The Colby Echo

Issue date: 2/16/07 Section: Opinions

Media Credit: Courtesy

Apparently, environmentalism is starting to catch on. It's been hard for me to recognize this trend; as an Environmental Studies minor I feel so steeped in environmental awareness that I sometimes forget other people don't think about things like emissions trading or the Endangered Species Act all the time.

Two weeks ago, The Economist ran a cover-story called "The Greening of America" documenting this development; Newsweek had a very similar cover over the summer. On Feb. 3, the New York Times, along with a huge portion of the media, devoted a front-page spot to the release of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's report declaring that global warming is "unequivocal"; more recently, the Times ran a story about the growing popularity of eco-friendly weddings
All of this is great, of course. We can never fix the problem of global warming until everyone's aware of it, until everyone understands the reasoning behind the severity of the issue.

But I'm not convinced that this "greening of America" is for the right reasons.

I'm troubled the most by the linkage of global warming with dependence on foreign oil sources. Yes, many of the world's primary oil producing countries are volatile, politically unstable, or unfriendly towards the U.S. Yes, the U.S. should be able to feed its own addiction. However, the current approach to ending American dependency on oil (Bush's plan to cut gasoline consumption by 20 percent in ten years, by increasing ethanol production and raising fuel-efficiency standards) addresses global warming as an afterthought. And independence from foreign oil only fosters an "us versus them" mentality, when really the whole messy situation should be seen as us versus ourselves.

The Economist featured a photo of a road sign depicting a white farmer and an Arab sheik figure, stating "Who would you rather buy gas from? Support the statewide ethanol standard." The magazine's caption on the photo: "A no-brainer in Missouri."

But is that really a no-brainer? Or propaganda?
Ethanol, an alternative fuel produced from carbon-based feedstock, is another way for America to balance its over-production of cheap corn (a benefit of generous subsidies), while also providing fuel. However, as Michael Pollan discusses in my new favorite book The Omnivore's Dilemma (reading just one page will change the way you think about your Dana hamburger), it takes a certain amount of oil to produce the necessary fertilizer to grow such an excess of corn. As he says in his book, when you eat a hamburger from a corn-fed cow, you're, in some ways, eating oil. Similarly, when you fill up your tank with ethanol, you're just a few steps down in the industrial process and still using oil. Ethanol may burn cleaner, but it's definitely not the best solution-just the one that's currently most convenient and politically viable.

Playing on current American fears and discriminations is not the right way to think about global warming or about moving away from an oil-based economy. The entire world will experience the effects of global warming, not just the US. The only way to really end this downward spiral is to change the way we think about our oil-powered lifestyles, and then the way we respond.

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