Progress should be marked and celebrated, even in a recession

Too often Americans forget to set aside time to celebrate progress. We dedicate every day to a new catastrophe, and as we do so we fail to realize the gains that we have made, leading to panicked policies rather than sound judgments. And today there is no subject for which our progress is less celebrated than that of environmental issues.

Today America's cities are cleaner and greener than they have been in recent memory. No American cities rank among the 50 most polluted in the world. Air pollution is decreasing in the 10 most polluted cities in the United States, and in Los Angeles the percentage of fine particulates in the air fell by as much as 27 percent in this last decade alone. Across the world, there is evidence that tropic rainforests may now be expanding faster than they are being harvested.

These are signs of progress, and it is easy, when reading about these advances, to hope for more and to imagine that we should pass more stringent climate legislation today in search of further gains. But this would be a mistake. The climate legislation at the Senate today, the Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act, would either have a minimal environmental impact or an unacceptable economic impact. And furthermore, for the bill to pass, it would have to incorporate the kind of pork barrel spending that causes the public to lose faith in the government.

These economic impacts exist because we are in one the worst recessions in recent memory. Unemployment in the month of October rose to a startling 10.2 percent. Unemployment today is the highest that it has been in 26 years. If we pass the cap-and-trade legislation that Senators Kerry and Boxer propose, it will impose substantial costs on consumers. One study by Heritage Institute reports that the act would cost the average family of four an additional $3,000 per year.

This is unacceptable in the current economic environment. What is worse is that the bill will target precisely those areas most struck by the recession. The bill would most affect the states that generate their electric power through dirty means like coal rather than clean sources like wind and solar power. It would target the cities of the rust belt, where unemployment is high and wages are low. This would have a devastating impact on communities in the South and Midwest and would make the bill either impossible to pass or worse, it would harm the very people whom it is meant to protect.

The only way to fix this problem of the Act would be to institute local allowances that would allow areas that pollute more today to dodge the costs that the act would impose. But this would defeat the point of the bill. The very goal of climate legislation must be to make those areas dirty today clean tomorrow. If we instituted these allowances, we would simply be paving the way for future pork-barrel spending, voter bribes and the other types of corrupt policies that thrive in Washington.

The only other way, in the current economic environment, to make cap-and-trade legislation possible would be to make it so ineffective that it would not impose substantial costs on the consumer. But this is not the answer either. There is no point in passing further regulation, which would drive up the costs of business for energy corporations, and fail to address the many other problems that confront us, unless it would actually be effective in combating climate change.

Thus, due to the recession, the Senate is caught in an inescapable quandary. It either passes the Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act as it is and cause widespread damage to the communities most in the jaws of today's economic downturn, or the legislation loses its teeth and accomplishes nothing.

Americans should look to the progress that we have made so far, to our cleaner cities and to the growing rainforests, and congratulate themselves. We should take the recession as a sign not to advance too far too fast. Eventually further climate regulation may be prudent, but today is not the time to push for it, we would do ourselves more harm than good.