OPINION/COMMENTARY

A New Beginning for our Forests

The devastating Yellowstone National Park fires of 1988 first began to focus national attention on the condition of our nation's forests. The highly controversial policy of letting nature-caused fires burn uncontrolled (called "natural regulation"), touted by one of Yellowstone's top ecologists, quickly caused debate in the U.S. Congress. Eight Congresses have since convened, and hearings have occupied ever-growing time in the Senate and the House. Forestry professionals, ecologists, biologists and environmentalists in government, academia and non-governmental organizations have presented volumes of studies, data and photos. It has become clear to almost all parties that there is a crisis in the national forests.

A century of federal and state total suppression of all fires, propelled by Smokey the Bear's constant harangues, has created historically unnatural forests, dense with hazardous accumulations of dead and dying trees, duff, pinecones and fallen or wind-toppled trees and near-impenetrable thickets of smaller trees crowding the forest floor under the mature forest. Prolonged droughts across much of the West, together with the dense, overcrowded young trees, have stressed the forests and weakened their resistance to disease, insects and beetles, which have reached epidemic levels in many national forests...

COP Out

I was starting to wonder why I'd come to the COP-9 conference. It didn't threaten to be very newsy, and just about everyone now realizes that the Kyoto Protocol, the reason for these regular gatherings of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, is deader than a gathering of Iowans for Al Sharpton. Other than the rather seductive allure of Milan's shopping district, there wasn't much to recommend the journey here.

Then I picked up a press release on "Gender and Climate." Now here was something worth writing home about.

"Simply stating that both men and women are affected by climate change does not bring out the fact that women in many cases are more vulnerable, and also less involved in the technological changes proposed to mitigate climate change," this incredible statement read. "Climate change is not a gender neutral process and this needs to be explicitly recognized and dealt with."...

Nitrate Alarmists Cost Consumers Plenty

Early in the Bush administration, a political row erupted over proposed changes in the maximum contaminant level (MCL) for arsenic in drinking water. In its final weeks, the Clinton administration initiated a 10-fold reduction in the MCL for arsenic, from 50 parts per million (ppm) to 5 ppm. The Bush administration suspended the change pending a reexamination of the science by the National Research Council.

The new MCL would be particularly burdensome on poor, rural communities, Bush administration officials explained. While the health risks of maintaining the MCL at 50 ppm appeared to be small, the compliance costs for reducing it were very high.

A similar small risk/high cost drinking water regulation has received almost no attention: the limit on nitrate in drinking water, currently set at 10 ppm. That regulation is costing U.S. communities and homeowners hundreds of millions of dollars per year, and the cost is increasing.

The Environmental Protection Agency is increasing its pressure on state agencies to enforce the standard, even though there is no evidence of a problem. Moreover, as communities grow, more are reaching the threshold at which the regulation is enforced. (The regulation applies to community water systems serving more than 15 homes or 25 people.)...

Meet Me in Milan

Some 4000 delegates from 188 countries have been convened since December 1 in Milan at the ninth Conference of the Parties (COP9) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The delegates will be joined later this week by at least 74 environment ministers from around the world.

The delegates and environmental activists had hoped that the COP9 would be the occasion for announcing that the Kyoto Protocol to the UNFCCC had at long last come into force. The Kyoto Protocol has already been ratified by 100 or so countries but is not yet internationally binding. That's because it must be ratified by a set of industrialized countries whose collective emissions add up to 55 percent of their total emissions of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide.

President George W. Bush pulled the United States out of the Kyoto Protocol in March 2001, which means that the 55 percent limit can only be reached if Russia ratifies the treaty. And that may not happen. Russia has been very coy about whether it will in fact ratify the treaty. Just last week, a prominent advisor to Russian President Vladimir Putin strongly suggested that his country would not ratify the treaty on the grounds that it would harm Russia's economic growth...

An Energy Policy That Makes Sense

When is a filibuster an opportunity?

When failure by the Senate to cut off debate and vote on a $31 billion energy bill gives members one last chance to govern responsibly.

It won't be easy. The $350 million in tax-exempt bonds for "green" development projects would have to go. That would mean Syracuse, N.Y., wouldn't get its subsidized-soybean-powered mall. And Bossier City, La. -- a town virtually awash in casino money -- wouldn't get its riverfront development project that includes an "energy-rich Hooters" restaurant. And Iowa wouldn't get its million-gallon aquarium.

Alaskans would have to be told that the $18 billion in loans needed to build a natural-gas pipeline would come without federal guarantees of repayment. (As if a project that would deliver that much natural gas to a hungry American market has any real chance to fail.)

In Minnesota, residents would have to be told that a coal gasification plant will be built in the state only if private interests step forth to finance it.

The toughest task would fall to senators in the farm states of the Midwest. They'd have to tell their gasohol-producing constituents --or at least the board members at Archer-Daniels-Midland and ConAgra -- that the federal government no longer will spend billions to drive up the price of gas, drive down the health of engines and prop up an industry that, absent huge subsidies, would fade into obscurity in months...