Tinkering With Environment Is Tempting

The most provocative--and important--ecological policy issue of the 1990s won’t revolve around auto emission standards, solid waste disposal or industrial design-for-recycling. Those hardy policy perennials only describe the conventional environmental debate.

While society is clearly prepared to make active efforts to reduce waste and encourage energy efficiencies, to what extent are we prepared to intervene to mitigate environmental harms? If the impact of the “greenhouse effect” threatens to reach catastrophic proportions, if changes in weather patterns cause droughts to persist, if air quality decreases at truly alarming rates, is it so hard to believe that society would look for--even demand--technological fixes for the environment?

“This is an underlying intellectual and conceptual problem that we will be grappling with throughout the ‘90s,” says Rob Coppock, who was the staff director for a recent National Academy of Sciences panel exploring the policy implications of greenhouse warming. “This is a terrifically controversial area--the idea that you might help fix things by actively intervening in the environment understandably disturbs a lot of people.”

And yet, crises seemingly demand active intervention: When overweight, middle-aged men are confronted with heart disease, the immediate response is not a change in diet and lifestyle, it’s a call for angioplasties and blood-thinners.

“It’s funny,” Coppock says. “In our mitigation and adaptation discussions, we kept using the word interventions. We kept asking, ‘What are the practical things we can do--both in terms of reducing emissions and of mitigating the consequences?’ ”

Direct ecological intervention is already becoming a part of the environmental policy lexicon. We’ve always put out forest fires. We occasionally dump petroleum-eating microbes on oil slicks. Indeed, companies are now designing genetically re-engineered microbes to gobble up waste at landfills and toxic chemicals dumps.

Similarly, all kinds of provocative ideas for “geo-engineering” are bubbling up. Some of these proposals read like bad science fiction; others may force policy-makers to consider further thought and exploration. One proposal calls for vast amounts of iron to be dumped in the ocean. Why? Because this iron will spur the dramatic growth of certain kinds of algae. In turn, these huge algae islands will absorb great quantities of carbon dioxide. That is the gas that is primarily responsible for promoting the greenhouse effect--the phenomenon that many scientists believe is responsible for a potentially dangerous pattern of global warming.

Too risky? The NAS panel also looked at geo-engineering clouds. Although their role is not well understood, clouds play a critical role in shaping atmospheric temperatures. Some clouds--such as thunderheads--apparently exacerbate the greenhouse effect. By contrast, thin and low clouds are good for dissipating heat. It may be technically feasible to create such clouds. Is that something the country--or California, or the South Coast Air Quality Management District--might want to explore?

“All the things we chose to look at in this geo-engineering arena could be stopped,” NAS’s Coppock says. “We didn’t really consider non-reversible actions.” Of course, that’s easier said than done.

“At this stage of the game, all these mechanisms are extremely ill-thought out,” asserts Dr. John P. McTague, Ford Motor’s vice president for technical affairs and a former White House science adviser. “They’re will-o’-the-wisps. . . . It’s problematic as to whether they’re worth investing in. My guess is that there is not an inclination in either the political process or in the technical community at this phase to pursue these radical approaches. It’s too early in the game.”

“We do tend to go in for angioplasty rather than diet and exercise,” says Stephen H. Schneider, a climatologist with the National Center for Atmospheric Research who served on the NAS panel. “When you gamble with your body or with the environment, sometimes the cure can be worse than the disease. Environmental intervention is the wrong way--but it’s the American way.”

However, Schneider acknowledges that if the direr predictions of global climate change occur, “we may be forced to go into environmental angioplasty.”

But who makes that call? An embattled state government plagued by drought? A regional coalition of states trying to alleviate dismal air quality and annoyingly high temperatures? A federal government wanting to make a global impact on global warming? Or do issues such as geo-engineering and climate control require--like financial regulations and currency management--some degree of global coordination?

Americans can be very impatient. There is already an enormous amount of dissatisfaction created by the changes now being imposed by environmental regulatory fiat. At some point the cry will go up: “ Do something!”

At that moment, the focus of our ecological debate will be forever transformed from a policy based on reaction to how much we should rely on technologies designed for intervention.