Bad Ideas for Saving the Planet

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Anyone growing up in the 1970s and 1980s will remember the scare stories about forests denuded as a result of toxic acid rain. The most famous of those scare stories centered on the famous Adirondacks. If the worst was to be believed, acid rain would eventually make Saranack, New York, look like the surface of the moon.

Over the years, the acid rain scare story was gradually supplanted by the all-encompassing fear of global warming. But even as recently as 2000, CNN was still reporting that the Adirondacks were in danger. On April 19 of that year, the news channel reported on its website: "A new federal study finds that acid rain still devastate lakes in the Adirondacks, 10 years after Congress amended the Clean Air Act to deal with the problem."

CNN interviewed a local resident who underscored the damage supposedly done by years of acid rain: "We used to have swarms of kingfishers picking up fish," the resident said, "you go out there now in the summer, you'll be lucky if you find one." According to CNN, the loss of the kingfishers was because the "lake was slowly poisoned by acid rain, pollution that comes from burnt oil and coal, blown in primarily from Midwest utility plants."

The pollution in question is, primarily, sulfur, and in the 1970s and 80s, cutting back on sulfur emissions was one of the most important things an industry could do if it wanted to be perceived as environmentally friendly.

How times change. Now, to fight the civilization ending, all encompassing menace of climate change, at least one scientist has proposed pumping extra sulfur into the atmosphere.

Australian scientist Tim Flannery is one of the more influential global warming activists. In fact, it is possible that only Al Gore is more influential among climate change radicals. A short bio of Flannery published by Penguin Books notes: "Sir David Attenborough described him as being ‘in the league of the all-time great explorers like Dr. David Livingstone’. His many books include the award–winning international bestsellers The Future Eaters and Throwim Way Leg, and The Eternal Frontier."

Flannery is also noteworthy for having proposed the possibility that the planet will one day have to be under the control of a carbon dictatorship that he has termed the "commission for thermostatic control." Though he says he deplores the idea, in a 2005 interview with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation he also seemed to indicate that such a dictatorship would be achieved step-by-step.

"I think it will happen by degrees," Flannery said of the development of the carbon dictatorship. "Probably you'll have some mechanisms set up and as the situation deteriorates not being effectively addressed. You can imagine that, you know, the first thing might be something that even resembles Kyoto."

The outcome, Flannery has warned, would "involve restrictions on emissions from all sorts of sources - agriculture, mining, industry and whatever else, and once you get to that point, you get a government that reaches very, very deep down into the lives of individual human beings. And I think that's a very undesirable outcome. Far better to let Gaia, or let natural systems control the climate. If we get into a carbon dictatorship situation, we will have a truly dreadful dictatorship. We're carbon-based life. Carbon is everywhere, it's integral to the way the planet works. So you don't want to let things go on so long that you're forced into that rather terrible situation."

Apparently, in order to prevent this dreadful probable dictatorship, we should now pull out all the stops and dump as much sulfur into the atmosphere as possible to block out sunlight. Says Flannery: "It's the last resort that we have, it's the last barrier to a climate collapse. We need to be ready to start doing it in perhaps five years time if we fail to achieve what we're trying to achieve."

And Flannery is not proposing just the addition of a little sulfur. In fact, he proposes the release of enough sulfur to "change the color of the sky," despite the fact that he admits "the consequences of doing that are unknown."

What to take away from this agglomeration of fantasy and bad policy ideas? First, there is a petition signed by 31,000 scientists that reads, in part: "There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere and disruption of the Earth's climate." The petition is the closest thing to a consensus on climate change that there is, and it suggests that hair-brained ideas for fighting global warming, like pumping the atmosphere full of sulfur, should be, at the very least, shouted down in derision.

Beyond that, Flannery's concern about a growing carbon dictatorship is well-founded. Increasingly restricting carbon will mean increasingly restricting industrial activity, which, in the end, will mean putting people out of work -- which, put another way, means restricting individual activity. Starting with Kyoto, as Flannery notes, there has already been serious work done to empower the United Nations to become the commission for thermostatic control.

The way to avoid such an outcome, though, is not by pumping sulfur into the atmosphere and creating the conditions for the most severe storms of acid rain this side of the planet Venus, but by preventing, in the U.S.A., at least, the passage of crippling climate change legislation and the removal of the nation from the organization, the United Nations, that is the international nexus of climate change regulation.

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