WASHINGTON — Driving from Washington, D.C., to Annapolis, Md., on the shores of Chesapeake Bay, you have a choice. You can take Highway 50 and hope it’s not bumper-to-bumper. Or you can take a two-lane country road called the Defence Highway, where constant traffic flow winds through countryside that really isn’t rural.
Beyond the thin canopy of forested hills that hug the road are cul-de-sac communities with dozens of newly built stick houses sporting three- and four-car garages. They represent what climate scientists call “locked-in carbon intensive emissions.” Jobs, schools, shopping all depend on the automobile.
U.S. Census Bureau statistics show that these suburban neighbourhoods continue to creep across America like an ink stain. And with them is a national splurging on new cars so large it is the main driver of economic growth.
Since average wages have shown little or no growth, the question is how Americans can afford them. The answer is low-cost automobile loans, but not just any kind. Increasingly, buyers are obtaining the same kind of subprime loans that brought down the housing industry in 2008. And the government permits it.
With new-car purchases up more than 40 per cent — almost twice the growth of all other spending — U.S. highway systems are overloaded. The call is out for big-budget repair and expansion of roads and bridges.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released its fourth climate mitigation report this week, and chief among its warnings is the danger of building infrastructure that locks societies into GHG-intensive emissions, guaranteeing a nation’s commitment to burning carbon for many decades to come.
“The lock-in risk is compounded by the lifetime of the infrastructure … and the magnitude of the investment costs,” the IPCC writes.
The positive side of the report is that scientists believe there is still time to avoid catastrophic climate change with minimal lifestyle changes. “This report makes very clear we face an issue of global willpower, not capacity,” U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said in a statement.
Polls indicate that in most countries there is no shortage of willpower. But not so in the U.S., where only 40 per cent said climate change is a major threat and most of them were Democrats (only nine per cent of Tea Party supporters said they believed in man-made climate change).
Yet 65 per cent of Americans support stricter emissions limits on power plants. So the country is not entirely lacking in the desire to take action. What is lacking is good governance — the kind of law-making that is geared to looking after the long-term security of its people.
Signs of bad governance are everywhere. Among the major democracies, the richest and most powerful country in the world is pretty well dead last in most quality-of-life indicators: life expectancy, poverty, access to health care, public security, education and even average wealth.
The true nature of America’s bad governance is fundamental and systemic. It is seen in Congress’s unwillingness to pass laws of obvious benefit to the greater population. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the environment and in health care.
The Center for Public Integrity, a non-profit dedicated to investigative journalism, this week won the Pulitzer Prize for stories about the systematic denial of benefits by doctors and lawyers to coal miners suffering from black lung disease. Among the findings was that doctors at Johns Hopkins University had supplied erroneous medical assessments that allowed coal companies to deny benefits to thousands of miners. In exchange for the assessments, which consisted of chest X-ray readings, the coal companies paid the university’s medical school — among the most prestigious in the country — 10 times the typical rate. This went on for decades.
Had the U.S. a universal health-care system and a workers’ compensation program, the chances of this happening would have been slim.
The high cost of U.S. health care — well over twice what Canadians pay — is often attributed to the high quality and inventiveness of the U.S. free market system. Yet there is nothing free market about health care, and studies repeatedly show that countries with public systems are equally inventive and often more advanced in the delivery of quality care at every level.
One reason U.S. health care is so expensive has to do with the way Congress has set the rules. It allows the American Medical Association to set the fees, which are often adjusted to allow the doctor to charge for more hours than were actually worked. They also award doctors higher fees for using more expensive procedures.
A Medicare database of doctors’ charges, for example, showed that eye doctors were using a drug that costs $2,000 US per injection over an equivalent drug made by the same company that costs only $50. The Washington Post found that the more expensive drug costs Medicare an additional $1 billion US a year.
The reason doctors prefer the more expensive version is strictly financial. Over and above the cost of the drug, Medicare pays them 40 times more for the pricier injection. And why does that happen? Because doctors and drug companies contribute to the campaigns of law-makers that slip these skewed pricing regulations into the laws.
There are no signs the quality of governance will change in America. Last weekend, six Republican presidential hopefuls gathered at the “Freedom Summit” in New Hampshire. It was co-sponsored by the Americans for Prosperity Foundation, which is financed by the billionaire Koch brothers. Over the years, they have pumped millions of dollars into Congress to oppose carbon-emission regulations. So far, not a single climate-change bill has made it to the Senate floor.
wmarsden@postmedia.com
