The Anti-GeoGreen (The Hidden Tierney)

NYTimes columnist John Tierney (aka, The Grinch Who Stole Earth Day) looks at all the eco-fascists worrying over the fate of the earth and just shakes his head. Move along, nothing to see here. Everything's getting better all the time, thanks to nuclear power. (Cheer Up, Earth Day Is Over is fully available to Times Select subscribers.)

Earth Day has traditionally been the occasion for apocalyptic predictions: global famines due to overpopulation, cancer epidemics from synthetic chemicals, cities destroyed by accidents at nuclear plants, species wiped out by deforestation, crippling shortages of energy. Humans, especially Americans with their technological hubris, were doomed to be punished unless they forsook gas-guzzlers, turned off the lights and toiled in their organic gardens — complete, of course, with compost heaps.

The current apocalypse, global warming, is a more realistic danger than the previous ones. But after all the past doomsdays that didn't arrive, a lot of people are understandably skeptical of the ecoprophets, especially when the prophets start prescribing the same old penance.

The Kyoto Protocol appealed to environmentalists' sense of virtue because it required big sacrifices, particularly from Americans. One reason the United States dropped out is that it couldn't get proper credit for the new growth in its forests. While the growing trees would indeed remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, this solution lacked the requisite dose of masochism.

But even the proponents of sacrifice have a hard time keeping their promises. Europeans are having trouble cutting their emissions to meet Kyoto targets. In America, President Bush is blamed by Democrats for rejecting Kyoto, but how many of the Democrats now howling about high gasoline prices would vote for the best way to comply with it: a stiff tax on gasoline, coal and other fuels?

The most practical way to combat global warming is not through asceticism but through technology — the way we averted the famines and energy shortages forecast on past Earth Days. Air pollution has declined not because Americans drive less and turn off lights but because cars and power plants have become cleaner.

While Europeans have been reveling in their moral superiority in adopting the Kyoto Protocol, the United States has been pushing technologies that involve less pain but more gain, like new nuclear power plants and methods of sequestering carbon. America has offered to help India build nuclear plants and is working in China to generate cleaner electricity. It's leading a 15-nation program to cut down emissions of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, by turning it into a profitable source of energy.

These programs have gotten little attention. (I managed to find a total of one newspaper article devoted to the methane project). But if you add up the projected annual reductions in carbon dioxide from these efforts, the total is greater than what Europeans are planning to cut through Kyoto, according to David Victor, the director of the Program on Energy and Sustainable Development at Stanford.

"The Bush administration's nuclear deal with India by itself could do almost as much as Kyoto," Victor says. "While we should cut our own emissions at home, we need to work on more deals like this in developing countries, because they'll be producing most of the future carbon dioxide and they don't want to address global warming unless it serves their own needs."