ENVIRONMENTAL FANATICS ATTACK "WRONG" TREES

Mexico: "Two years ago, artists and architects banded together to stave off McDonald's from opening on the picturesque main square in the southern city of Oaxaca. Now some of those same activists are under attack themselves, over their plan to evict another foreign invader — the towering India laurel trees that shade the historic plaza. Opponents say the idea is political correctness run amok. "This is almost dogmatic," said painter Francisco Verastegui, who joined the fight to oppose McDonald's but is leading the battle against the renovation project. "They're nonnative species, so we have to get rid of them? That's like botanical racism."

His foe is a group of artists and architects who launched — with little public consultation — a vast remodeling project at the square that included talk of eventually replacing "foreign" laurels with native trees. Planted in the 1870s, the broad-limbed, dense laurels have shaded generations who come to the plaza to escape Oaxaca's hot, dry climate. Bulldozers felled one of the laurels as workers were ripping up pavement in the square in late April. The project's planners called that an accident, saying they meant to replace the 11 laurel trees in the square only gradually, as they die off.

But many people in Oaxaca no longer trust the would-be renovators, and started a Citizen's Committee to defend the trees and protest the lack of public consultation and cost of the plan, which includes repaving the entire square. Founded in 1532, downtown Oaxaca is listed as a U.N. World Heritage site and a Mexican national historic area. The plaza is bordered by colonial-era arched walkways, government and church buildings and open-air restaurants. The trees shading the square are huge, some of them soaring 100 feet high. The designers of the renovation say they favor smaller trees, arguing the current ones dwarf the surrounding buildings and block views.

But when workers showed up with chain saws to cut up the tree tipped over by the bulldozers, angry residents stood guard around the laurel and stopped them. The tree was later propped back up and may survive. The fight — which has left one of Mexico's foremost tourist attractions ripped up and roped off — has become so heated that federal authorities stepped in, ordering the city to slow down and open the plan to more public comment. Authorities also found the project lacked permits required for such work in historic districts.

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GLOBAL WARMING WAS ONCE SEEN AS A GOOD THING

"How to Change the North American Climate," announced the headline of one modest proposal published in The Atlantic. How indeed? It's quite simple, says the study's author: Reroute the Pacific Ocean's warm Kuroshio Current through the Bering Strait. "If the vast low-lying districts of Eastern Siberia and Western Alaska were sunk beneath the sea . . . it would open wide the road of this vast ocean stream straightaway to the pole." And then . . . Paradise! Arctic temperatures would instantly rise by 30 degrees; the ice caps would melt, New England winters would become a quaint memory, and lawns and trees could commence "their march towards the pole."

It sounds like the stuff of science fiction, but it was science fact . . . in December 1877. The article's author was Nathaniel Shaler, a leading Harvard geologist and later its dean of sciences. He'd suffered enough Boston winters-"the fossil sunshine of old coal makes poor amends for the vanished warmth of an earlier day," he groused-that climate change sounded both splendid and eminently attainable. There was nothing unnatural about it, Shaler eagerly explained: In past eras the earth had been much warmer. Just carve out the Alaska coastline a bit, and you could turn back the clock to the balmy dinosaur days of yore.

But why melt the caps with the Pacific when you could do it cheaper and closer to home? "A jetty . . . extending eastward from Newfoundland across the water on the Great Banks" could divert the warm Gulf Stream upward toward the Arctic, noted The New York Times of one proposal in 1912. The man behind climate change this time was Carroll Livingston Riker, an engineering wunderkind who had already designed both the world's first refrigerated warehouse and a dredging system that successfully cleared the Potomac River at half the cost of government estimate. Building a 200-mile-long jetty would cost $190 million-less than the cost of the Panama Canal, the Times pointed out-and it was, Riker insisted, not visionary at all. "It is exceedingly practical," he said flatly.

Imaginations ran wild, and The Washington Post envisioned Manhattan becoming a tropical paradise: "People would be gathering oranges off the trees in Central Park, or picking cocoanuts from palms along the Battery, [and] hunting crocodiles off the Statue of Liberty." The prospect sounded so splendid to New Yorkers that Senator William Calder tried to get $100,000 appropriated for a study of the idea. But in a twist worthy of Montgomery Burns, it seems Riker's plan hid a side effect: Diverting the Gulf Stream away from the British Isles would probably . . . well, freeze them solid. "Considerable indignation is expressed in England that Americans should plan to destroy the British climate," The Washington Post drolly reported in 1913-a prospect the paper helpfully illustrated with an artist's conception of the Houses of Parliament encased in ice; in the foreground, an Eskimo spears a walrus on the frozen-over Thames. Oh, and melting the caps too quickly might cause another problem, the Post pointed out: an immense movement of weight distribution that would cause a cataclysmic shift of the earth's axis. Oops.

Melting the Arctic would truly have global effects-if, perhaps, not quite the ones its proponents anticipated. Earthquakes, cities sinking under the waves, what have you . . . details, details. But what about picking coconuts in Manhattan? When do we get our coconuts? Standing at a podium in Madison Square Garden on a chilly evening in December 1945, one man had the answer. "Atomic dynamite," his voice rang out over the PAs. Blow up the North Pole? If the notion sounds a tad aggressive to you, consider the source: Julian Huxley, then the Secretary-General of UNESCO, the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization. The brilliant zoologist brother of writer Aldous Huxley, and himself a co-author of books with H.G. Wells, Julian used his bully pulpit at UNESCO to imagine a brave new world of atomic landscaping. Blast away the ice cap with A-bombs, Huxley reasoned, and you'd create both a warmer climate and new habitable lands.

But why stop there when you could also bomb the South Pole? "Cracking of the Antarctic icebox," the World War I flying ace Eddie Rickenbacker put it just weeks later, would reveal vast mineral riches. The idea was enthusiastically pitched to America's tool-belt demographic by Mechanix Illustrated in May 1946, quoting one Columbia professor who "likens the polar ice to a 'common cold' afflicting the earth in 'head' and 'feet,' producing what he considers an unnatural condition." Bombing the polar caps, presumably, would be like blowing the earth's nose-but blowing really, really hard.

A few spoilsports pointed out that city dwellers wouldn't have too much time to enjoy their lovely coconuts if, the Times noted, there were "fish swimming in the lower offices of New York and other cities, and only the upper stories of skyscrapers protruding from the water." But someone in Moscow, at least, didn't get the memo. The Bering Strait dam project, the brainchild of Soviet engineer P.M. Borisov, was a Stalin-era update of Shaler's old idea. Borisov proposed "liquidating the ice sheet of the Arctic Basin" with a low dam across the Bering Strait; a series of atomic-powered pumping stations could skim off the cold surface waters of the Arctic and induce a flow of warm water in from the Atlantic. This would return the earth to balmy "climatic conditions which existed 1.5 million years ago. . . . Subtropical crops would be grown in the regions adjoining the Black Sea from the north, and in the lower reaches of the Don and the Volga." At long last, Russia could make its transition from a vodka- to a rum-based economy.

The idea was taken seriously enough that in 1972 Borisov's book was translated into the English-language volume Can Man Change the Climate? But even within his own book Borisov noted the dawning realization that man was already changing the climate; he quotes oceanographer N.M. Knipovich marveling that "In a mere 15 years or less time there has been such a change in the distribution of marine fauna as is usually associated with long geological periods."

And so now, alas, climate change is merely the province of Bond villains . . . and consumers. It turns out we didn't need monolithic jetties, atomic landscaping, or giant pumping stations to change the earth. All we had to do was drive over to the Circle-K for a six-pack and leave the engine idling.

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EUROPE NOT COMPLYING WITH "KYOTO" EITHER

A hastily assembled special negotiation of the Kyoto Protocol begins this week in Bonn, Germany, to try and define a future for a climate-change treaty that runs for five years (2008-2012) but already appears dead. This comes on the heels of European Environment Commissioner Stavros Dimas coming to Washington with the message that Europe is leading on climate change and America could cheaply comply. The public deserves some candor about Kyoto's, and Europe's, actual failure and the radical changes necessary if Europe sincerely believes that American involvement is "critical" in any next steps. What we are witnessing instead is a growing European Union effort for a U.S. bailout from the political corner into which its leaders have painted themselves.

In Washington, Mr. Dimas repeated the ritual assessment of a "thawing" in U.S.-EU relations over climate change. These claims increase in frequency as Kyoto's failure becomes increasingly obvious to all but its most insulated advocates. Such pleas seek to create the inference of a Bush Administration gravitating toward agreement on Kyoto: Don't abandon ship, help is on the way.

Nothing could be further from the truth. That was reaffirmed the very week before Mr. Dimas spoke in a public speech overseas by the White House's own Council on Environmental Quality director.

In repeating the fable of a low-cost Kyoto, Mr. Dimas peddled a claim that has already proven spectacularly false back home. The specifics should surprise those familiar with Europe's righteous claims of a United States grossly out of step with the Kyoto-compliant world. In fact, Europe is not complying with Kyoto, and this failure will soon create significant internal political tension in the European Union to match that with the United States.

Almost to a nation, those few covered countries aren't complying. Under Kyoto, the EU-15 committed to collectively reduce "greenhouse gas" emissions to 8 percent below 1990 levels. Internally, however, a deal was struck under which many EU countries were permitted emission increases. These would presumably be covered by over-complying states Great Britain and Germany, due to the respective "one-off" political developments of shifting from coal to gas and shutting inefficient eastern production. This is Brussels's vaunted "burden sharing agreement."

However, those countries have since made clear they will not carry the rest of the EU-15 over the finish line of compliance. This is important for the simple reason that, regardless of any country's promise to Brussels, under the treaty each and every country among the EU-15 is stuck with an 8 percent-below-1990 commitment. As such, 12 of the EU-15 project egregious violation (by between 20 and 77 percent) of a treaty invoked by many in the European Union to demonstrate U.S. irresponsibility.

Consider the following projections for 2010 by member countries, as reported to Brussels, in relation to their now-operative Kyoto "Article 4" commitment of 8 percent below 1990: Portugal, over its promise by 77 percent, Spain by 61 percent, Greece by 51 percent, Ireland by 41 percent, Luxembourg by 31 percent, Finland by 27 percent, Denmark 26 percent, Italy by anywhere from 13 to 23 percent (following Italy's submission, the numbers discussed suddenly got worse), France by 19 percent, Austria by 18 percent, Belgium by 16 percent and the Netherlands by 10 percent.

Brussels masks these reported figures with clever rhetoric that does not withstand scrutiny nor crunching of the numbers that member states publicly submit, if with little fanfare. In early May, Spain became only the second EU country to (grudgingly) admit it will not comply.

These are not mere technicalities, but the reality behind the European Union's anti-U.S. rhetoric, and the stuff of political problems as talks presumptuously turn to a "second phase" of cuts. This is also why Italy has refused to consider the inane, operative EU posture of "Now that we have broken one promise, it is time to break an even bigger one!"

Europe's flagrant lack of adherence to Kyoto is wildly belied by the remarkable rhetoric aimed by official Europe at the United States. The EU claims the mantle of "leadership" on Kyoto while finding no apparent shame in the fact that the "rogue" United States, using the same baseline, would be tied with Ireland only for fourth-worst in Europe, at 41 percent over. Canada projects violation by 54 percent.

These facts should roil a debate dominated by scolding the United States for being so grossly out of step with the rest of the world, acting alone - with 155 others - by refusing to make an unrealistic promise. In fact, the European Union can no longer credibly blame the United States about the current state of Kyoto. The question now is whether the European Union will accept Kyoto's failure, and its own, and accept a more practical rethinking of the issue for the future. If not, it only has itself to blame.

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists

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