Molly Ivins August 4

AUSTIN — Another dandy 100-degree day is just what we need to inspire the pause that reflects. Do you ever go along all involved in your daily business and then something big happens to you or someone you love, and you realize you've been worrying about the wrong things? There you are, fretting about why you didn't get invited to some party or how to pay the phone bill when, wham, you find out you have cancer, and you realize your priorities are all wrong.

Thinking seriously about the environment often does the same thing to our sense of public priorities. The invaluable Austin Lounge Lizards, the satirical singing group, has a new album out on which they have definitively identified the petty public issues that occupy all too much of our contemporary political concern — "teen-age-immigrant-welfare-mothers-on-drugs." According to the Lounge Lizards' jaundiced view of political debate, teen-age-immigrant-welfare-mothers-on-drugs are responsible for everything from drought to the fact that kids now refuse to wear their baseball hats rightside to.

Actually, they're not responsible for drought, or for global desertification, or for the destruction of the ozone layer, or for several awful proposals from Congress that will further screw up the environment. The state of the environment is the global equivalent of cancer, and most of us are still worrying about the wrong things.

Much of this phenomenon is the media's fault, naturally. Most of us have so little scientific expertise, we report bad science along with good science as though it were all equal. The most glaring example is that idiotic education debate in which we continue to say, "Well, evolution is only a theory, so we might as well teach creation 'science' along with evolution since some people believe in creationism."

Some people still believe the Earth is flat. Gravity is still only a theory, too, but when you drop something, it seldom falls up. Science consists of knowledge that can be proven by experiment. It is tentative only in the sense that someday an experiment might yield different results: Someday, you may drop something and have it fall up — science doesn't shut off possibilities.

The media have failed most noticeably in reporting the empirical evidence concerning the ozone layer.

It is not a debatable phenomenon. True, there are some scientists, and Rush Limbaugh, still denying there is a problem. But if ozone depletion were a political question, the media would quickly recognize the difference between "reliable sources" and those few, overpublicized, financially motivated, ill-informed dissenters.

Contrary to recent reportage, the depletion of the ozone layer is not getting better or even approaching improvement: It's steadily getting worse, while nations, including ours, continue to drag their feet on banning the chemicals responsible and a brisk international smuggling trade in CFCs has already developed.

A perfect example of how greed leads to stupidity: The replacements for chlorofluorocarbons now cost about five times as much as CFCs themselves. In order to save themselves that fivefold expense, industries are willing to use ozone-depleting chemicals, even those smuggled in, a traffic now second only to drugs. Mark Dowie, in a fine piece of investigative reporting in the July 8 Nation, marshals the appalling evidence, including the politics of getting rid of methyl bromide, used in pesticides.

Gwynne Dwyer, reporting on the International Climate Change Conference last month in Geneva, traced much of the rotten science and misinformation about global warming to oil-exporting countries and to the misleadingly named Global Climate Coalition, which has buckets of money since it is funded by Shell, Texaco, Exxon, BP Amoco, Chevron and Mobil, plus Dow Chemical, Union Carbide, etc.

Look, there is a continent-sized hole in the ozone layer of Antarctica, where the penguins are dying. The ozone values are falling over the Northern Hemisphere, and the connection between the greenhouse effect and climate change becomes ever clearer.

True, there have been droughts before in Texas and blizzards before in the Northeast, but here's one happy piece of news. The insurance industry is really upset. Payouts for storm damage from 1990 to 1995 already total $48 billion, three times the figure for the 1980s. Fifty-eight international insurance companies went to Geneva to demand "early substantial reductions" in greenhouse-gas emissions.

When science takes on something the size of the fossil fuel industry, it's always nice to have something the size of the insurance industry on our side.

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Molly Ivins is a columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

COPYRIGHT 1996 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.