Editorial
skies?, Clear
0 E EAR= Ai; Clear skies? his summer's hurricanes in Florida, coupled with even more destructive monsoons in Bangladesh; last year's European heat wave that killed thirty thousand and massive...
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...Environmentally, the last four years have otherwise proved a lost opportunity, with potentially disastrous consequences...
...last year's European heat wave that killed thirty thousand and massive wildfires that scalded Australia: suddenly, people everywhere are beginning to wonder what's afoot...
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...Written largely by energy executives, this redefinition of Nixon's historic act sought to delay implementation and allow for the release of millions of tons of additional atmospheric pollutants...
...Similarly, the world's major political institutions have failed to grasp the enormity of the ecological crisis...
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...Wind turbines provide 18 percent of Denmark's total energy needs...
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...With each new scientific report, the data seem to grow starker...
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...As Jaynes Gustave Speth notes ruefully in his recent ecological call-to-arms, Red Sky at Morning (Yale University Press), "in a book containing as much bad news as this, one must hope that some of it turns out to be wrong...
...The Earth is a lustrous place, but we now know its gifts are finite, and that its carrying capacity and powers of renewal have measurable limits...
...We are truly all neighbors, and the garbage of one spills on the others...
...True, Senator Kerry has pledged to promote alternative energy resources, to reduce dependency on Middle East oil (as has President Bush), and in so doing, to create half a million jobs in new energy-technology industries...
...It is now predicted that by 2010, one-third of the smog-forming ozone in California will originate in Asia...
...We will need to create, and sign on to, what he calls a Declaration of Dependence...
...Average glob-al temperatures rose one degree Fahrenheit last century, and that increase is more than likely to double in the century ahead...
...True, the Bush administration did strengthen emission standards for diesel vehicles, but at the same time, federal automobile fuel efficiency standards fell across the board...
...Yet this hope is thin...
...After all, on the eve of the Republican National Convention, the Bush administration finally acknowledged that global warming is a fact...
...Wind power is one area in which to invest...
...Such an understanding would include a serious commitment to environmentally sustainable economies and to an ethic of planetary stewardship...
...But the sky seems limitless here, and similar or better results are clearly achievable...
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...As China and much of South Asia prepare tovault into the middle class, the strains on our shared environment will deepen...
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...The Bush standards would relax that goal, and prescribe only a 29-percent reduction by 2010...
...In the last half-century, Catholic social teaching has emphasized the sacredness of human life, while paying insufficient attention to the environmental conditions that underlie and sustain it...
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...Only then will it be possible to understand our place here and to claim our responsibilities...
...To date, the Kerry campaign has done little to address these issues consistently, broadly, or bluntly...
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...In the long run, whoever our leaders turn out to be for the next four years, changing the tone and the substance of the conversation about conservation is imperative...
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...September 14, 2004 The Unfinished Universe Is God at Work?, Yob,,Hm4gbt `SA For generations, Con- n;t'eal has been an essential element of the Catholid education of college students...
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...The administration's environmental rollbacks have been achieved largely by executive-branch fiat, shielded from congressional oversight...
...They produce but 1 percent of ours...
...Whereas the Clean Air Act led to a 37-percent decrease in sulfur dioxides in the United States between 1980 and 2000, during the same period those pollutants increased 25 percent in Asia...
...But while temperatures are rising, the actual amount of sunlight reaching the Earth has fallen 10 percent since the late 1950s...
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...As the Economist (August 28) noted, "By changing the word 'waste' to 'fill' in a rule governing coal T STAFF Editor: Paul Baumann Managing Editor: Patrick Jordan Associate Editors: Darla Donnelly (At Large) Grant Gallicho Maurice Timothy Reidy Production Editor & Webmaster: Tiina Aleman Business Manager: Sandra J. Taylor Development: Mary Lundy Semela Copy Editor: Susanne Washburn Poetry: Rosemary Deen, Darla Donnelly Screen: Rand Richards Cooper, Richard Alleva Stage/Media: Celia Wren Columnists: E. J. Dionne Jr., John Garvey, Andrew Lustig, Jo McGowan, William Pfaff Circulation Manager: Malena Seldin Administrative Assistant: Quanda Williams Advertising Manager: Roth Advertising Commonweal, [ISSN 0010-3330] A Review of Public Affairs, Religion, Literature, and the Arts, is published biweekly except Christmas/New Year...
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...Kilimanjaro's once majestic snow-cap has melted to the point where it will now disappear by 2020...
...There is hope...
...Nineteen states now advise residents against the consumption of fish from any of their rivers and lakes...
...At the same time, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was reporting that more than half of U.S...
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...Dirty skies make for dirty water...
...A group of nineteen eminent California scientists recently warned that the state's water resources and its agriculture sector are imperiled by such trends...
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...Might we be in the grip of a warming process that is tipping the Earth's ecological balance, knocking the whole thing off kilter...
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...forty-eight states warn against eating fish from at least some of their waters...
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...It attempted to weaken the Clean Air Act of 1970 through its euphemistically titled Clear Skies Initiative...
...Employing executive orders, the administration turned back other regulations on species protection, workplace safety, and brazenly removed hundreds of millions of acres from wilderness protection, opening them to paving and drilling...
...improving energy conservation in buildings and along transmission lines), Kerry could achieve marked improvements and perhaps begin to change the tone of the whole conversation...
...By emphasizing renewable sources of energy, and coupling them with enhanced efficiencies (pumping up fuel economies and strongly supporting hybrid vehicles...
...Instead...
...The Clean Air Act had legislated a 90-percent reduction of emissions from power plants (which ac-count for 41 percent of total mercury emissions) by 2008...
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...The cause is pollution and the resulting heavier cloud coverage...
...Kerry is on sound ground here...
...citizens now live in, or adjacent to, areas that violate clean-air standards...
...The federal government re-ports that half the nation's freshwater fish are contaminated with highly toxic mercury, and that the more fish it tests, the more mercury it finds...
...Is there some way to stop it...
...It will have to spell out our reliance on this planet and on its maintenance...
...When it comes to clear skies, clean oceans, and to global warming, we are now a world with-out borders...
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...Advocates like James Speth argue rightly that to meet the Herculean challenges that confront us, we will first have to reconstruct our way of thinking—as individuals, collectively, institutionally, and even religiously...
...For some life forms, "four more years" may prove their last...
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...It will demand more than four years, a great sense of urgency, and bold leadership...
Vol. 131 • September 2004 • No. 16
