The Root of All Evil

What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imaginations?
...Moloch whose blood is running money!
--Alan Ginsburg, "Howl"

On February 19, CBS became the second major broadcast network to air a bleak and alarming in-depth report on the consequences of global warming, and the undeniable human agency in this disastrous phenomenon. Traveling to the arctic to look at disappearing glaciers and endangered polar bears, "60 Minutes" reporter Scott Pelley also interviewed several leading climatologists who drew inescapable conclusions concerning the culpability of the current American lifestyle in the unfolding crisis.

Standing on an iceberg that used to be a glacier, Pelley interviewed the University of Maine's Paul Mayewski, who said his research "has proven that the ice and the atmosphere have man's fingerprints all over them."

Noting that the world hasn't seen seen temperature increases at the present level for at least 2,000 years, and probably several thousand years longer than that, Mayewski identified the heating agent as carbon dioxide, adding "we haven't seen CO2 levels like this in hundreds of thousands of years, if not millions of years."

"It all points to something that has changed and something that has impacted the system which wasn't doing it more than 100 years ago. And we know exactly what it is. It's human activity," he said.

"It's activity like burning fossil fuels, releasing carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases," Pelley added, noting almost as an afterhought, "The U.S. is by far the largest polluter."

What the otherwise excellent "60 Minutes" segment didn't identify was those specific activities this "largest polluter" engages in to produce such disastrous amounts of CO2. It would be easy to name ten or a dozen without much effort, but the worst offender is the endless building of new suburbs.

James Kunstler introduces his article "Atlanta: Does Edge City Have a Future?" with a quote from an Atlanta-area real estate developer: "They ran the environmental people out of here a long time ago. You've got no trees. You've got no streams. You've got no mountains. It's a developer's paradise."

You could say the same for the entire country, whose only prospering industry at the moment is constructing and financing ever newer, ever larger, ever more far-flung suburbs and exurbs, so that suburb dwellers -- who now account for more than half the population -- can drive ever greater distances to work, to drop the kids off at school, to shuttle over to Wal-Mart, to Winn-Dixie, to pick the kids up from school and drive them to soccer practice, and on and on.

In other words, the United States today is doing nothing to alleviate the global warming crisis. On the contrary, through both habit and policy, we're doing everything we can to make the situation worse.

It isn't just Atlanta, although that city is the worst offender, having added over 700 square miles of urban sprawl in the 20 years between 1970 and 1990 (the latest census year for which complete urban expansion data is available) and having shown no sign of slowing in the 16 years since. Los Angeles and San Diego are both among the top eleven offenders for the same period, resulting in the spread of a monster megalopolis of freeways, gas stations, strip malls, subdivisions, fry pits, muffler shops, and Starbucks that stretches along the Pacific coast from Santa Barbara to the Mexican border. Even older, long-established cities such as Philadelphia (fifth on the list) are not immune to this plague, and you would have to look to West Africa to find an uglier, more offensive urban disaster than Phoenix, Arizona.

Government policy aids and abets rather than discourages this catastrophe in the making, since our land use and energy policies are not set by the office holders ostensibly guiding our destiny, but by the capitalist high rollers and their lobbying organizations that grease the skids and pay the bills. Whether it's the powerful National Association of Realtors buttonholing your local district representative to pressure the city council back home to grant the permit for that new subdivision, or the czars of the petroleum and electrical power industries sitting secretly in convocation with Vice-President Cheny in 2001, writing the self-interested, carbon-rich legislation that Congress would later supinely approve, we have no recourse in the halls of government when it comes to changing the course of global warming.

But it's not just structural corruption at the heart of this problem. Very few Americans, from the current occupant of the White House to the humble CPA paying the mortgage on a tract unit in Bumfuk, Georgia, 38 miles outside Atlanta and driving the freeway-cum-parking lot to work every day in his Ford Expedition, want to think about what we're doing to the world we live on. Last year Bush was visited in the Oval Office by Michael Crichton, whose 2004 book "State of Fear" maintains that global warming is "just a theory" and an overstated threat. The author, who is smart enough and educated enough to know better, left the President comfortable with his doubts about this global warmin' thing. Like most of us, Bush believes what he wishes were true and thinks it's true if he believes it.

We'll have to take matters into our own hands. Our only way out of this mess is for us, on our own volition, to change the way we're living, and I have no doubt we will. The only question is whether we'll do so by choice or out of necessity.