POST SCRIPTS

thought that the issue-attention cycle for the environment would last longer than most issues, it appears the mother-of-all-environmental scares -- global warming -- is following his model and is going to begin to fade like other environmental alarms of the past such as the population bomb and the “we’re running out of everything” scares. ** The latest annual Gallup survey on the environment shows that only 37 percent of Americans say they worry about global warming “a great deal,” down from 41 percent last year, and, moreover, about the same as a decade ago. ** Air pollution is on its way to being eliminated entirely in the U.S. in about another 20 years. Levels of air pollution have fallen between 25 and 99 percent (depending on which pollutant you measure), with the nation’s worst areas showing the most progress. For example, Los Angeles has gone from having nearly 200 high ozone days in the 1970s to less than 25 days a year today. Many areas of the Los Angeles basin are now smog-free year round. ** Water pollution is more stubborn and harder to measure (and is being made worse in the Mississippi River basin by the government’s crazy ethanol mandate), but here too there have been major improvements since the first Earth Day in 1970. ** The Great Lakes have been cleaned up, with many previously endangered species of birds now thriving. The Cuyahoga River in Cleveland doesn’t catch fire any more. The amount of toxic chemicals used in American industry has fallen by 61 percent over the last 20 years, even as industrial output has grown. Forestland in the U.S. has been expanding at a rate of nearly 1 million acres a year over the last generation. ** The world’s worst environmental problems are in poor nations, precisely because they are poor. Economic growth turns out to be the prerequisite for environmental protection—a fact that most environmentalists now grudgingly admit.

CONGRATULATIONS AMERICA - That includes EVERYBODY!!