A Letter from Phil Kirk
Take a Deep
Breath of Clean Air
 Not
too long ago I personally heard a lobbyist tell an influential group
that North Carolina had more bad ozone days last year than Los
Angeles. While that is not true, it is nevertheless typical of the
misinformation and hysteria promulgated by the anti-business crowd and
some of the media.
The facts simply do not support the extreme environmentalists’
viewpoint that we are destroying the environment in a record-setting
manner. Of course, good news about our environment would not sell
memberships and provide jobs for the extremists.
Those who try to label people as “pro-business” or
“pro-environment” simply miss the boat. All good business people
are also environmentalists. To be otherwise would be foolish. They are
not extremists or purists without any knowledge of economic factors or
what sacrifices are necessary to provide jobs and a high quality of
life.
Nationally, our air has never been cleaner. According to the
Environmental Protection Agency, air pollutants decreased 58 percent
in the past 21 years. In the past 10 years, the number of
“unhealthy” air quality days has been slashed by two-thirds in
major cities across the country. In the next 20 years, American
business will reduce its rate of carbon dioxide emission approximately
30 percent compared to the Gross Domestic Product. In the past two
years, while the GDP grew by 8 percent, U.S. greenhouse gases
emissions barely increased at all.
Technology and tremendous gains in efficiency achieved by business
have allowed these improvements to take place. Of course, some have
been spurred on by governmental regulations, but many have been
achieved because of market-driven needs, requirements, and demands.
Some examples:
 Iron and steel
manufacturers have used new technology to cut energy consumption by 45
percent since 1975.
Cement-makers produce as
much cement today as they did 20 years ago, but consume 27 percent
less energy.
Motor vehicles are using
less energy to turn their wheels. The average car got 15.1 miles to
the gallon in 1983. By 1994, the average car could travel nearly 20
miles on a gallon of gas — a 31 percent improvement!
What about our water — the other area that extremists love to get
people alarmed about, often without cause or good reason?
Our water is the cleanest it’s ever been, despite record population
growth and a big increase in business and industry necessary to handle
this growth.
For example:
Discharges of untreated
organic wastes and toxic metals from industry have sharply declined,
plunging an incredible 98 percent from levels in the 1970s;
Today, two-thirds of the
nation’s waters are safe for fishing and swimming, compared with
only one-third in 1972;
And what about our
nation’s land? Extreme environmentalists claim we aren’t doing
enough to preserve our wilderness, yet less than 5 percent of this
country’s land is urban or suburban areas or a roadway;
At the current rate of
growth, it would take us 50 years to build over even 1 percent of the
nation’s total land mass;
States like Maine, Vermont
and New York have about 26 million more areas of forest than they had
in 1900.
These improvements did not come on the cheap. Since the first Earth
Day event in 1970, the business community has spent at least $1.6
trillion improving and protecting the nation’s air, land, and water,
and in the next decade alone will spend at least $1.5 trillion on
environmental improvements. How much has the “environmental
community” spent on actual improvements to the environment?
There are many environmental challenges facing us, in addition to
getting the truth out to the public.
We need to learn how to more effectively and efficiently feed and fuel
the world. We need to restore our abandoned brownfields — this will
help businesses, local government and economic development, or people,
in other words.
In a future column, we will focus on the challenges.
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