Editorials

The Saturday Farmers’ Market in Berkeley was awash with politicians, pressing the flesh and hawking their latest products. “Will you take the pledge?” one shouted at me, and I fled. I’ve got many historic associations with taking pledges, none of them good. 

In my childhood I discovered that when it was whispered about that So-and-So had “taken the pledge” it meant that he (it was always men) drank too much, and with the aid of some earnest priest he had promised in church to “go on the wagon” for a while—with dubious chances for long-term abstinence, however. (For the uninitiated, that’s the “water wagon,” as opposed perhaps to the club car on the train where the boozers hung out.) The hope was that prayer would save sinners from the demon rum, but it seldom lasted long. 

Another popular pledge has been promoted by the Christian right as the solution to the problem of sexually transmitted diseases. Pre-teens promise to refrain from sex at least until (we hope not after) marriage. Statistics, scanty at best, indicate that these abstinence pledges don’t make much difference either. 

A Google search turns up all kinds of pledges, from the unenforceable to the frankly commercial. There’s a “no-windows-boot” pledge bawked, not surprisingly, by the Apple Computer corporation. A Republican senator tried to goad Al Gore into signing some sort of environmental pledge. Gore, no fool he and an honest man to boot, politely declined.  

The pledge being pushed at the market on Saturday also seemed to have something to do with the environment. Making an educated guess, I checked the Berkeley mayor’s city-funded public relations page, and sure enough, there it was: 

I, _______________________, will address the climate crisis by taking responsibility for my greenhouse gas emissions. I pledge to reduce my greenhouse gas emissions by at least 10 percent within one year and 2 percent every year after that. 

Who could object to that, one might ask? Write a piece, if you dare, denoucing motherhood (population explosion, you know) or apple pie (the obesity epidemic!), but the prime candidate for Sacred Cow of the New Millenium is greenhouse gas emissions. How can anyone deny the need for reducing greenhouse gas emissions? 

Well, no sensible person denies the problem, but there’s a lot to object to in the quasi-religious way that true believers are promoting ineffective personal solutions to knotty global problems. Pledges such as this one are based on a lot of faith, even more hope, and very little science. Percentages, as any high-school math student will tell you, mean nothing unless you define “percent of what.”  

Accompanying the pledge was a table, coyly titled “My Very Own Climate Action Plan,” printed in that Word computer font which is supposed to look like hand-printing but fools no one. It profers dynamic suggestions like using a water-saving shower head and buying an Energy Star ™ refrigerator. Excuse me, but haven’t we been doing those things here in Berkeley since the drought of the mid-’70s at least? The problem with band-aid solutions like these is that they allow us to feel that we’re doing the right thing while large-scale serious environmental threats of all kinds continue to be tolerated. 

Even worse, when environmental protection is treated like a religion, like all religions it engenders the emergence of false prophets. Here in Berkeley we have false environmental prophecies in abundance prominently preached. Some examples: 

A major part of the University of California is being sold off to British Petroleum. Why? Scientifically suspect claims are made that biofuels will solve the energy crisis without causing deforestation in the Amazon for planting fuel crops. And even if the claims are right, a multinational BP will still have a near-monopoly on supply, a risky proposition. Some professors will get even richer, to boot. 

And AC Transit is promoting half-a-billion dollars worth of construction contracts for a hard-wired bus rapid transit scheme which threatens to sink locally-serving businesses along its route. Their EIR offers absolutely no concrete proof that BRT will reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but it will certainly line a number of pockets with green. Berkeley people will be driving to malls to buy their books if Moe’s closes. 

The revised Berkeley landmarks ordinance, if not overturned by citizens in the upcoming referendum, is another anti-environmental boondoggle. It’s carefully calculated to make it even easier to demolish re-usable existing buildings. These will be replaced with the kind of new construction which consumes more energy and other resources than intelligent rehab—even if a few of the new buildings are built to often-lax LEED standards.  

But if we all believe, if we all take the pledge (and perhaps take some shorter showers and turn off some lights) we’ll be saved. Hallelujah. 

Berkeley should be embarrassed to allow itself to be fooled by faith-based greenwashed promotional schemes, particularly if they’re promulgated at government expense to promote political careers. Climate change, sometimes equated with global warming, is a serious threat which requires reality-based scientific world-wide solutions. Messianic zeal at the local level for ineffectual nostrums, with a dash of hippy capitalism thrown in to make us all entrepreneurs, cannot promise salvation, no matter how many pledges we take.