For every organic compound produced by a living organism, there is an enzyme in the ecosystem that makes substance biodegradable. The enzyme will break the substance down and recycling its components in the biochemistry of life. The biosphere has evolved as a self-consistent but limited array of substances and reactions that are internally harmonious.

About 150 years ago, and accelerating rapidly since World War II, industrial processes have been creating synthetic organic chemicals that are never found in nature and are usually dangerous to the biochemistry of life. Often they mimic natural chemicals, attaching themselves to living cells, but disrupting their normal functioning, inducing cancer, genetic mutations, and other malfunctions and disease. These synthetic chemicals are often long-lived and bioaccumulative, meaning they concentrate in tissues as one organism eats another up the food chain and concentrate in certain tissues of organisms at the tops of food chains.

Environmental policy since the early 1970s has focused on Pollution Control instead of Pollution Prevention. Pollution Control is adequate for wastes of biological origin, which are biodegradable and ecosystems can break down, assimilate, and recycle in limited amounts. But when Pollution Control measures are applied to synthetic chemicals, they ignore the fundamental difference between biodegradable wastes and synthetic substances that accumulate in the environment, ecosystem food webs, and our bodies. These synthetic chemicals cannot be integetated into natural cycles. They disrupt these cycles. Even in minute amounts, these synthetic substances build up over time in ever higher concentrations in ecosystems and organisms.

Environmental policy must therefore move from controlling the release of synthetic pollutants to preventing their creation in the first place. Policy must follow the Precautionary Principle that synthetic substances must prevented from being created even where there is no evidence to prove a causal link between emissions and deleterious effect. With tens of thousands of synthetic chemicals now used by modern industry, it would take centuries to do toxicological studies of their effects. We already know from the few hundred that have been studied that they almost always have harmful effects on living things. It is better to safe than sorry.

The Precautionary Principle thus reverses the onus of responsibility from the public to industry. Now industry can use new chemicals until the public proves they are dangerous. Instead, industry will not be able to use new chemicals until it proves them safe to the public.

Further, we must require Chemical Sunsetting, with goals and timetables for phasing out synthetic chemicals and by-products in industrial materials and processes and replacing them with nonpolluting materials and processes. This means an ambitious program of industrial conversion to ecological technologies.

The big successes in pollution reduction over the last 25 years have come from bans, like leaded gasoline and DDT, not from pollution control programs, like smog control devices in cars and scrubbers in the stacks of coal-fired power plants. The bans that prevent pollution have reduced toxics dramatically. The pollution control measures that regulate emissions have reduced the emissions per unit of output, but because output has increased, the total emissions have increased.

Our present technologies and environmental policies cannot long sustain our society ecologically. The are poisoning ecosystems, driving many species to extinction, depleting resources, and upsetting the most fundamental biogeochemical cycles and balances of the planetary ecosystem. Yet, existing environmental laws are under attack by corporate interests. We must defend and strengthen these laws and oppose corporate efforts to shift environmental liability from polluters to taxpayers.

An emphasis on Pollution Prevention for synthetic chemicals requires the replacement of toxic technologies with ecological technologies. The development of ecological technologies must be supported by the full range of public policy supports, including public investment, eco-taxes, preferential purchasing by government, and industry-wide standards for packaging, energy efficiency, and non-toxic materials.

Pollution Prevention

• Protect the Safe Water Act: Strengthen it to get cancer-causing pollutants out of drinking water.
• Protect the Clean Water Act: Strengthen it to stop toxic discharges and runoff into water that endanger species and to better protect America's wetlands.
• Protect the Superfund Law: Improve it to make polluters pay promptly for toxic waste clean-up and to make toxic waste clean-ups quicker and more effective.
• Protect the Clean Air Act
• Ban Chlorine Discharges: End the build up of dioxin and other toxic chlorinated compounds by passing a Chlorine Discharge Act to ban most organochlorines in production processes and products.
• Stop Hazardous and Solid Waste Incineration: Place an immediate moratorium on new incinerators and rapidly phase out existing incinerators.
• Ban Hazardous Waste Exports
• Ban Deep Well Injection of Hazardous Wastes: Deep well injection wastes can migrate to contaminate water aquifers and other environmental systems.
• Rapid Phase Out of Nuclear Power: In all but a few areas of the country, excess capacity means nuclear power plants can be shut down immediately. All plants should be closed within five years. We oppose further public bailouts of the failed nuclear industry-liability for construction debts and decommissioning costs must be born by their owners.
• Oppose a National Radioactive Waste Dump: Keep radioactive waste at nuclear power plant sites, above ground and continuously monitored.
• Ban Methyl Bromide Pesticide: Oppose the efforts of the Clinton administration and Congress to exclude a ban on this toxic and ozone-depleting substance from the Clean Air Act and the international Montreal Protocols, the international agreement to phase-out ozone-depleting chemicals.
• End Military and Government Exemptions from Environmental Laws
• Space Shuttle Moratorium: Place a moratorium on space shuttle and other chlorine-fueled missile launches until alternative safe fuel sources are developed.

Materials and Waste Management

Federal policy should encourage major reductions in per capita consumption of materials, significant increases in the efficiency with which materials are used, and the rapid phase out of toxic substances and their substitution with safe substances.

• Green Dot Program: Pass legislation, similar to the Green Dot program in Germany, requiring manufacturers to be responsible for the whole life cycle of their products and packaging. Manufacturers must be required to take back products and packaging when they are used up and to be responsible for their recycling or disposal.
• Toxic-Free Manufacturing: Establish a national program provide technical and financial assistance to help businesses reduce waste and toxic chemicals and materials and to find safe substitute chemicals and materials. Industry standards must be established to create ecologically responsible production entailing zero-emissions of persistent toxics in production, use, repair, or disposal; energy efficiency; ecological resource extraction; and worker safety.
• Sustainable Agriculture: Redirect the priorities of the Department of Agriculture and land-grant colleges toward a sustainable agricultural system based on biological pest controls and organic soil amendments.
• Pass a National Bottle Bill: Help restore the returnable/refillable system for food and beverage containers by requiring a deposit on glass, metal, and plastic beverage containers as an incentive to return containers for reuse.
• Recycled Content Requirements: Require 50% recycled content in newspapers and increase government purchasing of recycled products.

Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency

Initiate a massive program to replace fossil and nuclear fuels with renewable energy sources, including wind, solar, biofuels, and solar-hydrogen fuels.

• Energy for Employment: Initiate Congressional legislation to put into effect Greenpeace's Energy for Employment proposal to spend $15 billion per year in public investment in energy efficiency and renewable energy to create 2.8 million new jobs.
• Energy Efficiency Goals: Save consumers $5 trillion over the next 40 years by adopting the energy efficiency goals for the year 2030 proposed by the Union of Concerned Scientists:
  • Cut U.S. energy use by 50%;
  • Cut oil consumption by 70%;
  • Cut carbon dioxide emissions by 70%;
  • Meet more than 50% of U.S. energy needs with renewable energy sources.
• Car Fuel Efficiency: Increase fuel efficiency standards to 45 miles per gallon by the year 2004.
• Expand Rail Transportation: Expand Amtrak to rebuild networks of inter-city rail lines and expand assistance to cities for intra-city light rails.
• End Taxpayer Subsidies to the Coal, Oil, and Nuclear Industries: Subsidies to end include the depletion allowances for oil and mineral ores, below-cost timber sales and public land grazing by private ranchers, and the Price-Anderson Act limiting liability in the case of nuclear accidents.

Conservation

• Ban Patents on Life Forms: Congress must join the European Community in banning patents on life forms, including seeds, livestock, body parts, and bioengineered life forms.
• Moratorium on Bioengineered Life Forms: The release of genetically engineered life forms into the environment must be banned until the ethical and ecological implications are studied and society can make informed decisions.
• Protect the Endangered Species Act: Strengthen it to focus on the protection of entire ecosystems, not just individual species.
• Ban New Offshore Oil Drilling
• Protect Old-Growth Forests and Roadless Wilderness Areas: Ban all logging in the remaining old-growth forests and roadless areas. Protect wild regions in the Northern Rockies, Colorado Plateau, and Arctic National Wildlife Refuge by giving areas protected wilderness designation.
• Reform the 1872 Mining Act: End taxpayer subsidies for mining and set protective environmental standads for mining.
• Restore Fisheries: Strengthen international regulation of fishing with a goal of restoring depleted fish populations and then fishing on a sustainable yield basis with equitable access to this resource for all nations.
• End Subsidies for Cattle Grazing on Public Lands: Withdrawing subsidies in the form of below market land use fees and publicly financed water projects will end this use of public land where it is uneconomic and anti-ecological.

Air

Animal Liberation

Biodiversity

Environmental Enforcement

The monitoring and enforcement agencies of the Environmental Protection Agency must be strengthened to relieve the backlog of cases. Efforts to shift liability from the polluter pays principle to general public liability must be opposed. Individual citizens should have legal standing in all pollution cases. Penalties for white-collar environmental crimes must be strengthened to include mandatory minimum fines and jail time for the corporate officers responsible. In addition, we call for three pieces of federal legislation to enhance the capacity of workers and citizens and their communities to defend themselves from polluters:

• Community Right to Know More Act: Strengthen the rights of the public to be informed of toxic chemicals in communities and workplaces.
• Environmental Democracy Act: Pass a no-pollution-without-representation bill establishing the absolute right of local communities to bar the disposal or transshipment of hazardous materials and the siting of nuclear and toxic industries. The act should also establish the right of states, counties, and municipalities to set higher environmental standards than the larger jurisdictions in which they are located.
• Environmental Justice Act: Strengthen the existing Executive Order on Environmental Justice with legislation that provides stiff penalties and compensation for victims when minority and low-income communities are targeted by public or private entities for toxic dumps or toxic industries.

Furthermore, the Greens oppose efforts to undermine the "polluter pays" principle of environmental policy:

• Oppose "Takings" Legislation-Oppose corporate efforts to require taxpayers to compensate polluters for the costs of complying with environmental laws.

Forests

In the United States, federal lands should be managed primarily for ecosystem protection and restoration. To that end, we advocate the end of commercial extraction (logging, mining, grazing) and off-road vehicle use on federal land. Erosion from the immense network of National Forest logging roads (8 times more miles than interstate highways) damages water quality and fragment wildlife habitat. Many of these roads must be decommissioned, beginning with the most ecologically damaging roads. We support large-scale ecological restoration based on conservation biology.

Genetic Engineering

Global Warming

Corporate propaganda to the contrary notwithstanding, the overwhelming scientific consensus is that modern technologies have emitted enough greenhouse gases to have already committed the global climate to warming. Greenhouse gases trap heat in the atmosphere like glass insulation does in a greenhouse, letting sunlight in but not letting heat escape. Greenhouse gases include carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), perfluorocarbons (PFCs), and sulfur hexafluoride. All are increasing due to industrial processes, with the major culprit, carbon dioxide, increasing mainly due to the burning of fossil fuels. Carbon dioxide in earth's atmosphere has increased 25% since industrialization began burning coal and oil, from 280 ppm (parts per million) to 350 ppm today. It is projected to rise to 550 ppm by 2100 if fossil fuel burning continues for another century. An especially potent greenhouse gas, methane, has increased largely because of the flatulence of human-tended livestock.

The 12 hottest years in recorded history have taken place since 1980. When heat is trapped in the atmosphere, 20% of it goes to warm the air and 80% of it produces increased evaporation. Because of the increased heat energy in the atmosphere and higher rates of evaporation and precipitation, there has been a significant increase in the last decade in the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events-hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, droughts, and heat waves. There have been ten times to average number of catastrophic floods worldwide in the last ten years.

The global climate is predicted to increase 2 to 6 degrees Fahrenheit in the next 100 years and continue increasing thereafter if greenhouse gas emissions are not curtailed. A 2 degree increase may be enough to melt the glaciers of Greenland and raise sea levels 20 feet, enough to swamp the southern half of Florida, most of Bangladesh, and all of several island nations. 50-70% of the world's population lives in coastal areas where rising sea levels and more frequent storm surges will create millions of environmental refugees. The range of such infectious diseases as malaria and dengue fever will expand into the Temperate Zone, including parts of the United States. Climate change poses significant threats of crop failures in the world's major breadbaskets. Without immediate and massive measures to reverse global warming, human society will experience millions of deaths due to changing climate zones, crop failures, hunger, and disease in the next century.

The danger exists that rising temperatures will trigger an ever-worsening, runaway catastrophe as the forests, soils, and seas that absorb carbon dioxide die back. Billions of acres of Amazon basin rain forest may turn into desert by 2050 due to the combination of climate change and deforestation for wood products and cattle ranching. As such key elements of the global ecosystem die off and decompose, they will turn from being elements that absorb carbon dioxide into major sources of greenhouse gases themselves.

Unless measures are taken to stop and reverse the build-up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, global warming will continue for centuries to come in a runaway process of global warming that will transform Earth's climate into one like Venus's, too hot for complex life.

As the UN's International Panel on Climate Change stated in 1990, in order to stabilize greenhouse gases at non-catastrophic levels, greenhouse gas emissions from human sources would have to be reduced immediately to at least 60 per cent below 1990 levels. The US and other industrial countries came up criminally short of this standard in December 1997 in adopting the Kyoto Protocol, which calls for them to reduce their emissions just 5.2% by 2012. The US Senate refused to ratify even this token gesture. Even if the Kyoto goals were implemented, global greenhouse gas emissions will still rise 30% by 2010 due to increased fossil fuel burning by the newly industrializing countries.

Many of the developing countries have resisted the Kyoto caps on greenhouse gas emissions as measures that condemn them to remain poor. They consider it the moral duty of the industrialized nations to begin reducing emissions at home rather than creating an international market for selling and buying the right to emit greenhouse gases. The US has proposed implementing the Kyoto Protocol through tradable pollution rights, which shifts the burden of cleaning up energy sources from the rich, who can afford to buy the right to pollute, to the poor. As the world's most wealthy nation with the largest economy, the US must set the example and take the lead in reversing global warming by transforming energy and production technologies and helping the poor nations develop them.

The Greens support:

• Phase Out of Fossil Fuels in 50 Years: The US should accept the goal of reducing atmospheric carbon dioxide below 1990 levels. In 30 years, carbon dioxide emissions should be cut by 75% in 30 years and near 100% by the total phase out of coal, oil, and natural gas as energy sources within 50 years. The US should unilaterally adopt these goals and offer assistance to other nations in developing renewable energy sources.
• Phase In 100% Renewable Energy Sources in 50 Years: Solar energy income from the sun can provide all the energy we need for a decent standard of living using technologies we already have. Development of renewable energy sources should receive massive public investment.
• Transfer All Government Subsidies for Fossil Fuels and Cars to Renewables and Public Transport
• Ban the Development of New Coal, Oil, and Gas Reserves
• Reject Nuclear Power: Nuclear power is no answer to global warming. We reject the nuclear industry's cynical attempt to take advantage of public concern over global warming by pushing an industry that not only creates dangerous radioactive emissions and wastes, but also contributes to global warming by consuming more energy in fossil fuels than it yields in electricity. When the total life-cycle energy cost-construction, parts manufacture, transportation, fuel production, decontamination, waste storage, decommissioning-is figured in, nuclear power has a negative net energy yield. It takes more fossil fuel energy input to create a nuclear power plant than we get out in electricity. Solar-derived sources, from direct solar to wind, hydro, and biomass, can provide electricity without fossil fuel energy subsidies.
• Protect and Restore Natural Carbon Sinks:

  1. Forests

  • Compensate Undeveloped Countries for NOT Cutting Down Their Forests
  • Fund Massive Reforestation Around the World
  • Cut Consumption of Wood To Sustainable Yield Levels
  • Legalize Industrial Hemp-Replace wood with hemp as the source of paper products.

  
  2. Oceans-Ban Ozone-Depleting Chemicals to Protect and Restore Phytoplankton: Phytoplankton in the oceans, which absorb a massive amounts of carbon dioxide through photosynthesis, are being killed off by increasing ultra-violet radiation due to the depletion of atmospheric ozone.

  • Enforce the Montreal Protocol Banning the Production of Ozone-Depleting CFCs
  • Require the Removal of CFCs Before Disposal of Appliances

  
  3. Soils-Transfer Public Subsidies from Industrial Agriculture to Organic Agriculture to Protect and Restore Soils: Agricultural soils can be a huge sink for carbon dioxide. Unfortunately, energy-intensive industrial agriculture, with its pesticides and synthetic fertilizers, is killing soil ecosystems and well as releasing massive amounts of greenhouse gases by burning fossil fuels.

Oceans

Water