Underreported Progress on Earth Day...?

New York Times columnist John Tierney noted the following Sunday (April 23, 2006) in his regular weekly column:

 

“Most air pollutants have declined sharply in recent decades, and the amount of forest land hasn’t been shrinking at all — it’s been fairly stable since 1920 and has actually grown in the last decade.  But cheery facts like these don’t get much attention in environmental studies classes or Earth Day events.  Earth Day has traditionally been the occasion for apocalyptic predictions: global famines due to overpopulation, cancer epidemics from synthetic chemicals, cities destroyed by accidents at nuclear plants, species wiped out by deforestation, crippling shortages of energy... While Europeans have been reveling in their moral superiority in adopting the Kyoto Protocol, the United States has been pushing technologies that involve less pain but more gain, like new nuclear power plants and methods of sequestering carbon... These programs have gotten little attention.  (I managed to find a total of one newspaper article devoted to the methane project).  But if you add up the projected annual reductions in carbon dioxide from these efforts, the total is greater than what Europeans are planning to cut through Kyoto, according to David Victor, the director of the Program on Energy and Sustainable Development at Stanford University.”