British diesel is a self-inflicted $12 per gallon, biofuels have nearly doubled their food prices, and 40 percent of U.K. electrical power will be shut down over the next six years.

Now, the same Green alarmists, who warn of man-made warming while the planet cools, demand sharp reductions in Europe’s pesticide use.

That will slash Europe’s crop production in half during a global food emergency.

Is Green really the world’s way forward?

Europe’s Large Combustion Plant Directive will shutter 17 big generating plants in the U.K. alone for emitting too much CO2. Never mind that the Earth has not warmed as the alarmists predicted – and has been actually cooling for 16 months in defiance of the climate models.

Until now, the European Union has regulated pesticides based on their contribution to producing food – balanced against the farmer’s relatively small risks of using them.

Henceforth, however, pesticide permissions will be radically tightened based on theoretical risks dreamed up by the alarmists.

Britain’s Pesticide Safety Directorate says conventional agriculture will become impossible in much of Europe. Farming costs will soar and yields will fall. Is this simply the old Green demand for population control – through famine?

Have the pest protection chemicals been quietly killing off European citizens? Actually, Europeans are living longer than ever, and should add five years to their lifespan by 2050 – unless they starve after the crop protection chemicals are canceled.

Have all Europe’s birds and butterflies died off because of pesticide spraying? Actually, biologists are finding increasing biodiversity across the EU as vegetation, butterflies, birds, mussels, fish and mammals all take advantage of the warm and moderate “interglacial” climate we’ve had since the end of the Little Ice Age.

Global temperatures increased only 0.2 degree C from 1940 to 1998, and recently have dropped back more than 0.5 degree C.

Why, then, cancel the insecticides that allow us to control the plant-munching bugs, the termites and the roaches; the fungicides that suppress the fungus so prevalent in Europe’s rainy crop fields; the herbicides that control the weeds, which otherwise steal half the sunlight, moisture and soil nutrients from the crop plants?

Organic farmers claim they can feed the world, but Denmark’s high-level Bichel Committee reported in 1999 that an all-organic farming mandate would cut Danish food production roughly in half.

The University of Michigan said in 2007 that organic farming could triple world food output – but the study’s lead author was a fully qualified geologist with no farming experience.

Humanity recently has enjoyed some of the most comfortable weather in the history of the planet. The Modern Warming should last several more centuries, at least, with less than 1 degree C of further temperature increase.

The only huge run-up in temperatures is found in the unverified computer models.

We have massively increased global food production, despite warnings from generations of Greens that farm science was “dangerous.” Bill Gates is trying now to extend Norman Borlaug’s Green Revolution to feed Africa as well.

Meanwhile, declining Third World birth rates indicate a peak human population about 2040, followed by a long, slow decline in human numbers as trade and technology spread affluence worldwide.

Is life too good? Is that why we feel compelled to make it more difficult?

Dennis T. Avery is a senior fellow for the Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C. and is the Director for the Center for Global Food Issues (www.cgfi.org). He was formerly a senior analyst for the Department of State. He is co-author, with S. Fred Singer, of “Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1,500 Years.” Readers may write him at P.O. Box 202, Churchville, VA 2442 or by e-mail to cgfi@hughes.net.

Until now, we've had little incentive to cut back on a one-person, one-car lifestyle that's polluting, wasteful, congests traffic and spawns the growth of highways and parking garages.

DES MOINES – I probably should have satisfied the urge to make a westward road trip 20 years ago, when a gallon of gas cost a fraction of the $4.40 we shelled out last weekend.

But with plenty of time to reflect in the 20 hours to and from Denver, I thought about some possible positive spin-off effects of these skyrocketing gas prices.

Tough as it is, they could force us to make adjustments that result in healthier, more communal and environmentally friendly living. And they could push governments and businesses to help provide the infrastructure.

Until now, we’ve had little incentive to cut back on a one-person, one-car lifestyle that’s polluting, wasteful, congests traffic and spawns the growth of highways and parking garages.

But when people can no longer afford to get in their gas-guzzling SUVs alone, maybe we’ll try something different.

At the most basic level, it should give a much-needed boost to public transportation, especially in cities that don’t have extensive bus routes or late hours of operation.

If enough people start riding, and demanding better routes and times, maybe we’ll get them.

Employers might consider offering shuttle services from the major residential areas where employees live. At the very least, we could all be doing more carpooling; employee groups or human resources officials could help coordinate schedules.

More commuters may be inspired to ride their bikes to work, a great heart-healthy exercise. Then we might get more bike lanes.

At least one city’s police department is putting more officers on bicycles, which encourages a more relaxed interaction between police and residents.

Gas prices are already leading to the manufacture of more hybrid cars for those who can afford them. But a more dramatic impact could be a trend some demographers predict, and real-estate agents are starting to see: a move back to the abandoned urban cores.

And since the cost of gas is most felt by companies and people doing long-distance travel, it might inspire the federal government to finally get behind better long-distance passenger rail service and even high-speed rail between major cities.

Some communities are looking at four-day workweeks, which could promote a better quality of life and more family time.

And if people limit their forays to the mall just to hang out or exercise, and start using their neighborhoods for recreation, maybe we’d see more block parties and picnics and a growing sense of community connectedness.

I know none of this long-term thinking can make up for the pinch we’re feeling at the gas pump right now. But when we stop behaving as if the Earth’s resources are infinite and each of us has unlimited, autonomous access to them, we might also start living more consciously and purposefully.

Maybe, in the larger scheme, we’ll be motivated to return more to our original (some would say natural) tribal state of interdependence.

Rekha Basu is an editorial columnist for the Des Moines (Iowa) Register. E-mail: mailto:rbasu@dmreg.com

Oilman serious about making America the ‘Saudi Arabia of wind’

Pickens' plan is a relatively simple but big step. Over the coming decade, he wants to build enough turbines in the nation's "wind belt" from Texas to North Dakota to provide more than 20 percent of U.S. electricity needs.

The last Texan to put so much of his money into a campaign was Ross Perot, who entertained the political world in 1992 with charts and rants of impending doom.

But his message about the budget deficit was serious, and he helped push the United States government into the black for a fleeting stretch of the late 1990s.

Now comes T. Boone Pickens, an 80-year-old Texas oilman who is pushing – of all things – the power of wind. Pickens promises to be nearly as recognizable as the presidential candidates on TV this fall, which may be a tall order given Barack Obama’s fundraising prowess.

Like Perot, Pickens brings a serious message worth listening to.

The oilman-entrepreneur-takeover artist has sponsored nationwide ads with a clearer, more declarative energy proposal than either Democrat Obama or Republican rival John McCain has offered.

Obama would sink $150 billion into alternative energy research and raise car fuel standards. McCain would offer a $300 million bounty for the developer of a better electric car battery and favors more oil exploration.

But each campaign has spent so much time attacking the other’s plan that it has muddied the energy debate and left a wide opening for Pickens’ straightforward, unifying message.

“It’s our crisis,” Pickens says in his new ads, “and we can solve it.”

Do not underestimate the power of can-do in this political moment. Most Americans are made aware of the problems facing the country every time they fill a gas tank, pay a light bill or worry about health insurance.

Stipulate that no one in the government, Democrat or Republican, deserves an energy policy star over the past 35 years. Stipulate that expensive choices lie ahead. But quit pointing fingers and tell us how this can be fixed.

Pickens, a self-described oilman through and through, is an unlikely messenger for the moment. He’s gone from boom-to-bust-and-back, the Oil Patch’s equivalent of Al Gore.

So Pickens embracing wind is tantamount to Nixon going to China. He says the country can’t “drill its way out of this problem,” that his plan is doable “with the right kind of leadership” and with “everyone pulling together.”

Besides proposing a big wind-turbine construction plan, he wants Congress to either extend construction tax credits set to expire at year’s end or establish other incentives for new wind generation.

Oilmen may be the most despised romantics in the American West. But as big dreamers, they have rarely sold short on the possibility of America.

Pickens is putting his money behind his idea, funneling big bucks to a TV ad campaign and building a $10 billion wind farm, near Pampa, Texas.

His plan is a relatively simple but big step. Over the coming decade, he wants to build enough turbines in the nation’s “wind belt” from Texas to North Dakota to provide more than 20 percent of U.S. electricity needs.

Pickens says that would free up enough natural gas to reduce foreign oil imports by 38 percent, ostensibly accelerating the trend to cars powered by something other than oil.

Such a plan would cost $1.2 trillion, he estimates, but it would allow the United States to keep at least one-third of the $700 billion it annually sends abroad for oil.

He says the potential is there. This is one of the windiest countries on the planet, and that’s no commentary on our perpetual campaigns. As the cliché goes, the U.S. is the Saudi Arabia of wind.

Pickens’ Web site is Perotesque in its use of charts and chalk and Texas talk. On his explainer video, you half expect Pickens to mention crazy aunts or vow to get under the hood, as the bantam billionaire Perot often did in the ’92 and ’96 elections.

Wind already is catching on in Flyover Country, where gigantic trucks can be seen hauling massive components of the 1-3 megawatt turbines headed for hillsides and bluffs in the wind belt from Washington state to Texas.

About 50,000 Americans are now employed in the wind generation industry, but Pickens’ plan could boost that figure to 500,000, according to the American Wind Energy Association.

Reaching 20 percent of the nation’s electrical needs through wind also would reduce carbon dioxide emissions from electricity generation by 25 percent by 2030, something that could put power behind the 50 percent greenhouse gas reductions agreement at the just-concluded G-8 meetings in Japan.

Last year, I heard Pickens tell a class of high school graduates that he would trade all the money he ever made, all the fancy things he ever enjoyed, for their futures. He urged the 18-year-olds to learn from their failures as much as their successes.

This capacity to correct is an unheralded power of America. The nation’s energy thirst will have to be quenched by something other than oil, and soon.

If it takes an oilman to push the politicians out into the wind, so be it.

Chuck Raasch is political editor for Gannett News Service. E-mail: craasch@gns.gannett.com. Get more behind-the-scenes reports, context and analysis about politicians and the political process in Raasch’s Furthermore blog.

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TO LEARN MORE

• T. Boone Pickens’ Web site: www.pickensplan.com

Committed environmentalists, they try to live by their principles. They buy local foods, take public transport, don't use air conditioning and keep their home a chilly 65 degrees in winter.

Some of us learn to live with our contradictions. We might talk corporate responsibility but still shop at Wal-Mart. Or worry about global warming, but leave every light on.

While there’s no substitute for more conscious living, you can reduce the impact of some of your bad practices.

That thought came to Ryan Legg and Meredith Nelson after they had planned, by their own descriptions, a rather environmentally unfriendly wedding.

Committed environmentalists, they try to live by their principles. They buy local foods, take public transport, don’t use air conditioning and keep their home a chilly 65 degrees in winter.

But this was their contradiction: They wanted a traditional wedding – church ceremony, country-club reception, the works. They knew many of the 165 guests would drive three to five hours to get to the wedding. That’s a lot of exhaust to pump into the atmosphere.

Plus they were serving steak and chicken, though fish would have used four times fewer carbon emissions to produce. And they wanted cut flowers on the tables, though potted plants would have been renewable.

They were feeling guilty, even with the hydrangeas and peonies coming from local growers. Then, as Legg put it, “We went, ‘Wait a minute. We should do something good for the environment!’ ”

They could, they realized, lessen their environmental faux pas by tallying up the energy expended in each guest’s car or plane trip, hotel stay and meals, and from the wedding itself.

Once they had a “carbon equivalent,” they could buy an equal number of “carbon offsets” to be invested in renewable-energy projects such as wind farms and solar installations.

The concept is known as carbon trading, and it’s the same principle behind the U.N. Kyoto Protocol treaty, which sets limits on each country’s carbon emissions. Carbon dioxide is believed to be the No. 1 human-induced cause of global warming.

Countries buy credits in return for exceeding their limits.

The United States pulled out of the treaty before it took effect in 2005. But mitigating greenhouse gases can be done at the individual level, too.

Each person has a carbon footprint, representing the amount of carbon dioxide we put into the atmosphere by using fossil fuels such as oil or coal to drive, fly or heat homes. Even the things we buy contribute because of the energy required to create and transport them. You can calculate your carbon footprint using the Web site they did, www.TerraPass.com.

The couple arrived at a carbon equivalent of 27,000 pounds. So they bought an equivalent amount of carbon offsets, which cost under $200. Cards on each table let guests know that this was in lieu of party favors. “Better than a little bag of M&M’s,” says Nelson.

Legg, 26, and Nelson, 25, are graduate students at Cornell University. Both went into engineering with an interest in improving living standards in the developing world.

As a researcher at Cornell’s Johnson School Center for Sustainable Global Enterprise, Legg has explored how the private sector is addressing environmental concerns.

The best way to reduce greenhouse gases and global warming, of course, is to conserve energy, use public transport or drive more energy-efficient cars.

But this is an alternative that promotes awareness and interjects an ethical approach into a major life event. It shows that doing better by the environment (and your conscience) doesn’t have to be punishing. You can get pretty creative with it.

Rekha Basu is an editorial columnist for the Des Moines (Iowa) Register. E-mail: mailto:rbasu@dmreg.com

Congress hasn't mowed the grass - or pumped our own gas - for years. We had a chance to start drilling on federal land in Alaska in 1996. The grass was short and easy to cut. The House and Senate pulled the starter rope. But President Clinton vetoed it.

I think I will stop mowing my lawn. After all, it’s just a short-term fix. If I mow this week, it will still have to be cut again next week. Demand for mowing just keeps growing. I can’t mow my way out of the grass crisis.

If the neighbors complain when my yard turns into a miniature rain forest, I will insist I’m doing it to be “green.” That seems to work for everyone else.

And if the neighborhood association drags me into court, I will call as my first witness Sen. Harry Reid, D-Weaselville.

“You people are just not serious about addressing grass,” he will say. “If you were, you would stop offering the same old ideas meant to pad the pockets of Big Mowers and work with Democrats to reduce our dependence on short grass.”

That’s almost exactly what he said about drilling for oil.

So I figure the logic is about the same. If we don’t cut the grass this week, it will be a lot harder to mow when it’s deeper than barnyard byproducts in the Senate.

And if we don’t keep up with demand by pumping more oil, our economy will turn into a vacant lot of weeds and thistles.

Congress hasn’t mowed the grass – or pumped our own gas – for years. We had a chance to start drilling on federal land in Alaska in 1996. The grass was short and easy to cut. The House and Senate pulled the starter rope. But President Clinton vetoed it.

He said it would ruin Alaska – which is like saying Texas would be “ruined” by adding a Shell station in Abilene.

Now the grass is $4 deep, and it gets harder to cut every day.

The Democrats’ answer: We should rely on alternatives, such as goats and sheep.

The environmentalists couldn’t be happier. They’ve managed to convince Congress that our overgrown backyard is a “sacred ecosystem.”

But I have a couple of cars in my garage. I like to drive them. Light rail, trolleys, buses and other goat-alternatives don’t move the needle on my thrill gauge like the rumble of a V-8.

And I’m not the only one who thinks driving is a cherished constitutional right. So until we come up with Fords that burn mulch or Hondas that run on dishwater, we’re going to need gas. Lots of it.

If we had drilled in Alaska in 1996, we could be tapping up to 12 billion barrels of our own oil. Even with rising demand from India and China, we’d have some relief from gas pains.

The good news: We have enough untapped oil reserves to fuel all the cars on the road today for 30 years, according to U.S. geological reports.

President Bush says we have 800 billion barrels of recoverable shale oil in the Rocky Mountain states alone – three times bigger than Saudi Arabia’s ocean of oil.

In the Gulf of Mexico and along our coasts, there’s another 18 billion barrels – 10 years of current U.S. oil production.

The bad news: It’s all off-limits – banned by Congress in 1981, when gas cost $1.38.

Bush wants to lift the bans and start drilling to keep gas prices reasonable until we come up with mulchmobiles. It takes years to get some of that oil to the nearest gas pump, but starting now could reduce prices by curbing speculation and notifying OPEC that they’re no longer the only gas station in town.

A petition drive by Newt Gingrich, “Drill Here, Drill Now, Pay Less,” has nearly 1 million signatures.

But Democrats offer the same old ideas: No to nuclear power. No to drilling our own oil. They say offshore oil drilling will be an environmental catastrophe.

Folderol. There were no damaging spills from 3,000 offshore platforms in the path of Katrina.

Polls show 57 percent of Americans agree with Bush. Just ask anyone pumping gas if they want cheaper domestic oil – then stand back.

Meanwhile, maybe we should stop paying gas taxes, which cost twice as much as “Big Oil” profits. After all, taxes are only a short-term fix. They are just the same old idea to pad the pockets of Big Blockheads in Congress.

Peter Bronson is a columnist with the Cincinnati Enquirer and former editorial page editor of the Tucson Citizen. E-mail: pbronson@cincinna.gannett.com

Tucson didn't want to be like Phoenix. What Tucson failed to realize is that existing and developing inexorable political and economic forces were going to make this metropolis part of the megalopolis anyway, so you might as well build adequate infrastructures and with respect for the environment.

Sure, it’s the same all over, as one of my professors once said.

But is it my imagination, or is it just a little worse here in Tucson and Arizona?

Maybe I’m part of the problem. I moved here.

Yes, I moved to this fragile desert environment, with a scarcity of that basic resource known as water.

Then I contributed to the problem by consuming water and doing other things that degrade the surroundings, such as having a polluting, greenhouse gas-emitting automobile, consuming electricity, living in spaces that have asphalt parking lots, etc.

But at least I was only one person and didn’t try to mass develop the place in an environmentally unfriendly manner.

We’ll get back to this later – whoever that editorial “we” might be.

You can see the problem in the way Tucsonans drive.

Lack of adequate infrastructure is one problem, of course. There also are selfish, aggressive drivers.

There are the overly cautious drivers. And many lack peripheral awareness and have tunnel vision only.

Tucson didn’t want to be like Phoenix. What Tucson failed to realize is that existing and developing inexorable political and economic forces were going to make this metropolis part of the megalopolis anyway, so you might as well build adequate infrastructures and with respect for the environment.

Now it is too late, kind of. We can’t get out of the grid and gridlock easily.

Water will have to be pumped from the Pacific Northwest and Canada, or from desalinization plants in the Pacific or Gulf of California in Mexico, neither of which is particularly feasible politically or economically.

What is unique about Tucson and southeast Arizona is the Sonoran Desert sky island ecology, with an incredible variety of bird life, for example.

These elements should be nurtured and fostered, with eco-tourism and solar energy, for example.

Not much has been done in these areas, however, sad to say.

Impersonal developments breed impersonal people at best, criminals at worst.

Some urban developments should be done with elevators and covered parking with electric plug-ins, to encourage preservation of the environment and use of bicycles.

I didn’t change the whole world in the space of this column. Next time, maybe.

Dave Schwartz is a retired maverick intellectual environmentalist.

Rep. Raúl Grijalva unearths a legal tactic favored by Morris Udall to keep uranium miners from exploring land around the Grand Canyon for a year

Rep. Raúl Grijalva's bill to protect the Grand Canyon would have taken too long and may never have made it through the current administration.

In a slick maneuver perfected by the late, great Mo Udall, U.S. Rep. Raúl Grijalva Wednesday will get the votes needed to protect the Grand Canyon.

The House Committee on Natural Resources will approve an emergency declaration to halt uranium mining activity on more than 1 million acres there.

Floor debate? We don’t need no stinkin’ floor debate. Or a vote by the full House or Senate, for that matter.

An emergency can be declared when “extraordinary measures must be taken to preserve (land) values that would otherwise be lost,” says Section 204 of the Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976.

Such House declarations have been made only four times – all four by Arizona’s legendary Rep. Morris K. Udall, a Tucson Democrat.

Udall always said “you can get anything done in the House as long as you know the rules,” recalls Tucson’s Chris Helms, his former aide and the retired executive director of the Udall Foundation.

And get it done Udall did:

• In 1978, he froze uses of 104 million acres of Alaska, land later carved into national parks, wildlife refuges and conservation areas under the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act written by Udall.

• A year later, Udall halted exploratory uranium drilling within the Casita Reservoir Watershed in California.

• In 1981, he forced Interior Secretary James Watt to withdraw 1.5 million acres of forests from mineral leasing in three Montana wilderness areas where the secretary planned to issue oil and gas leases.

• And in 1983, Udall’s final emergency declaration withdrew coal leases opposed by Indian tribes in Montana and North Dakota.

Now, 25 years later, Grijalva is following in the footsteps of another great Tucson Democrat.

Grijalva’s Grand Canyon resolution, signed by committee Chairman Nick Rahall, D-W.Va., will protect the canyon’s buffer zone from uranium exploration for one year.

The Bush administration will challenge the constitutionality of this move, Grijalva predicts.

Udall’s emergency declarations prevailed in several challenges and lawsuits, however, and the land policy law hasn’t changed.

What’s mystifying is the lack of immediate, loud support from a united Arizona delegation.

Only Democratic Reps. Gabrielle Giffords and Ed Pastor had expressed support as of this writing.

“If I were our delegation, our esteemed senators, I wouldn’t want to be on the side of challenging (the canyon protection),” Grijalva said.

If anything ever deserved full bipartisan support in Arizona, it is the Grand Canyon, one of the world’s seven wonders.

Yes, mineral exploration may be tempting, with uranium prices expected to rebound from $57 a pound to $90 a pound, as the International Herald Tribune reported Monday.

But earlier uranium exploration in northern Arizona now is costing the U.S. government tens of millions of dollars in assessments and cleanups.

Cold War mining on the Navajo reservation – in Arizona, New Mexico and Utah – sparked a public health tragedy that still reverberates today. Between 1944 and 1986, more than 4 million tons of uranium were extracted from Navajo land.

Prolonged exposure to uranium is cited in the premature deaths of Navajo miners, and cancer clusters and genetic defects still being passed on.

Contamination of water sources, homes and buildings still is being assessed by federal agencies.

Uranium exploration simply isn’t appropriate in the buffer zone of Grand Canyon National Park.

The canyon, the very icon of Arizona, attracts more than 5 million visitors a year from around the world.

Its Colorado River and tributaries support populations from Tucson to Los Angeles to the Colorado River Delta in Mexico.

“The ecological, geological and hydrological connections between the canyon and the lands adjacent to it are formidable and profound,” notes Tucson’s Robert L. Arnberger, a former superintendent of Grand Canyon National Park who now serves on the executive council of The Coalition of National Park Service Retirees.

The coalition, with about 650 members representing more than 17,000 years of managing national parks, supports Grijalva’s declaration.

“What happens around the park eventually finds its way to the park and vice versa,” Arnberger says.

Yet the Forest Service recently approved exploratory drilling for uranium at seven sites within three miles of Grand Canyon National Park.

That’s why Grijalva had to get creative and wound up with an emergency declaration a la Udall.

Grijalva’s bill, HR 5583, would have taken too long and may never have made it through the current administration.

Now the lands in question must be withdrawn from drilling for a year.

“Hopefully our senators will step in and talk to the administration,” Grijalva said in an interview last week.

“Then comes the next hope: We get permanent legislative relief and an administration with a much kinder and gentler view of the Grand Canyon.”

Until then, Grijalva deserves thanks – and the protection of our Grand Canyon deserves strong, full support from every Arizona delegation member.

Billie Stanton may be reached at bstanton@tucsoncitizen.com and 573-4664.

Grijalva hopes for 'an administration with a much kinder and gentler view of the Grand Canyon.'

Udall always said 'you can get anything done in the House as long as you know the rules.'

To keep our nation moving efficiently, the federal government must ensure dedicated funding and hold states accountable for maintaining roadways.

Transportation in America was once an engine of progress and an inspiration.

Railroads opened the West, and automobiles brought new mobility for a footloose nation after World War II.

Nowadays, getting around is a source of more problems than solutions.

Traffic delays waste an average of 38 hours a year for urban commuters – almost an entire workweek and more than twice as much as in 1985.

The major source of our addiction to expensive foreign oil, transportation consumes 2 out of every 3 barrels and is the fastest-growing source of global warming pollution.

Oil costing $130-plus a barrel and crumbling infrastructure are drags on the economy.

And the once-flush federal transportation trust fund and many of its state counterparts are forecast to run out of money in the next two years.

Since fulfilling President Eisenhower’s 1956 vision of an interstate system to link our major cities, transportation policy has stumbled on without a clear purpose.

Federal transportation spending has become little more than a giant public works program.

In the absence of a defined strategy, individual success of legislators is often judged by how many federal dollars are brought home, while the nation’s infrastructure has largely deteriorated.

To keep our nation moving efficiently, the federal government must ensure dedicated funding and hold states accountable for maintaining roadways.

Maintenance now is left almost entirely up to states, competing with popular programs for scarce dollars and typically losing out to expensive projects that offer big headlines and ribbon-cutting ceremonies.

Federal transportation funds also continue to be distributed through the false assumption that more is better when it comes to roadways.

States receive highway funds based on three outdated criteria: the previous year’s gasoline consumption, lane-miles of federal highways and the previous year’s vehicle miles traveled.

More driving, in other words, garners more federal dollars.

States that do their part to reduce America’s oil dependence and global warming pollution would reduce growth of these measures and would lose out on federal dollars.

Our government should reward states and localities that reduce gas consumption and miles driven by instead emphasizing public transportation.

Light rail, rapid bus transit, commuter rail, high-speed intercity rail and other forms of public transit are more energy efficient and encourage development patterns that require less driving.

The Arizona PIRG Education Fund found that public transit saved 3.4 billion gallons of oil in 2006. This translated into $9 billion saved at the pump and prevented 26 million tons of global warming emissions.

Public transit trips have been growing faster than auto miles or population since 1995. Likewise, 53 percent of Americans tell pollsters they would like to take more public transportation if it is available near where they live and work.

Giving people the transportation choices they want will require Congress to make changes.

Since 1956, federal, state and local governments have spent nine times more on highway subsidies than on public transportation.

This ratio has improved, but not fast enough. And now President Bush’s 2009 budget would take us back in time, cutting transit money by $200 million, slashing Amtrak’s budget by 40 percent and diverting $3.2 billion from the federal transit account to highways.

Such cuts would move the country in exactly the wrong direction.

Congress will have a golden opportunity when the current transportation authorization bill expires next year.

Public leaders must recognize that our transportation problems stem from a lack of purpose. They must rewrite policy to address contemporary problems of rapidly aging infrastructure, urban congestion, oil dependence and an overheating planet.

Instead of simply “reauthorizing” the transportation act with higher spending, Congress must reinvent how it funds transportation.

Diane E. Brown is the executive director of the Arizona Public Interest Research Group in Phoenix (www.ArizonaPIRG.org).

We are truly conflicted about energy. Everyone agrees gasoline prices are far too high, but:

• Congress claims the oil industry is manipulating gas prices, while not allowing drilling.

• President Bush’s corn ethanol mandate has nearly doubled the world’s food prices, while producing a tiny amount of low-grade auto fuel.

• The Senate is debating the Lieberman-Warner bill, which would deliberately tax gasoline and every other fossil fuel more and more heavily until we stop using them. That’s to “save us” from global warming.

The most foolish “solution” of all – the new law that lets us sue Arabs (we have zero jurisdiction) to force them to produce more oil while we sit on billions of gallons of oil and thousands of American jobs, refusing to drill in our own backyard.

The most logical answer to high gasoline prices has to be coal.

We have centuries’ worth of coal, and we have clean-burning systems such as fluidized bed combustion. But we’ve been retiring the old coal-fired power plants and burning scarcer oil and natural gas in our power plants. That has driven up both gas and gasoline prices.

Hybrid cars conserve a little oil, but shifting the power plants to “clean coal” would conserve a lot of it.

Instead, the Eco-Department of Kansas has just forbidden the construction of two new coal-fired power plants because they would emit greenhouse gases. Gov. Kathleen Sibelius has backed up the environmental regulators. Texas has been forced to drop plans for several new coal-fired plants as well.

Kansas and Texas are naïve. In Europe, they’re openly burning more coal already.

German coal burning was up 3.5 percent last year, never mind Kyoto. Britain is building a whole generation of new coal-fired plants to keep the lights on with a minimum of Middle East oil and Russian natural gas.

California wins the hypocrisy medal as it brags about its small carbon footprint while letting Arizona and New Mexico burn California’s coal just over the border, and paying the transmission costs back to California.

In the longer run, when we come to our senses, nuclear power will be a big player. But it will take a long time to get new nuclear plants on line. Nor is it clear what they will cost, even if we can rein in the green lawsuits that seem to have paralyzed both the courts and Congress.

Don’t blame Big Oil. Countries own their oil – and the U.S. won’t let U.S. workers produce it in this country.

Don’t blame the Arabs for the Greenpeace plan to scuttle “clean coal,” along with every other viable energy source.

Don’t even blame Congress, which foolishly tries to represent our own ambivalence about cars, energy and “conservation.” Is leaving coal in the ground part of conservation? And what are we conserving it for if we refuse to use it as energy?

The crowning irony is that NASA now says the Pacific Ocean has entered a 25-30 year cooling phase. The last time this happened was from 1940-1975, when we had moderate, erratic global cooling.

The climate science shows a 79 percent correlation between our temperatures and sunspots but no correlation with CO2. This means CO2 cannot be the dominant factor in our climate.

So the high gas prices, the reliance on foreign oil, the loss of American jobs in the oil and coal and potential jobs in the nuclear fields are all for naught.

Dennis T. Avery directs the Center for Global Food Issues (www.cgfi.org) for the Hudson Institute of Washington, D.C. He was formerly the senior agricultural analyst in the U.S. State Department. He is the co-author of the 2006 best-seller “Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1,500 Years.”

There is a long stretch between the premise that there is a significant anthropogenic contribution to global warming and the conclusion that cap-and-trade is the best approach to mitigating it.

The debate this week over the Lieberman-Warner cap-and-trade bill will be depicted as a fight between those who believe in man-made global warming and those who don’t.

And to a large extent, that will be the case.

It shouldn’t be. There is a long stretch between the premise that there is a significant anthropogenic contribution to global warming and the conclusion that cap-and-trade is the best approach to mitigating it.

There are three harsh realities about cap-and-trade that are likely to receive short shrift this week.

The first is that the conundrum over how to allocate emission allowances is irresolvable.

Under cap-and-trade, the government decides how much aggregate greenhouse gases can be emitted. Rights to emit are distributed. Those rights can then be traded.

The problem is in deciding who gets the rights initially.

In Europe, the rights were distributed roughly proportional to what producers were previously emitting. There are several objections to this.

First, it gives existing polluters something of value for free. That hardly seems fair.

Second, it disadvantages new entrants, who generally have cleaner production processes. They either have to petition the government for emission rights or purchase them from competitors.

The other approach is to auction off the emission rights to the highest bidder. Cap-and-trade for greenhouse gases, however, would apply to a vast expanse of the American economy. Auctioning off emission rights would engender huge economic uncertainty. Producers wouldn’t know whether they could obtain sufficient rights to continue production or at what cost.

Lieberman-Warner splits the baby. Initially, some of the emission rights would be distributed to producers without charge, some would be auctioned.

Over time, the free permits would be phased out, and producers would have to purchase all their emissions rights.

Most of these equity and uncertainty problems would go away with a straight-forward carbon tax. No pollution would be free and polluters wouldn’t get something of value for nothing. New entrants with cleaner production processes would be advantaged.

Yet producers would know they could produce and roughly what their emissions would cost. The tax could be calibrated to induce the increments of reduced greenhouse gases desired.

The only advantage of cap-and-trade over a carbon tax is political. With a carbon tax, politicians would be increasing energy prices directly. With cap-and-trade, they are increasing energy prices indirectly through business regulation while creating greater economic unfairness and uncertainty.

Cap-and-trade is a refuge for politicians who don’t want to own up to what they are doing.

The second harsh reality of a cap-and-trade program is that policing international offsets will be impossible.

Allowing international offsets reduces compliance costs considerably, since greenhouse gas reductions can be accomplished much less expensively in other parts of the world. As it emerged from committee, Lieberman-Warner allows producers to obtain 15 percent of their emission rights through international offsets.

However, the world is a big place and governance standards in developing countries often leave a lot to be desired, to put it mildly. Policing supposed greenhouse reduction projects in developing countries to ensure validity is simply not doable.

A U.N. program intended to do so has bogged down, not that U.N. certification would be any more reassuring.

The greenhouse gas reductions contemplated by Lieberman-Warner – 33 percent by 2030, 70 percent by 2050 – are doubtful to begin with. Without reliable international offsets, they are highly improbable.

Which leads to the third harsh reality. Even if global-war