Hello friends, this is the Environment Show and welcome.
There's quite a number of civilisations which lie around us, which we can see for ourselves,
where the population increased, the Australian armed resources started to become too great,
and those civilisations collapsed.
When gasoline costs a dollar or a dollar or a dollar or a dollar or a dollar or twenty,
the customer doesn't say, oh I'm worried about this global warming thing or our energy security.
He says, you know, last time I bought a car was five years ago,
and since that time my income has gone up a little bit, my kids got bigger,
and we'd really deserve a little more comfort, so it goes up in car size.
Sir Crispin Tickle, great Britain's United Nations representative,
telling us that just because we have more scientific technology than any previous civilisation,
if we don't use our technology properly and timely,
ours will be numbered among the lost civilisations.
And Michael Schwars, Ford Motor Company representative,
protesting the recent announcement that New York State will be adopting the California Auto-emission Standards,
regardless of what the federal government is doing.
Two of our guests and the topics this time on the Environment Show.
The Environment Show is a production of WAMC,
made possible by the J.M. Kaplan Fund of New York, and this is Bruce Robertson.
With the passage of the original Clean Air Bill in 1970,
the state of California became the only one in the nation
to take the Auto-emission Standards in the Bill and go one better.
Now, as more and more cities get added to the non-attainment list
for failing to live up to the 1970 standards for basic clean air,
states are starting to realise that maybe those California standards
ought to be their standards too.
That in fact is the intent of the new 1990 Clean Air Bill now before the Senate and the House of Representatives.
Supporters of the Bill would like to see the California measure strengthened and made national.
But U.S. Congress is slow to act, too slow,
says New York State Commissioner of Environmental Conservation.
Thomas Jorling this week announced that New York State
would not be waiting any longer for a federal bill
and would instead take the initiative and craft one of its own,
based on the California standard,
about which, he says,
they will produce a clean, durable car,
100,000 mile performance,
90% of the vehicles produced on the assembly line will meet the standards
and the standards themselves will be a much improved over what we presently
have available for sale in New York.
Jorling says these steps are essential in order to achieve healthful air,
and he says that New York State plans to proceed with these regulations
unless and until the federal government draws up a bigger and better bill.
There is no question that we would all be better served if Congress adopted
the California car in the year 1993 as the national car,
and then when a step further and adopted what is referred to often in the national context as a Tier 2 car,
even better performance in the year 2003.
Congress, however, seems to be reluctant to adopt that kind of a national car.
It doesn't seem as concerned about the health and welfare of the American people
as we are here in New York.
So we are left with the recourse of proceeding on our own,
with the only two we have available to us and that is adopting the California standards.
New York State Commissioner of Environmental Conservation Thomas Jorling,
announcing the intention of New York State to set auto emission levels
as per the California regulations.
Those regulations call for .25 grams per mile of hydrocarbon emissions,
.4 grams per mile for nitrogen oxide emissions,
and a carbon monoxide emission standard of 3.4 grams per mile.
According to tables supplied by the American Lung Association,
the current federal standards allow .41 hydrocarbon grams per mile,
1 gram per mile of nitrogen oxide, and a 3.4 gram per mile carbon monoxide emission standard.
To complicate matters further, under the compromises hammered out recently in Senate negotiations,
some of the federal standards also will be changing,
how much and when we will have to wait and see.
In any case, New York State is not going to wait and see.
The plan though is not without its critics,
Michael Schwars is manager of emissions control for Ford Motor Company.
He says it is both premature and unnecessary for New York State
to adopt these standards at this time.
The California Federal Emissions Standards will be nearly identical in the mid-1990s.
Clearly, the direction that Congress is headed right now on both sides
is towards standards that are either equivalent or more stringent
than the California standards in the mid-1990s.
So we don't think that it really makes sense in terms of taking on the extra administrative burden for the state
to have standards in place that won't net that many emission benefit beyond what they will have
by simply through the federal requirements.
Speaking at the same public hearing at which Commissioner Jorling testified,
one of four planned around the state, Schwars says he is concerned that if enacted
the New York State law would actually require breaking the federal law.
Under the principles of the 1970 Clean Air Law, states are prohibited from requiring auto manufacturers
to provide a special car for the individual state.
This would change under Jorling's plan.
Schwars says he represents the other auto manufacturers when he says that the problem
is not that they don't have the technology to build these more fuel-efficient cars with less emissions.
The problem Schwars says is with the driving public.
When gasoline costs a dollar or a dollar ten or a dollar twenty,
the customer doesn't say, oh, I'm worried about this global warming thing or energy security.
He says, you know, last time I bought a car was five years ago
and since that time my income has gone up a little bit, my kids got bigger
and we'd really deserve a little more comfort, so it goes up in car size.
And that's just the market, that's the way the market is.
And there's not much we can do about it.
With all of the wrangling in Congress over terms of the new bill, Schwars says believe it or not,
the auto industry is actually in favor of the California standard.
At this point, the industry by and large is endorsing.
The California standards for the whole nation, which is not what we would have anticipated.
It's much more stringent than really warranted by the general level of air quality in the other 49 states.
But we're realistic politically and we realize that we're the houses now and where the Senate is now
and the fact that very key important legislators have agreed to compromise
and made commitments to those compromises that it's fruitless for us to advocate something less.
Michael Schwars of Ford Motor Company.
The point here is that according to Commissioner Jorling, there is something that can be done about it.
Under his plan, the state would come under the new regulations beginning with the 1993 model cars available
in late 1992. Schwars urging the state to table the idea,
says the auto industry is working to reduce air pollution in other ways,
developing flexible fuel cars where you can mix and match to your desire and the availability.
Methanol or compressed natural gas, even electric cars.
Jorling says his plan is even cheaper.
The cost per car at the most will be less than $100.
That's the cost of a wheel cover.
It's less than the cost of an electric antenna.
It's less than the cost of a racing stripe painted on the side of a car.
Surely those kinds of costs are merited in order to achieve healthful air for the people of New York.
New York State Commissioner of Environmental Conservation Thomas Jorling.
This is the Environment Show, and I'm Bruce Robertson.
Time now for our weekly connection with Chris Valentine,
Northeast Regional Director of the Sierra Club.
Chris has been lobbying on Capitol Hill as debate goes on in the U.S. Senate.
The Senate is now on a brief break, giving both sides an opportunity to retreat and regroup.
Chris joins us today from regional headquarters in Saratoga Springs, New York.
Chris tells us that just because the senators are not in town,
that's not meant things have come to a screeching halt.
Indeed, the action shifts back to the individual states of the senators that are on the committee
and senators throughout the country.
Environmentalists are obviously working very hard to secure support back at the state level,
using such tools as what we call recess meetings,
where we try and schedule a meeting with the senator to face-to-face express our concerns about the bill.
The big action this week is on the House of Representatives side.
In the Energy and Commerce Committee, where for the first time since October of 89,
we're starting to see some movement.
And indeed, as we speak, introductory statements are going on at the committee level,
and there's possibility that we will start to see some markup of the various provisions on the House side.
Now, is that something a little bit problematic for you as a lobbyist who have to divide your resources
between the Senate and the House of Representatives side?
On the environmental side, it's very difficult because it means that we're trying to cover both the House
and the Senate simultaneously.
On the industry side, I think they just go out and hire more hired guns.
John Dingell is pretty much leading the fray over the House.
So what is your evaluation? What's the inside the beltway evaluation of that?
Our evaluation is sort of the flip of the Senate.
On the House side, the Energy and Commerce Committee is a much less friendly environment
than the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee was, where we got a good bill.
The House floor is the opportunity for us to improve whatever comes out of this committee.
Based on what we've got right now, the compromised Senate version versus the preliminary work in the House of Representatives,
how would you characterize the major differences?
The major differences continue to be in the area of air toxics.
What balloons are going to be regulated, whether or not there will be zones of an inhabitability where citizens are bought out by chemical companies
that choose not to meet standards.
And then also in the area of alternative fuels, we expect action on the Senate side to center on restoration of the alternative fuels proposal
that was the centerpiece of the Bush administration clean air proposal.
We expect to see that on the Senate side, on the House side, it remains questionable.
Well, you'll be heading back down then when the Senate reconvenes as everyone regathers their force for the last final push.
Chris Valentine, Northeast Regional Director of the Sierra Club, normally reporting for us on the Environment Show from Capitol Hill,
but today reporting from Northeast Regional Director Headquarters.
We'll talk to you again next week, Chris.
Thank you, Bruce.
In the middle news note now, Massachusetts and Nova Scotia have agreed to cooperate on environmental problems.
The Massachusetts Department of Environmental Planning says the two regions recently signed an agreement providing for a joint committee on the environment.
Deputy Commissioner Kenneth Hay says the team will focus on acid rain and global warming.
He says Nova Scotia is the first Canadian province to establish such a link with Massachusetts.
This is the Environment Show, and I'm Bruce Robertson.
The History Books are full of stories about the rise and the fall of kingdoms, the reigns of kings, and the campaigns of wars.
Events played out over immense periods of time.
Remember, won't you the timeline used by your social studies teacher to depict the great epics, the dynasties, and the ages, the age of discovery, and such?
Normally, we need several generations to get a grand perspective, but consider the rate of change in just the past six months.
The Shake Up in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, the Freeing of Nelson Mandela, the Elections in Nicaragua, these and more we have long expected.
These are exciting times for environmental changes, too, says Sir Crispin Tickel.
Sir Crispin, the permanent representative from Great Britain to the United Nations, says that we have, perhaps for the first time, the opportunity to understand what we have done, and moreover what we should do.
In a recent address, Sir Crispin outlined what he sees as the key points in the burgeoning environmental movement in the last 20 years.
He says it all appears to have started in 1970, with the club of Rome, and a report titled The Limits to Growth.
A lot of people said that report was wrong or was extrapolating tendencies which shouldn't be extrapolated and was fundamentally misleading.
The same time that report began to set a tone of concern about what was happening in the environment which was not there before.
He was followed by in 1972 the First World Conference on the Environment which led to the creation of a special United Nations Environment Program.
That in turn was followed in 1979 when President Carter commissioned a body called Global 2000 to try and see what the world would look like at the end of the century.
And I had a modest role in that. Then came perhaps the most important document of the lot because it was that which made the real impact on world opinion rather than opinion in industrial countries.
And that was the Bruntland Commission report which was commissioned in 1984 and was published in 1987.
Sir Crispin says it was that report that really laid out for the first time the various linkages between environmental perils and the prospects for solutions.
In his recent talk at the New York State Museum he said that if we examine our collective history correctly we shall see that human beings have always had an impact on the environment.
The balance of things really becoming threatened for the first time by the start of the industrial revolution.
Now one of the consequences of the industrial revolution which after all is only 250 years old is that we are able to understand however imperfectly our predicament but our predicament is essentially one of the consequences of the industrial revolution.
And Sir Crispin notes that we have always had this cause and affect relationship with our world.
The moment that human beings move from a hunter gatherer of society and I believe there are things in this museum which will illustrate that.
The moment we move from a hunter gatherer of society to an agricultural one and stability and the first cities we began obviously to change the environment in which we lived.
We were the first animals to do so. You know as well as anyone how much beavers can change an environment.
They changed the environment even more quickly than the fending of a forest.
And even the humble coral likewise changes the environment in order to survive.
And so it's a fundamental characteristic of living creatures whether mammals or others that if they can change the environment to suit their circumstances they will.
And that was what happened after the last ice age ended. The hunter gatherer of societies became agricultural societies and human beings settled down.
And as soon as this happened we began to clear the land, fell the great trees and build cities.
And so someone looking at the earth from far away would have seen 6,000, 7,000 years ago as I say once the ice was really out of the way.
These great changes taking place in the environment of the world and he wanted to perhaps if you were looking from far enough away.
Why was the earth changing in this interesting fashion? There must be something doing it.
And that's something of course is we humans. We who straight away started to multiply.
Population increase started to put great strains on the natural resources.
What says Sir Crispin?
Most of those strains were unseen. No one quite understood what was going on.
Because the timescale was then long enough for people not to understand what was going on.
And because distances were also immense to great people did not know what was happening in other parts of the world.
But there's quite a number of civilizations which lie around us which we can see for ourselves where the population increased.
The strain on resources started to become too great and those civilizations collapsed.
Some notable examples, the great civilizations in the Indus Valley and the Tigris and Euphrates, in Manoncrete the destruction of trees there led to collapse.
The same can also be said of the Mayan and the Aztec civilizations.
These processes have been active for thousands of years and would be going on today worth not for the fact that we are more self-aware now than ever before.
So the question is can we learn from history? Can we learn from self-scrutiny?
Well the problem says Sir Crispin is that we are not yet all working together.
One of the great problems of the world today is that the countries that have labelled themselves developing countries is that they somehow believe that if they just try hard enough they will have the same kind of standards of living, the same kind of organisation of society that you have in North America and we have in Europe.
This is a profound illusion and it causes a lot of disturbance and dismay because there is no way in which countries without resources, without water, without the ability to feed populations of a large kind can in fact.
It can in fact go the way in which our societies have gone.
Not of course that the way our society has gone is in fact any model for copying. Nevertheless the question remains what to do.
I think that all governments in the world have recognised that you have to take a global approach. It cannot be solved by the United States, it cannot be solved in Western Europe, it cannot be solved anywhere.
You need the whole earth and every government and every person in it has to be brought in.
In fact, says Sir Christman a lot toward this has already been done, a fairly long list of international summit meetings if you will on the environment including the meeting in the Hague, the economic summit of last July.
The key is to have an interactive system whereby governments can play a role and moreover where individuals can play a role in those governments and to set the whole thing up it is necessary says Sir Christman to have a scientific foundation.
Because Sir Christman is the most government, so only elected for short periods of time and they don't want to take decisions which could be 30 or 40 years of to deal with problems which are 30 or 40 years in the future.
Sir Christman says that scientists now are talking about really three different ways to analyse our problems and the potential solutions.
They talk about remedies, they talk about mitigation and they talk about adaptation.
As to the first Sir Christman says finding and developing remedies is not really practical given the scope of any one problem, so large that anything applied as a remedy will of necessity take 10, 15 or even up to 100 years to see results.
Somewhat analogous to taking aspirin for a headache you expect to have to wait for a while for the medication to take effect.
So that leaves the other two mitigation and adaptation. First mitigation.
The classic examples are energy efficiency. We all waste energy on the most immense scale at the moment.
I'm sure you know that bubbles, electric light bulbs, at the moment they emit roughly 75% heat and 25% light.
There are bulbs that have been invented which do exactly the converse. They emit 75% light and then it 25% heat and they are very good on your electricity bills for the end of the month.
There are many industrial processes by which we can increase energy efficiency. We have to look at mass transport, we have to look at new forms of urban planning and infrastructure and we have to look above all at the better use of vehicles.
Adaptation too is going to force some big changes, finding different types of plants for example that can grow in increasingly hostile climates, dealing too with the possibility of rising sea levels and rising temperatures, forcing vast migrations.
Environmental refugees is what we're going to call them. Sir Chris Mantickle is author of a recent book, Climate Change and World Affairs, published by Harvard Press.
As a final observation he says that the ultimate solutions will rest in a coordinated effort with participation by all.
We cannot, he says, continue to hold international conferences and expect the problems to go away just because we had a conference on the subject.
The first thing that governments have got to do is to adapt their own internal structures to deal with it. You need interagency mechanisms in Washington, you need interagency mechanisms in London, you need them in Moscow, in Paris and everywhere else.
To try and make certain that national policies are properly put together. You can't have the Secretary of State for Transport make a decision to increase the quantity of cars on the roads and to cover yet more of the fields with concrete on the same day
that somebody is saying that we must reduce carbon emissions, set ourselves targets for reducing carbon emissions at all the rest. These two dead match.
Sir Chris Mantickle noted author and economic expert with a special interest and expertise on the environment and Great Britain's permanent representative to the United Nations.
He was one of the officials responsible for leading successful negotiations resulting in Great Britain entering the European common market.
He spoke recently at the New York State Museum in Albany, part of a lecture series on the environment from a global perspective.
You're listening to the environment show and this is Bruce Robertson.
American journalist Friedrich Bever returned recently from Czechoslovakia where he had gone on something of a working vacation.
Usually covering environmental affairs for the Bennington banner in Bennington Vermont, Bever wanted to see how environmental affairs were being dealt with after the Czech revolution.
He tells us that in Czechoslovakia, environmentalists speaking out with a newly found free voice now find themselves in something of an ironic position.
After years, generations really, of burning coal, the nation is now nearing the end of its coal reserves.
But more importantly, after all of those generations, the burning of coal has profoundly fouled the land, the air and the water.
The ironic position is that environmentalists are now forced to advocate for nuclear power and accepting this is even more astounding when you learn that they are tremendously fearful of the nuclear power plants being built, fearing the Russian technology being used, the same that built and operated Chernobyl.
Still says Bever, the environmental people are saying yes to nuclear power but it has to be in the right place and it has to be the right size and it has to be not Russian technology.
Let's use French technology, let's spread it around the country and let's have smaller installations.
Because the environmentalists see they cannot keep on burning brown coal as it's called.
They have to update their energy production, solar power isn't an option in Czechoslovakia, they're too far north.
Even if they were to continue burning coal at their present rate, they run out of their own supply in 20 years.
So they have to do something and nuclear power is seen as the answer.
So environmentalists are in a precarious position of advocating for nuclear power because in this case it turns out to be the lesser of two evils for the time being.
Exactly, it's interesting because here in the United States, nuclear power has at least its publicists have had a resurgence because of the global warming question.
And environmentalists here say no, no, no, no, that's all wrong, we still don't need nuclear power.
But in Czechoslovakia it's not that way. The environmentalists say yes we may well need nuclear power because we have to produce reduced stack emissions.
Unlike debate going on in this country where there are both those who say acid rain is a problem and those who say it is not, in Czechoslovakia the situation is much more pronounced.
You can smell it, you can walk down the street and you can smell it and it smells acrid.
You look around, this is a Prague, it's full of statues, it's a beautiful city, but the statues are eroded, they're black with suck.
And their features are obscured from the acid fallout.
Now, the some environmentalist civic forum say yes we probably will need nuclear power in certain areas.
But more than that we need to reduce our consumption, the same thing that environmentalists here say.
Bevor went to Czechoslovakia initially to find out about this debate. He says he had the most amazing good fortune to get in touch with the people really very high up in the new civic forum government headed by President Watslav Havl.
Bevor says he talked to people like the chairman of the Environmental Committee of Civic Forum, the rough equivalent of Bill Riley, EPA minister here in the United States.
Mr. Iván Dažmall.
Mr. Dažmall said to me for 40 years we've only been able to think about what we wanted to do, only dream and now we can act.
Now he's still a pessimist and he says so. I don't think that a lot is going to change but at least now I can try to change things.
He was in jail for several years for his activities as a student.
But he and others say until the economy is up and on its feet the environment will be secondary.
Every political party he says we'll have to consider the environment but it will still be running second to concerns about the economy and the public's desire for material goods.
So for now the Czech government's solution to its national environmental troubles is political not exclusively scientific.
To set the nation on a new remedial course Dažmall has proposed four steps be taken.
First of all the switch to the free market economy, putting market price on energy will give the incentive to reduce energy consumption and to be more efficient about it.
Secondly he wants to tax the use of energy and put the monies that come from that into a fund which would be used to purchase desol forization technology and monitoring technologies from the west and equipment.
Thirdly and this is an interesting point he wants to put effective penalties on polluters.
There have been penalties the government has given lip service to regulating polluters and they've even find industries who have exceeded government standards in pollution.
But what has happened until the revolution was that the local municipal communist officials would reduce the fines and return for favors from the industries in their provinces.
The fourth step is the creation of pollution vouchers whereby one factory has given a set of standards and if it comes in under those standards the unused portion may be sold off.
This idea is widely popular in the Bush administration as well for controlling stack emissions in the Midwest.
Frederick Bever is a writer for the Bennington banner in Bennington Vermont. Usually covering environmental affairs in southern Vermont he took a working vacation to Czechoslovakia recently to see if these environmental problems and their solutions are in fact of global proportions.
And as we have seen they are. Well that is our show for this week before we go we'd like to thank and welcome a couple of new stations to the environment show.
Hello to friends at UWM listing in Milwaukee glad to have you with us and in San Bernardino California. Hello to KVCR FM.
If you have any comments or concerns or something you think we ought to know about feel free to drop us a line at the environment show we're at WAMC 318 Central Avenue in Albany New York and the zip code here is 1 2 2 0 6.
The environment show is a program about the environment the air water soil wildlife and people of our common habitat.
The environment show is a production of WAMC Dr. Alan Shartock is executive producer. This is Bruce Robertson. The environment show is made possible by the J.M. Kaplan Fund of New York.
