What the greens actually mean

Remember last June? About the time of the Earth Summit in Rio, when Al Gore and leaders of many environmental organizations portrayed the US as a laggard on environmental issues, a global foot dragger? It was a massive disinformation campaign, passed on by an uncritical media and unchallenged by a hapless, incumbent administration.

In fact, the US continues as the world's environmental leader by almost any measure of effort or performance. On the effort side, the US spends more than any other nation on a clean environment. The US also spends more per capita.

On the performance side, the US has cleaner air andwater than it had 30 years ago. And there is a major new study that shows the US is making greater progress in conserving energy than most of the other advanced industrial nations -- the so-called G-7: US, Japan, Germany, Canada, United Kingdom, France, and Italy.

Comparing historical trends and current levels of energy efficiency among the G-7 nations, the study, by the EOP Group for the national Global Climate Change Coalition, finds that US energy consumption per unit of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) has declined by 30% over the past 20 years --more than the decline in most G-7 countries. This overall pattern of improvement was also found in separate studies of the transportation, residential and manufacturing sectors.

What is really at issue here are not environmental values but lifestyle values. Slogans such as "Clean is Green" should be replaced by specifics such as " Don't Visit Grandma on Thanksgiving, " "Use the Broom, Don't Vacuum,""Throw Away Your Appliances," "Down with Central Heating," and "Move in with Another Family." Reason: These new slogansget to the heart of the problem. It's too easy to be "for the environment." Let's really look at what's going on, in the trenches, where people live and work.

• Transportation: America's wide open spaces mean increased driving distances. Longer distances in the US account for most of the differences in automobile energy consumption among the G-7 (including Americans' p[reference for larger cars). In fact, the rate of improvement in new car fuel economy has been twice as high in the US as in other G-7 countries, and the US is the only nation to improve overall passenger automobile efficiency (measured as energy consumption per passenger mile).
  
• Residential: US residential efficiency is higher than every other G-7 nation except Japan, once you adjust for home size and climate. According to EOP's Joseph Hezir, "We use more energy to run appliances not because our appliances are less efficient, but because we have more appliances and use them more often. We use more energy to heat our homes, not because we use energy less efficiently, but because we live in bigger homes and rely on central heating systems."
  

Conclusion: The assault on energy "waste" is really an assault on America's standard of living. Remedy: throw away your appliances; move out of your 1600 s.f. home (the average in the US) into a 850 s.f. home (the average in Europe and Japan); and get rid of central heating -- used in about 90% of the homes in the US, compared to 6% in Japan.

If "Stop the waste" really means "live in a 680 s.f. high rise" or "Hang your clothes out to dry," we should say what we mean. It would clarify the debate -- and perhaps the results of public opinion polls.