Yet another import

From USA Today:

Americans drive imported cars, wear imported clothes and chug imported beers. Now scientists are discovering another, less welcome import into the USA: air pollution.

Mercury from China, dust from Africa, smog from Mexico — all of it drifts freely across U.S. borders and contaminates the air millions of Americans breathe, according to recent research from Harvard University, the University of Washington and many other institutions where scientists are studying air pollution. There are no boundaries in the sky to stop such pollution, no Border Patrol agents to capture it.

Well, isn't that special. Of course, since the US won't sign the Kyoto Protocol, it's all our fault, even though China and other developing countries are specifically exempted from meeting its requirements. What good would signing it do? It's not like magical "pollution pixies" will appear and clean up the planet. All that will happen is that the economy of the US will be significantly hampered at the expense of the economies of other nations.

It doesn't take much research to find that, the wealthier a country is, the cleaner its environment tends to be. This is in large part because cleaner technology, involving both the creation and consumption of energy, is more sophisticated and therefore more expensive to develop, purchase, and maintain. Goods and services provided with that technology are likewise more expensive. You really want to clean up the planet, let the wealthy countries like the US grow their economies, which will help other less developed nations grow theirs, and eventually you'll get to a point where everyone can afford to have clean environments.

Now I'm not saying that the US doesn't have any work to do. But it's being done. For example, here in the Seattle area, I'll bet you won't be able to find a Toyota Prius or Honda Civic Hybrid for MSRP. There are a lot of environmentally-conscious people living here and a lot of them have ample money to spend on hybrid vehicles that are somewhat more expensive than their non-hybrid counterparts.

Oh, and what about allowing greater use of the energy source that doesn't pollute the air at all? That would, of course, be nuclear power. Yes, there's the problem of what to do with the spent fuel but we know how to store that stuff safely. Take a look sometime at how that stuff is going to be stored at Yucca mountain, if it ever happens. It's seismically stable and the fuel will be encased in containers that are, if anything, massively overengineered for the task.

Whether the Kyoto Protocol is an attempt to reduce the economic power of the United States or is motivated entirely by good intentions, it has serious issues and that's why the US isn't signing on. Instead, we're just going to go about our business inventing cleaner sources of energy not because we have to, but because we want to.