The greatest market failure the world has seen.

• Author: Hetrick, Sonya
• Position: Energy conservation - Report

While Americans concerned about global warming are diligently turning off the water while they brush their teeth, 137,000 million gallons per day are being withdrawn for US generation of thermoelectric-power. (1) While shoppers are stressing out over paper or plastic, US industry emits over 2.7 billion pounds of toxic chemicals into the air each day. (2) One reason for this preoccupation with energy reduction based on individual acts is that big business has cunningly co-opted the meaning of environmental sustainability rather than accepting responsibility for its culpability in the problem. Their drive is profit. Recognizing the increasing number of Americans who don't want to support companies that harm the environment, they flood the airwaves with newly-greened corporate images but avoid making any substantial changes in their business practices.

Americans must not allow themselves to be so misled. "Clean coal" is an oxymoron. The harmful impacts of global warming, acid rain, ozone depletion, and chemical toxins on natural ecosystems and human populations have long been acknowledged. Human economic activity is inducing changes in the level of greenhouse gases greater than those associated with the onset and termination of the last ice age. (3) Present-day computational models have basically no way of knowing what kind of massive reorganization of the ocean-atmospheric system could occur, nor the human suffering that could result. Adding in uncertainty and irreversibility, the issue of global climate change becomes more serious, not less. Action to cut back the use of fossil fuels need not await a full cost-benefit analysis.

In order to achieve the 50-80% level of greenhouse gas reductions that scientists believe will be necessary to avert environmental catastrophe, large-scale structural changes are necessary. As concluded in 1987 by the World Commission on Environment and Development and affirmed in 1992 at the Rio Earth Summit, sound incentive structures are key. (4) If humankind is to reach a sustainable future, environmentalists cannot merely issue pleas for voluntary emissions reductions. Polluters will not suddenly decide to account for the social and environmental costs of their business. Rather, considerations for ecological sustainability must be integrated into practical policy and decision-making.

As a 1992 World Bank study found, current policy incentives, especially within the energy sector, are environmentally destructive, economically inefficient, and trade distorting. (5) Energy is quite heavily subsidized, by $240 billion per year, (6) and over 80% of subsidies flow to oil, coal, and gas. [4, p. 49] The traditional justification for subsidies is to make possible economic growth. But current programs are "ineffective in fueling economic growth or in reducing the vulnerability of the...