The Threat of Exhalation

Pardon me for living.

From today’s New York Times:

The Environmental Protection Agency on Friday formally declared carbon dioxide and five other heat-trapping gases to be pollutants that endanger public health and welfare, setting in motion a process that will lead to the regulation of the gases for the first time in the United States.[Note 1, emphasis mine.]

So, according to the EPA, the simple act of my breathing is a threat to the public.

Now, lest I be accused of hyperbole here, I readily acknowledge that the EPA statement really pertains only to exhalation, not to the entire process of breathing.  Thus, when I inhale, I am not endangering public health and welfare according to the Obama administration.  (There may come a day when I must be concerned about inhaling more than my “fair share” of the vital gas we call air, but that is not yet on the regulatory agenda as far as I know.)  This wonderful freedom to inhale gives me great comfort, not only because I can do so without harming my neighbors, but for the very practical and selfish reason that my body makes great use of oxygen molecules.  

But alas, I have found that every time I inhale, within a few seconds I fall to the inevitable temptation to pollute the earth with that vile human discharge: carbon dioxide.  This is a happy circumstance for plants, of course, which would consider (if they had the capability to consider anything at all) carbon dioxide to be rather more like food than a pollutant.  However, the various governments of the world - the ones constituting the “fierce international criticism” before which the president and The New York Times quake - think otherwise.

It is not only the executive branch of our federal government that is now committed to regulating this ubiquitous "pollutant," carbon dioxide.  Both President Obama and EPA administrator Lisa P. Jackson would “much prefer that Congress address global warming rather than have the E.P.A. tackle it through administrative action.”[Note 2.]  Congressional action would have the merit of formalizing the legality of controlling our carbon dioxide production, which the president might reasonably guess to be more palatable to certain elements of the public than his steady stream of executive decrees.  In any case, neither branch is likely to meet much resistance from the Supreme Court, which in 2007 ruled that the Clean Air Act gave the EPA authority to regulate “greenhouse gases.”  

NOTES

1.  “E.P.A. Clears Way for Greenhouse Gas Rules,” The New York Times, 17 Apr 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/18/science/earth/18endanger.html?_r=1&hpw.

2.  This quote comes from an earlier version of the article in Note 1, which is no longer online.

“Earth Hour” in Malaysia

I just returned from a ridiculously long business trip, something I intend never to repeat.  I rarely spend even two days away from home for work purposes, never mind two weeks – and I like it that way.

 

Anyway, I was in a Singapore hotel on the evening of the “Earth Hour” anti-festivities.  A note in the hotel room reminded guests to turn off the lights from 8:30 to 9:30 PM as a means of protesting industrial civilization.  I used the occasion to turn on all the lights and celebrate, in my own quiet way, the human achievements that freedom has made possible.

 

A few days later, while I was in Malaysia, I was astonished to see a similar protest described in the opinion pages of a local newspaper.  The title of the piece was “Earth Hour is a total farce,” and it was written by a Malaysian native, Mohd Peter Davis:

 

As the lights went out for Earth Hour on March 28, organized by World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) to protest against man-made global warming, our scientist family did exactly the opposite.

 

We switched on every single light in our energy-efficient bungalow in Bandar Baru Bangi.  We held this mini festival of lights to say that mankind’s increasing use of electricity has nothing to do with global warming…

 

[Said his wife of the Earth Hour campaign,] “This is immoral and an insult to everything we have achieved.  I studied under oil lamps until I was 16.  Electricity got us out of poverty and built Malaysia.  It transformed society.  If anyone messes up our electricity supply, it’s back to oil lamps and padi farming…  Earth needs more and more electricity.  That is how we measure our improving standard of living.”[Note 1, emphasis mine.]

 

 

Mr. Davis made several other good points in his article, including the fact that carbon dioxide is not an environmental poison and that the “global warming” that results from natural fluctuations of environmental conditions has tremendous benefits to mankind.  Unfortunately, he subverted his article somewhat with his last paragraph, which seems bizarrely out of place, by pining longingly for big government programs of the past (“Atoms for Peace, the Green Revolution and the Man on the Moon mission”), and applauding the use of Malaysia’s “economic stimulus package” to fund scientific research.  Despite this defect, I was thrilled to see such a sentiment expressed in a Muslim country halfway around the world, especially as it stressed the immorality of the “Earth Hour” protests. 

 

 

NOTES

1.  “Earth Hour is a total farce,” New Straits Times, 3 Apr 2009, p. 19.