates are set with oversight by the public, and that there is some degree of accountability.

But this wasn’t always the case. The first federal water legislation addressed only issues of water use, like regulating fisheries and waterways used for commerce. As the country grew westward, Congress used water legislation to fund irrigation projects to make farming possible in the dry western states and territories, and hydroelectric dams to provide affordable electricity.

Water quality shifted from being a state and local issue to a federal one as all this expansion and development degraded water quality across the country. The shift parallels the current growing recognition among the governments around the world that the environment is global, and will ultimately require global solutions.

Federal legislation in the 1970’s created the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) which safeguards drinking water, and sets pollution standards.

The EPA oversees implementation of the Safe Drinking Water Act, which is the national law safeguarding tap water in America, and the Federal Water Pollution Control Act, or Clean Water Act, which gives the EPA the authority to implement pollution control programs, and set wastewater standards for industry and limitations on contaminants in surface waters.

Since the terrorist attacks of 9/11, protecting the nation's water supply and utilities from terrorist attacks has become a national priority. The Homeland Security Presidential Directives (HSPDs) and the Public Health Security and Bioterrorism Preparedness and Response Act (Bioterrorism Act) of 2002 designate specific responsibilities to the EPA and the water sector.

Click here to read more.

Water is a local issue because we get most of our water resources either from local supplies or from local water agencies. It’s also a federal issue. We look to the federal government in the United States to set and enforce consistent standards to protect water quality for drinking water and to make sure that the waste water we produce is collected and treated to a standard. And it’s also an international issue. Like it or not, we do share a limited supply of fresh water with the rest of the globe.

Air Quality: Public Health & National Wealth

Like water, air moves freely across artificial state and national borders. For example, polluted air from old power plants in more rural areas in the Midwest blows into densely populated urban areas, often in the east. And because wind is not stagnant, it’s not just a national, problem either. Emissions that are being produced by coal fire plants in China are not just remaining over Beijing or Shanghai -- they’re moving over the surface of the planet.

Health may historically be a state government responsibility, but the link between air quality and health has been a major factor in making air pollution a national issue – and increasingly an international one.

As the US grew and expanded, industrial development, burning of fossil fuels to generate energy, and increased use of motor vehicles released toxins like sulfur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide, and solid particulates into the atmosphere. While the air in this country was increasingly clouded by pollution by the 1940’s, the health and environmental consequences of air pollution were becoming more and more clear.

In Southern California, car exhaust trapped in the San Fernando Valley limited visibility to three blocks and caused respiratory ailments, nausea and vomiting. A few years later, toxic emissions from a steel mill killed 20 people and sent 7,000 more to local hospitals in the small town of Donora, Pennsylvania. The so-called “Donora Death Fog,” led to numerous lawsuits -- and the first calls for national legislation to protect the public from industrial air pollution.

Following the lead of state and local governments, Congress passed the Air Pollution Control Act of 1955, officially identifying air pollution as a national problem and proposing that research be conducted and steps taken to improve air quality. The main result, however, was to increase public awareness of the issue.

Eight years later, Congress passed the Clean Air Act of 1963, setting the first federal emissions standards and laying the groundwork for a steady stream of amendments to expand the initial legislation and deal with emerging problems like auto emissions, which had become the largest source of many dangerous pollutants.

In 1970, Earth Day and an bout of the worst air pollution in Washington D.C.s history helped build momentum for a tough new law. Although technically an amendment, the Clean Air Act of 1970 was a major revision, empowering the EPA to create national air quality standards and mandating the states to enforce them – including strict limits and deadlines for auto emissions.

Significantly, the legislation was also first federal environmental statute to include a provision allowing individual citizens to sue violators of the Clean Air Act instead of relying on government action

Automobile makers, a powerful economic engine in many states, however, were outraged about the unanticipated requirement that they achieve 90 percent reductions in emissions by 1975. Accomplishing the changes in such a short time would have put a severe economic burden on an industry already threatened by labor unrest, increased international competition, and growing inflation.

The legislation was amended in the next decade to push back what were soon seen as overly-ambitious deadlines, particularly in the face of oil shocks of the early 1970’s which threatened to put the US automobile industry out of business by raising gas prices tremendously.

Congress did not amend the Clean Air Act during the decade of the 1980s, partially because President Reagan's administration placed economic goals ahead of environmental goals.

The legislation was last amended in 1990 to both strengthen and improve existing regulations, and address newer concerns such as acid rain, and ozone layer depletion. The law remains the basis for air pollution control policy.

The history of air quality legislation in this country is closely connected to the shifting relationship between government, citizens, and industry. Today, the Clean Air Act legislation touches nearly every private citizen and corporation in the country. Still, federal regulations which tell the states what standards for air and water quality must be met are continuously at issue because they affect everything from our health and way of life, to the national economy.

Oil & Energy

Human life has been dependent upon oil, natural gas, and coal (fossil fuels) since the industrial revolution. Prior to that, humans used wood for heating and animals for transportation.

The burning of fossil fuels provides 85% of the world's commercial energy, and 80 percent of all human-caused carbon dioxide emissions. Energy demand has doubled in the past three decades and is expected to increase another 60 percent by 2020. As we become more dependent on them, we are reminded that these are called fossil fuels because they are the remains of vegetation that was compressed and heated long ago. There are no more of them being created. Some day they will all be used up.

Our country has built our modern way of life, our standard of living – which is the best in the world – on cars, and airplanes, and houses. And now we know that our planet will some day run out of oil and natural gas. The problem of finding other ways to produce energy has to be solved.

Many policy experts say that national government can and should provide economic incentives for companies to develop alternative technologies, and that it is possible for national governments to work together—under the right framework.

Many also believe that a clean energy economy could help the overall economy by creating millions of new jobs: on the first day of debate on the 2007 Energy Bill, the Senate passed an amendment authorizing tax dollars to train workers for high-skilled, clean energy jobs. In this economic shift, like all economic shifts, there will be both winners and losers.

The National Debate

The debate over Energy is complicated because it crisscrosses so many other issues. When it discusses Energy policy, Congress debates legislation pieced together from bills approved by various separate committees, including Energy and Natural Resources; Environment and Public Works; Commerce, Science and Transportation; and Foreign Relations.

Congressional representatives in all regions face intense pressure from constituents who are concerned about skyrocketing fuel prices, but who don’t necessarily agree on much else.

Consumers would like fuel efficient cars while car manufacturers would like clean fuel. It’s fuel efficiency vs. the fuel itself. Consumers want their cars to get a lot of bang for the buck, while car manufacturers would rather the fuel changed and their cars could stay the same.

Companies want laws because they need to plan ahead for stability and, further, they want their competitors to have to abide by the same regulations.

What about the states?

The Senate may exclude work trucks from the CAFE standards, a move that could cut fuel savings by 5 percent, according to an estimate by environmentalists.

However, national legislation on energy will not stop California and other states from instituting their own regulations on vehicle greenhouse gas emissions.

The debate over oil and energy in this country is also tied up with global warming– a clear example of the increasingly global nature of all environmental issues.

Global Issues

Global Warming

The Science

Many of us already know the basics behind global warming. As more carbon dioxide (CO₂) and greenhouse gasses are released into the atmosphere, more infrared radiation is trapped, causing rising temperatures. Since the first studies were conducted in the late 1950s, the atmosphere's CO₂ levels have been rising, from about 300 parts per million to 381 parts per million.

But what does this mean? The consequence is drastic environmental changes such as melting glaciers. For example, the Himalayan glaciers are responsible for 40 percent of the world's drinking water and their disappearance could cause a water shortage for billions of people. Even here in the United States, in Alaska's Glacier National Park, some glaciers have completely disappeared already.

Further, global warming has caused an overall rise in temperature that not only produces dangerously hot record-highs in summer, but also warmer oceans. In his film, "An Inconvenient Truth," Al Gore explains how warmer oceans cause more violent storms: as water temperatures go up, wind velocity intensifies, and so does storm moisture condensation. Gore argues that, according to an MIT study, hurricanes and typhoons have increased in duration and intensity by about 50 percent since the 1970s. Gore attributes the power of Hurricane Katrina to this phenomenon, which he says is caused by global warming. A report released by the British government says that "a 5-10% increase in hurricane wind speed, linked to rising sea temps, is predicted to approximately to double damage costs in the USA."

The devastating effects of warming are many, including flooding, drought, wildfires, and animal and plant extinction, even the rise of infectious diseases. Since vectors such as mosquitoes, ticks, algae, and other germ-carrying life forms increase and spread with warming temperatures, they are more likely to come into contact with people and cause disease. As Hurricane Katrina made clear, environmental damage has serious economic consequences including loss of jobs, displacement and increased taxes at every level.

The Politics

More and more, people who used to doubt global warming are beginning to see it as a credible threat. As the scientific community insisted and public perception shifted, the Bush administration has joined environmentalists, and many top business leaders, in acknowledging the real threats that global warming poses.

Global warming is the world’s problem; it’s not just an issue for one or a few nations. However, just a handful of countries significantly contribute to the problem, with the United States being responsible for more greenhouse gas pollution than South America, the Middle East, Africa, Australia, Japan and Asia combined.

U.S. vehicles have lower fuel-efficiency standards than Japan, Europe, Australia, Canada, and even China, which is accused of too few environmental controls to balance its quickly-growing economy.

So why is the U.S. so far behind on fuel-efficiency standards? Congress has been hesitant to raise the standards; American auto manufacturers claim they’d lose money and jobs and auto safety would be compromised.

However, both houses of Congress approved a measure in the Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2008 requiring a thorough report on the ramifications of climate change making our nation less secure. In that bill, they focus on the security ramifications arising from Hurricane Katrina and other natural disasters.

Global Warming in the Courts

Even since the administration has changed its tune, the agency that we would logically expect to deal with this danger -- the Environmental Protection Agency -- has not regulated heat-trapping gasses in any way. And President Bush maintains that the EPA does not have the authority to regulate them since they are not specifically mentioned in the Clean Air Act. But the Supreme Court disagrees: on April 2, 2007, the court ruled that the EPA does have the power to regulate the gasses, and further, that it should.

The Supreme Court decided 5-to-4 that the EPA defied the Clean Air Act by failing to regulate heat-trapping gases – and in some cases actually preventing or holding up states from doing so themselves. The ruling not only gives the EPA the authority to regulate “tailpipe emissions” from cars and trucks, but holds it accountable to do just that -- or face further litigation.

The ruling supports state governments, like California, that have already begun to reduce emissions. It also has basically given government the green light to regulate greenhouse gasses. Placing the responsibility firmly on the shoulders of the federal government, the court also found that even though other countries like China and India might increase their emissions, "[a] reduction in domestic emissions would slow the pace of global emissions increases, no matter what happens elsewhere.”

The decision sends a bigger message that our government is obligated to do something about global warming – regardless of whether the rest of the world goes along with us -- and that individuals and the free market cannot, and should not be expected to regulate emissions on their own.

The science is global and the consequences are global but preventing global warming will require not only new technological solutions, but also concerted action among governments and their citizens worldwide.

Biodiversity: More is better

Species have been going extinct since the inception of life on Earth as we know it. However, in the past 150 years, the extinction rates have been accelerated due to human influences.

Although there have been impressive scientific gains made in this past century, what we know is minuscule compared with everything that remains unknown. But we need to pay attention. As humans continue to render new technologies, which appear to have enormous benefits, human knowledge regarding how the world works is too limited to foresee all the consequences of that technology on the environment.

We know that we are all part of one life-support system, one ecosystem, and one food chain. Biodiversity, or the range of species in a given environment, has an effect on how that environment functions as a system. And these ecosystems provide incredibly important services to humans, including supplying the food and raw materials, regulating climate, disease, and water quality, supporting soil formation, and providing recreational and aesthetic benefits.

When it comes to biodiversity, the removal of one tiny organism, like algae, can have profound consequences for the entire ecosystem, even altering the growth of the entire forest. When any one species or place where a species lives (habitat) dies off, it is not available to eat something else or to be eaten - and so on, down (or up) the chain. When a species dies off, others can grow more than they should and where they shouldn't.

There is a general consensus among scientists that today, we are on the verge of a major biodiversity crisis. An article signed by 19 top international scientists, says that 12% of bird species, 23% of mammals, 25% of conifers, 32% of amphibians and 52% of cycads (an ancient family of palm-like plants) are currently facing extinction.

And how we deal with issues like global warming now could make a big difference in the future: climate change could conceivably lead to the disappearance of an additional 15% to 37% of species by 2055.

Although we don't yet know all the events that can be triggered by any one disappearance, we do know that the results of declining biodiversity could be catastrophic for our species. For example, we know that we need forests, even in far off places, because they affect the air we breathe. We know that the temperatures of the oceans directly affect our weather, especially the droughts and heavy rains.

Biodiversity affects our daily lives in more subtle ways, too, which may not be immediately obvious. More than 20,000 different plant species are being used for medicinal purposes, and over 40% of drugs prescribed by doctors rely on active ingredients from organisms found in nature. And those are just the medicines we know about.

The transmission of some diseases can also be reduced by diversity. We get Lyme disease from ticks, but these same ticks bite other mammals too. Research shows that when there are fewer other mammals as targets, Lyme disease rates go up among humans. And so do health care expenses.

Like so many environmental issues, biodiversity is closely linked to economics. The loss of biodiversity generates huge costs for communities in ways that may many of us don’t realize. For example, degraded wetlands and forests are no longer able to filter and store water, forcing cities to build expensive water treatment plants instead. The availability of clean water from the Delaware-Catskill watershed saved New York City an estimated $6 to $8 billion of tax dollars in construction costs for a water filtration plant.

Past economic models have not included the environment. But that may be changing as the economic costs of declining biodiversity become clearer. The first open conference held by Diversitas, an international organization that encourages and coordinates biodiversity research across disciplines attracted twice the anticipated number of applicants, and featured standing-room-only crowds in November 2005.

Population growth and consumption of natural resources

How many people can the Earth support? Within 50 years there could be between 7.9 and 10.9 billion people, according to United Nations population projections. What will be the quality of their lives? Everyone will need resources - food, water, croplands, and oceans. How can people's needs be met without exhausting those systems?

According to a world population report produced by the United Nations in 1991, "More people are using more resources with more intensity than any point in human history." We know the earth's resources are not infinite. Take water, for example. Right now, a fifth of the world's population - about 1.1 billion -- people live in regions of water scarcity. Global water use doubled between 1960 and 2000 according to the World Wildlife Fund. Because of population growth alone, fresh water will become scarcer and scarcer. It is predicted that by 2050, 4.2 billion people will be affected.

Water shortages create food shortages. Irrigated farming to feed the world's population has already seen inland seas drained dry and rivers slowly vanish to a trickle. Today 40% of the world's food comes from irrigated land. When there is little income, people convert forestlands into farmlands, deplete the ocean's fisheries for food, and cut down trees for fuel and building materials.

Deforestation starts a cycle of soil erosion and flooding that destroy farmlands, rivers, and wetlands. When wetlands disappear, plants and animals lose their lives.

So what happens in poor areas of the globe will affect our health and well-being.

Although the population is still growing overall, birth rates have dropped faster than United Nations forecasters expected. In the mid-1970s the average woman bore 3.9 children; now the average is 2.8. Many industrialized populations have stopped growing or are even slowly shrinking.

The environmental choices that industrial nations make – the policies that we vote into place- will nonetheless have profound effects on the overall consumption of natural resources. At the current rates, a child born in an industrialized country will consume and pollute thirty to fifty times more over his or her lifetime than a child born in a developing nation.

A comprehensive solution to the problem will require looking at both population growth and consumption patterns – and understanding the extent to which we are increasingly interconnected with populations around the globe.

The US in particular will face difficult policy choices. The high standard of life that we currently enjoy carries a steep environmental price-tag: with less than 5 percent of global population, the United States accounts for about one fourth of global consumption. Recently there has been a movement towards more sustainable practices, but a bigger shift will also require government to set and enforce national standards.

On a local level, our daily consumer choices impact the air or water quality of the city or state in which we live. As individuals, we can each choose to recycle, or reduce the amount of waste we produce. These seemingly small decisions can also have a global impact. For example, choosing to purchase locally grown food reduces the amount of fossil fuels required to package and ship the food, limiting the amount of CO₂ emissions produced that pollute the atmosphere we all share.

Lifestyles & Values

Suburban sprawl and urban development

Should some land be left undeveloped? Open space is not only aesthetically pleasing; it attracts tourists and sports enthusiasts who spend money in the area when they come to play.

However, if you are a land owner and someone offers you money, should you think about your own pocketbook or the future of the neighborhood for the next generation? People need to get together and play fair. In some places governments are offering tax dollars to land owners who are willing to put their land into a nature conservancy to preserve open space.

If old industrial sites are cleaned up with tax dollars and tax credits, there may be less need to build in the suburbs. Smart politicians can help make these trades happen.

Population growth and sexuality education

Many of the world's poorest countries will double their populations by 2025, increasing poverty in much of the developing world. As this happens their will be more dependent children for each working adult. And the AIDS epidemic is making it worse. This makes many of us feel that the situation is hopeless.

Across the globe, over one billion teenagers are now entering their reproductive years. This is the largest group of teenagers in history. Everyone should know that the shape of the world for generations to come will be determined by whether or not these young people have access to basic family planning education and services.

Some individuals, religious groups and government officials want people to have scientific information and modern sexuality education. There are also individuals, religious groups, and government officials who believe that babies are conceived by the will of God and that offering contraceptive information and services will lead women and men to make wrong decisions.

Some people are afraid. They know that any education about sexuality will inform individuals that an abortion is possible and that homosexuality is not a matter of choice. These people restrict information as a way of controlling the behavior of others and, thus, preventing behaviors they believe to be morally wrong.

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