Down to Earth_Nature's Role in American History

by Ted Steinberg

  To Hawaii and the Philippines went U.S. sugar corporations to carve out plantations—driven by the doubling in per capita consumption of the sweetener between 1880 and 1915—transforming diverse ecosystems into giant agricultural empires founded on the harvesting of just a single crop. In Costa Rica, Ecuador, Guatemala, and other Latin American counties, companies such as United Fruit and Standard Fruit created “banana republics” to satisfy the cravings of American consumers (some 95 percent of whose households purchased bananas by the 1970s). In the 1950s, the firms introduced a more disease-resistant species of banana, one that also required increasing amounts of pesticides and fertilizer to be productive.23

  Meanwhile, earlier in the century rubber and tire magnate Harvey Firestone trained his sights on Liberia. He succeeded where Henry Ford had failed. By 1960, he had amassed the largest rubber plantation on the face of the earth, a 74,000-acre enterprise that came at the expense of hardwood forest, as well as the Africans from whom the Liberian government appropriated land for the project.24

  And then there was the demand for beef so that all those American baby boomers could have their hamburgers, TV dinners, and luncheon meat—meals that resulted in an assault on the rainforests of Central America. In the 1960s and 1970s, U.S. multinationals opened nearly 30 new meatpacking plants in such countries as Honduras, Costa Rica, Guatemala, and Nicaragua, a move that encouraged local oligarchs to acquire more cattle and plant more pasture. Between 1950 and the early 1980s, the amount of land devoted to cattle increased from just an eighth to more than a third in Costa Rica alone. Tropical forest equivalent to roughly the size of the entire nation of India disappeared in the period between 1960 and 1990. That tremendous change in the planet’s land cover came mainly as a result of the voracious American appetite for consumer goods, from instant coffee to tires and banana splits.25

  Compounding the ecological effects of direct U.S. economic intervention abroad were the indirect consequences of global economic integration that came with the lending of money to “improve” life overseas. Loans for building dams, roads, and acquiring American-produced goods may have raised the standard of living of some in the Third World, but the money also had to be paid back. As those loans increased, developing countries felt compelled to liquidate whatever natural capital they had to earn the money needed to service all their debt.

  In the 1960s, American companies, selling everything from construction equipment to pesticides, found that U.S. banks, both big and small, were eager to lend money to developing countries to facilitate these transactions. Then, in 1973, war broke out between Egypt and Israel, and, in just a few months, oil prices increased fourfold as Arab petroleum producers sought to retaliate against the United States for siding with the Israelis. Money flooded into the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, funds that developing nations, now faced with higher prices for oil and consumer goods, desperately needed. U.S. and other Western banks, acting as intermediaries, lent Third World countries money like there was no tomorrow (especially after 1979 when oil prices doubled again)—money that would be repaid by the sale of natural resources.26

  But there was a tomorrow. The easy money could not and would not last forever. A global recession in the 1980s dampened demand for such commodities as wood and minerals that the struggling nations were counting on to generate the exchange to pay back their debt. The Third World debt problem soon assumed crisis proportions. Between 1982 and 1990, developing countries paid a staggering 1.3 trillion dollars to creditor nations. To help these nations meet their financial obligations, the World Bank and the IMF did what came naturally: They lent them more money. In exchange, the banks forced the debtor nations to reform their economies, to remove barriers to trade and government subsidies, bringing them more into line with the free market ideals so dear to the industrialized world. Stuck on a debt treadmill, developing countries became even more dependent on the export of commodities—timber, fish, minerals—to pay back their loans.27

  It would be wrong to simply assume that increasing debt meant decreasing environmental quality. The relationship is not quite so clear-cut. But with respect to deforestation at least, a relatively strong correlation does seem to exist. One study of the 24 largest debtor nations found that two-thirds of them experienced major deforestation in the 1980s. Brazil, for example, the largest debtor nation, had to come up with 12 billion to 14 billion dollars in interest payments each year by the late 1980s. To raise that kind of money the country turned to soybeans, a cash crop in demand worldwide. But to grow soybeans on that scale, a significant amount of land in the agriculturally rich southern part of the country had to be dedicated to large-scale commercial farming. And before that could happen, the peasants living there had to be relocated. Thus the Brazilian government, with loans from the World Bank for a road-building project, urged farmers in the south to migrate north to the Amazon, where land was plentiful. There was only one problem: The land was covered with trees. By the mid-1980s, the forests of the Brazilian Amazon were under attack. The burning done to clear them was so extensive and intense that it could be seen from outer space.28

  Brazil was not alone in its debt and deforestation woes. Nations such as Costa Rica, Ghana, and the Philippines also liquidated woodlands to generate greater foreign exchange earnings in the decades after 1960. Tropical forests, one of the most biologically diverse areas on the planet, declined by a third between 1960 and 1990. As we have seen, not all the clearing can be blamed on the Third World debt crisis. But one study has estimated that reducing a nation’s debt by 1 billion dollars could decrease deforestation by anywhere from 20 to 385 square miles.29

  CARBON ACCOUNTING

  It would be unfair to blame the United States alone for bringing on debt-driven deforestation or the other ecological problems that have stemmed from spreading economic development to the far reaches of the globe. Other industrialized nations—Japan, Britain, Germany, and France, among others—must shoulder some of the responsibility as well. But with respect to one aspect of global environmental change, America stands alone. By the end of the twentieth century, the United States used more energy per capita than any other nation in the world, twice the rate of Sweden, roughly three times that of Japan or Italy. As of 1988, the United States, with just five percent of the earth’s population, consumed 25 percent of all the world’s oil and released roughly a quarter of all the world’s atmospheric carbon. That last fact made America the carbon capital of the planet.30

  Back about 4.5 billion years ago, when the earth was formed, roughly 95 percent of the atmosphere consisted of carbon dioxide. The emergence of plant life, however, changed the planet’s atmospheric composition. Plants, through the process of photosynthesis, absorbed carbon dioxide. Carbon was drawn out of the atmosphere and settled in the earth’s vegetation, which eventually died, decomposed, and formed coal and oil. Meanwhile, the atmosphere’s carbon dioxide load declined dramatically to the point where it composed less than one percent of the planet’s total.

  With the onset of industrialization and the burning of fossil fuels, the earth’s previous atmospheric history was sent into reverse. Instead of being drawn out of the air, carbon was now extracted from the ground and launched into the sky once again. In the United States, the largest surge in energy consumption occurred between the late 1930s and the 1970s, ballooning by some 350 percent. Americans began using more oil and natural gas to meet their industrial, agricultural, and everyday needs for transportation and housing. Oil and natural gas contain less carbon than coal or wood, but this small piece of good news was more than outweighed by the huge increase in demand for electricity and fuel as the nation’s economy became more consumption-oriented. In 1950, Americans drove three-quarters of all the world’s automobiles. They lived increasingly, as we have seen, in high-energy suburban homes, with inefficient electric heaters and air conditioners. A 1970s color television, left on for the four hours a day that a household on average watched, was the energy equivalent of a w
eek’s worth of work for a team of horses. U.S. energy consumption slowed in the 1970s and 1980s, as manufacturers introduced more efficient appliances. Still, by the late 1980s, Americans consumed more petroleum than Germany, Japan, France, Italy, Canada, and the United Kingdom did together.31

  Burgeoning fossil fuel use in the twentieth century left its mark on the carbon history of the earth. But deforestation also added to the atmosphere’s carbon load. Forests normally serve as vast “carbon sinks,” producing oxygen while keeping carbon dioxide in check. The massive clearing of forests in the United States early in the century, however, combined with the huge increase in postwar tropical deforestation (in which much of the wood was burned, releasing carbon dioxide in the process), has helped to reshape atmospheric conditions. In 1900, carbon dioxide levels measured about 295 parts per million (ppm). By 1950, that figure had increased to 310 to 315 ppm, rising to roughly 360 ppm by 1995, courtesy of the double punch provided by both fossil fuel consumption and deforestation.32

  Carbon dioxide, in combination with other greenhouse gases such as methane and ozone, traps the sun’s heat. In the course of a century (1890 to 1990), the average surface temperature of the earth increased by 0.3 to 0.6 degrees Celsius. That temperature rise, which has lengthened the growing season in parts of the northern hemisphere, could have happened naturally, although it bears pointing out that such a change is unheard of in the last 600 years of human history.33

  What is perhaps most remarkable about the global warming issue is how quickly it has become the focus of national concern. It was not all that long ago that global cooling occupied the attention of U.S. political leaders. As recently as the 1970s, a number of extreme weather events, including freezing conditions in Florida, produced anxiety over a temperature decline. A spate of publications with such titles as The Cooling (1976) and Forests, Famines and Freezes (1977) filled the bookstores. In 1974, the CIA even issued a report that assessed how a decrease in temperature would affect America’s geopolitical prospects.34

  During the 1980s, however, the advantage shifted to the global warming theorists, partly as a result of the extraordinary drought and heat wave of 1988, a year, President George Bush later said, when “the earth spoke back.” In June of that year, climate scientist James Hansen went before Congress to say that he was “99 percent confident” that the greenhouse effect was contributing to global warming. Almost overnight, anxiety about rising temperatures captured the attention of the American public.35

  From the outset, environmentalists seized on the postulated human role in global warming as a means of advancing a variety of goals, from protecting air quality to preserving forestland. Although evidence showing humankind’s part in the problem continues to mount (and a recent study reported that human influence accounted for 75 percent of the increase in average global temperature over the last century), scientists still cannot say definitively what accounts for the warming trend. Changes in global ocean currents or in the amount of energy emitted by the sun could also be at work.36

  By focusing almost exclusively on the suspected, but until recently not fully verified, human role in the warming, the environmental movement has allowed industry—oil, gas, coal, and auto companies, primarily—to cast the entire problem as a theory in need of more research. More studies, not serious action to reduce fossil fuel use, goes their cry. But scientists are not debating whether global warming has occurred; that is accepted. It is the cause of the warming and future projections about how much the earth will heat up that divides them. U.S. industrial interests have papered over the areas of scientific agreement and instead engaged in a concerted campaign to mislead the American public. In the early 1990s, the Information Council on the Environment, a group made up of coal and utility companies, hired a public relations firm to, in its own words, “reposition global warming as theory rather than fact.”37

  The U.S. auto industry has also played a role in this whitewash, financing lobbying groups set up to dismiss global climate change and staging an aggressive campaign to hold the line on what is probably the single most important factor in carbon emissions: fuel economy. In the 1980s, U.S. carmakers succeeded in getting the federal government to relax fuel economy standards by arguing that they would have to close down factories to meet stricter requirements. In 1973, when the energy crisis began, American automobiles averaged about 13 miles per gallon of gasoline (MPG). By the early 1990s, that number had increased to almost 27 MPG. That seems like a significant increase, yet it works out to a less than one mile to the gallon improvement per year. Moreover, since the number of vehicle miles traveled doubled between 1970 and 1990 to 2.2 trillion miles, the gain in fuel efficiency has been entirely wiped out. The improvement in efficiency, in any case, was largely the result of legislation passed in 1975 that established “corporate average fuel economy” or CAFE rules, allowing automakers to produce any kind of car as long as the vehicles when averaged met the MPG standards set by the federal government.38

  In 1992, Bill Clinton campaigned for president on the promise that he would increase the CAFE standard to 45 MPG. His commitment to a fuel economy increase grew out of his concern with the question of global warming. While Clinton campaigned, then President Bush signed a global warming treaty at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Under the treaty, industrialized nations agreed by the year 2000 to voluntarily cut back their carbon dioxide emissions to the level they were at in 1990. To meet this goal, U.S. vehicles would need to be three to four times more efficient than they were, averaging something on the order of 80 to 90 MPG.39

  The auto industry was not willing to seek a dramatic increase. Indeed, it even balked at Clinton’s more modest 45 MPG goal. But when elected, rather than stand up to Detroit, Clinton caved in. In 1993, the administration announced that the federal government would team up with American automakers to produce a new, super-efficient car. Instead of raising fuel economy standards—the quickest way to reduce carbon dioxide—there would be more research and development. “This is the sensible approach to global warming,” declared Robert Eaton, Chrysler’s chairman, “not an international treaty based on inconclusive science that would have no chance of solving the problem (if we have one).”40

  The new clean car initiative has thus far done nothing to aid in the global warming dilemma, although it may have helped appease a few environmentalists. It also, according to one former auto official, diverted attention from what has become the most important development in automotive history in the last 20 years: the sport utility vehicle or SUV. In 1997, when the parties to the earlier Rio treaty sat down in Kyoto, Japan, to work out binding carbon emission standards for industrialized nations, the New York Times ran an article attacking SUVs and other light trucks as the epitome of American excess. These vehicles guzzled gas, coughed pollution, and made the typical sedan look like a wondrous green machine by comparison.41

  The SUV pollution problem stemmed from a simple fact: Light trucks were excluded from the 1975 fuel economy legislation because, it was argued, farmers and construction workers used them for business purposes. In fact, the trucks have long functioned in the same capacity as cars. When Chrysler rolled out its first minivan in the 1980s, it took advantage of this loophole to evade fuel economy standards.42

  By the 1990s, U.S. carbon emissions were on the rise. Not only were Americans spending more time on the road, they were traveling increasingly in the least fuel-efficient vehicles. Minivans, SUVs, and pickup trucks constituted some 40 percent of all vehicles sold in the United States. In 1999, when Ford unveiled a gigantic new SUV, the Excursion, a more than 18-foot-long behemoth that, depending on engine size, gets between 10 and 18 MPG, it advertised the truck as “a low-emission vehicle.” Not to be outdone, the aptly named Freightliner company, a division of Daimler-Chrysler, recently announced plans for the biggest SUV ever, a truck that will get a meager 10 miles to the gallon. The Unimog, as it is called, stands nearly as tall as a basketballhoop and weighs a whopping 12,500 p
ounds, roughly the equivalent of four Toyota Camrys. Bigger may be better, as Detroit claims, but rarely is it cleaner. Today, the average fuel economy of all new cars and trucks sold in the United States during the 2001 model year remains at its lowest level in two decades.43

  In a nation where driving and the freedom to pollute have become virtual inalienable rights, it is no surprise to find significant resistance to a global accord that would force the nation to conserve. In 1997, the U.S. Senate voted 95–0 against ratifying any global warming treaty that did not require developing nations themselves to reduce carbon emissions, even though Americans consumed on average somewhere between 50 and 100 times the energy of someone from Bangladesh.44

  Another blow to the carbon cycle occurred in the year 2000 at a meeting in the Netherlands, when an attempt to put the finishing touches on a global warming treaty collapsed. U.S. and European negotiators reached a stalemate as the talks broke down over carbon accounting. The United States sought to use its expansive forests as a way of offsetting its enormous carbon emissions. In other words, rather than cut fossil fuel use through fuel economy increases, the Americans wanted credit for the nation’s tree cover. The trading of carbon rights was precisely the type of win-win approach that mainstream environmental groups in the United States had long advocated in an attempt to give business an incentive to conserve. In Europe, however, where environmentalists have taken a more uncompromising stance with industry, no such bargains exist. To the Europeans, what the Americans proposed looked like little more than a scheme for evading responsibility for cleaning up the global atmospheric commons. “We have strong interest groups in German society,” said one conference negotiator. “What shall I tell them if the United States makes a fire road in a forest and flies airplanes over it and says that it is an emissions project? They’d say you’re ridiculous.”45