Thanks to Bush, Green Interest Soars

The scientist had done “Which Way, L.A.?” and “Life & Times Tonight” and “Talk of the City.” He had gone on the air at KFWB and KFI, had given interviews to various newspapers and television stations. All in all, for an atmospheric chemist from New York City, in town to tout a new study on climate change, it had been a rather impressive 24 hours of media blitzing.

“I have been on this issue one way or another for 18 years,” Michael Oppenheimer was saying via car phone Wednesday, on his way to yet another Los Angeles appearance, “and there has never been a period where the issue has received so much public attention.”

Global warming might be critical to the future of the planet, but in the arena of public attention, it’s never been much of a match for O.J., Monica and the rest of the tabloid tag team. Killer bees generate more ink. For the last few months, however, things have been different. Reports and studies that once would have sunk without a trace have become call-in fodder. The talking heads of the political talk shows have been heard yakking on and on about CO2 emissions and the Kyoto Protocol.

Oppenheimer and others in the field readily concede that credit for this turnabout is owed to a single individual. Ironically enough, our hero seems to be someone who is less than convinced that global warming is worth losing any serious pillow time over. Yes, that would be President Bush.

“Without a doubt,” said Peter Gleick, an Oakland-based policy expert who has studied the impact of global warming on water supplies, “the president has inadvertently caused a great increase in interest in this issue. Before he withdrew the United States from the Kyoto Protocol, and before his pronouncements that he didn’t think that much of the science behind it, this wasn’t such a hot issue.”

The good news doesn’t stop there. The Bush administration has turned out to be a terrific ally, in a backward sort of way, to the environmental movement as a whole. From arsenic levels in water to endangered species protection to oil drilling in Alaska--all sorts of environmental fronts have been opened or reopened in the early months of the new administration.

Every time Bush even hints that he wants to take on some greenish sacred cow, he reawakens another contingent of environmentalists. Al Gore would have talked them into a trance; Bush has them leaping and screaming and reaching for the telephone to alert the nearest branch of the Sierra Club.

“Arsenic in water? Who wanted to talk about arsenic in water?” said a not unhappy Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club. “It wasn’t on anybody’s priority screen,” at least not until the White House began to talk about revisiting the standards.

Although there have been reports of leaps in membership at environmental organizations--an echo of a trend experienced in the early Reagan years--Pope said the Bush administration’s greatest effect has been on the “level of involvement” of existing troops: “Now, when we ask people to pick up a phone, make a phone call, attend a meeting, they do it.” He cited recent hearings on hog farm pollution in Mississippi--not exactly a tree-hugger hotbed--that brought out by the hundreds supporters of the environmental position.

Pope said he never would have predicted that Bush’s environmental policies would become such a prominent flash point so early in the administration. The first months were supposed to be about tax relief and leaving no child behind and all that. The California power mess, however, flushed out Bush and his associates. In response to an electricity shortage, they suggested drilling for oil in the Alaskan wilds, and the game was on.

It won’t last, of course. Politicians more or less all read the same polls, with predictable results. The more pollsters find Americans holding their noses when it comes to Bush’s environmental positions, the more the president will be found posing for media cameras in front of big trees and gaping canyons. That’s politics--as opposed to policy.

In a similar way, face time on television might illuminate a problem; it does not solve it. Oppenheimer views the global warming’s current moment in the media light as merely a “silver lining in a rather dark cloud. It is unfortunate,” he said, “that it took a misguided and in some ways bungling response to the global warming problem by the Bush administration to bring it to such prominence.”

Oppenheimer, chief scientist for Environmental Defense, was in Los Angeles to discuss the organization’s study of how global warming might alter the Southland, should current trends persist. It was not a pleasant picture--children driven indoors by ever-worsening smog, beaches lost to a rising sea, rodents bearing diseases. The solutions proposed were not altogether startling: better public transportation, more development of renewable energy sources and the like.

The scientist said the audiences he encountered in his spin through the city seemed to have a solid handle on what’s at stake and what needs to be done. There did not seem to be a great clamor, a la the Bush response, for more study: “I think people have paid attention,” Oppenheimer said. “They know this is a serious issue. I think people are just dying for leadership.”

As opposed, say, to more talk-show debates or more pictures of presidents standing by big trees--not that such talk and such pictures are bad things, as far as they go.