Column: Global Warming ... The Story of the President Who Saw a Great Problem and Did Nothing About it

What public-policy historians would have done without the sorry events of the late 1920s as a guide is hard to imagine. Those final years of the 20th-century's third decade have acted ever since as an instructive benchmark by which contemporary official attitudes could be evaluated with benefit of focused hindsight. What was it that the nation's highest authorities did to avert an economic implosion--credible signs of which had been posted along financial highways for years?

The answer, of course, is that compared to the level of catastrophic trouble brewing, the level of official proactivism was barely readable. Even though Herbert Hoover later wrote that as Commerce Secretary he was alarmed as early as 1925 at the"growing tide of speculation," he urged little more than cooperative efforts between public and private concerns to stem it. Naturally, Washington expected working-class Americans to abide by volumes of coercive federal, state, and local laws; the unthinkable was that industry moguls and Wall Street stockjobbers should bend involuntarily to freedom-restricting, interventionist"statism."

Once the speculative bubble burst, as it was bound to do, President Hoover persisted in an overall hands-off approach. He did intervene with the traditional Republican answer to all bedevilments: a tax cut. And what a whopper it was. A family head earning the then-respectable annual income of $4000 saw his federal burden slashed by two-thirds, which provided the comfortable cushion of another $3.75 to rest on. Yet cutting the fellow's annual tab from $5.63 to $1.88 didn't quite do the job of turning the economy around.

Hoover also sought voluntary pledges from trade-association leaders to keep wages stable and boost investments; increased public-works spending; established $2 billion of lending power through the Reconstruction Finance Corporation; encouraged the Federal Reserve Board to expand the monetary supply; had the government buy some surplus wheat and cotton; and bowed to domestic manufacturing demands for higher tariffs. All that may sound impressive, but for a country with a gross domestic product of $101,444,000,000 in 1929, it wasn't much. By and large, in striving to overcome economic adversity Hoover restricted his vision to voluntary measures of cooperation and compliance, disdaining as he did the potential of monstrous government intrusions on free entrepreneurial spirits.

In the polluted waters of investment finance, for example, Hoover left to his successor the job of prohibiting insider trading, mandating full disclosure on new securities, and authorizing the Federal Reserve to set margin requirements of up to 100 percent on stock purchases. The technocrat-turned-politician's general policy of corporate"volunteerism" was a disaster which only deepened and prolonged disaster. FDR's early imitation of Hoover's policy--such as creating the ill-fated, industry-driven National Recovery Administration--similarly failed in recovery efforts.

Now comes the present-day White House with a stunningly sluggish Hooverian mentality on matters of far greater import, in the long run, than severe economic woes: to wit, global warming. Referring to his own administration's oxymoronically titled"Climate Action Report" as something"put out by the bureaucracy," the president has finally, though snidely, acknowledged the egregious effects of carbon dioxide, nitrogen oxide, sulfur dioxide, and mercury brimming over, around, and beneath us. Sure the atmosphere is heating up, admits W. Sure it'll get even hotter. And yep, that'll cause polar caps to melt, causing the seas to rise and thus causing the loss of water supplies, Rocky Mountain meadows, coastal wetlands, coral reefs, barrier islands, and even the loss of some sand in which he has head obstinately stuck.

And what does the president plan on doing about these less than sanguine environmental expectations? One indigenous, 2-toed White House struthio camelus announced the newly issued report compels the nation"to move forward on the president's strategies for addressing the challenge of climate change." The real challenge, though, lies in finding the strategies--any effective ones, that is.. We are told they're out there; somewhere, presumably, on the smog-clouded horizon above rising tides.

Because W. possesses that uncanny knack for boiling complexities down to their simple essence, his sole strategy is this: a Hooveresque gestalt-kind-of-vision-thing, in which he'll phone up a few campaign contributors--those belching, sky-blackening utilities most addicted to atmospheric toxins--and ask them to please cut down on their smoking. At least a little. But for heaven's sake don't get the idea W. might get brutish about this. He'd trade a Rocky Mountain meadow for a smokestack full of campaign cash any old day, so he's willing to be reasonable. As for coral reefs and sandy-white beaches? Well hell, who can afford to vacation pleasantly these days anyway, what with corporate-executive vultures keeping a sharp eye on wages so there's more to spend on pretty parachutes.

For 22nd-century historians, 2002 could be the year that replaces 1929 as a more significant benchmark of failed government and tragic consequences; the year in which government--with educated hindsight on volunteerism's limitations--knew what needed to be done and blithely did nothing. Future historians surely will be mindful of 2002's failures, because they'll be up to their keesters in salt water--thanks to Bush II and its noble reinvention of Hooverism.