The Imperial City

So We’re Green. Now What?

Then there’s Wal-Mart. We’re supposed to hate them because they drive local shopkeepers out of business, treat employees stingily, and say they don’t care if they ever open a store in New York City. But now the single largest private U.S. consumer of electricity has committed over the next very few years to cutting energy use by 30 percent and reducing carbon-dioxide emissions by 20 percent. Given that shopping at Wal-Mart is the closest thing we have to a universal American experience, it’s hard to imagine a more significant driver and symptom of the new eco-Zeitgeist.

There is still a minority of dead-enders, those 27 percent of Americans who insist to Gallup that global warming is nothing to worry about now—a number strikingly similar to the fraction who approve of the job Bush is doing. And they will continue to have their avatars, like James Inhofe, the ranking Republican on the Senate’s environment committee, who says “man-made global warming is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.”

We’re coming to the end of one of our regular 30-year cycles of laissez-faire-ism, however. The practical details of how and how much we will regulate carbon emissions remain to be worked out. For starters, federal gas-mileage standards haven’t been raised since the eighties—but soon they will be, perhaps along the lines of a bipartisan Senate bill introduced last month that would phase in a ten-miles-per-gallon increase over ten years. The big picture almost everyone now gets, just as Ronald Reagan’s big-picture convictions (about government overreach, about the Soviet empire) successfully shifted political paradigms in the eighties. And on this issue it’s the Inhofes who are about to become the shrill, impotent, out-of-touch paleos.

We are only coming to the end of the very beginning, though. Let’s say we elect a Democratic president next year and Congress remains Democratic. But … is our 40-year target for cutting emissions to be 40 percent, as the USCAP coalition proposes, or 50 percent (the IPCC, Nancy Pelosi), or 80 percent (John Edwards)? And exactly how do we make the new limits stick? The cock-up of Europe’s two-year-old “cap and trade” Kyoto scheme is not encouraging.

But let’s say our apparatus is worked out by 2010, and we go full speed ahead on a radical new set of regulatory and tax-and-tariff mechanisms to reduce the use of oil and coal, and to bring every possible form of alternative energy online. Alternative sources like, say, a miraculous carbon-free technology—nuclear power, that is. One highly inconvenient truth is that nuclear fission is the most practical large-scale source of green power available.

And then it will probably take decades to know if our grand new greening schemes are actually working. Unlike the big national engineering projects at mid-century, the interstate highways and the space program, this isn’t a matter of spending many federal billions and then in a decade marveling at our new road system and astronauts on the moon. It will be more on the scale of the New Deal plus World War II plus the Cold War—but combined with something like the disquieting uncertainty and open-endedness of the war on terror.

Americans have an intensely ambivalent relationship with sin and redemption. Heedlessly ruining the global climate is plainly sinful, and we are a people desperate to feel good about our shining city on a hill. But we also hated Jimmy Carter’s guilt-inducing sermons. (As I do some of the current green epiphenomena: The other day a Whole Foods clerk refused to give me Splenda with my cup of coffee—artificial sweeteners, their Website explains, lack “ideological compatibility.”) Americans have shown themselves willing to undertake epic battles against evil only when there’s somebody else to hold accountable—Nazis, communists, radical Islamists. But blaming and changing our own Homer Simpson–ish ways of life? We couldn’t even make Prohibition work.

This upsurge of alarm and pledges of commitment will grow, but it won’t last forever. As a political matter, we probably have a decade to lock into place new regimes of regulation and market incentives. Which happens to be the same do-or-die time frame that a lot of scientists believe we have to start getting gassy modern life back in balance with the Earth’s natural systems. Not to put too fine a point on it, but this looks to be the ultimate test of our national character: Do we fat, spoiled 21st-century Americans have the requisite gumption and discipline to be born again, and then do what’s necessary to try to keep the planet from going off the rails? I’d say the odds are 50-50.

Email: emailandersen@aol.com.