Gregg Easterbrook

International negotiations on global-warming accords continue to be an expensive exercise in pointlessness, while the leading anti-greenhouse-gas legislation in the United States Senate, shepherded by John Kerry of Massachusetts, is said to be so lengthy it may make the recent health-care bill seem like a Post-It note. Release of Kerry’s proposal was delayed Tuesday when its sole Republican cosponsor, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, developed cold feet. Some Senate action on the proposal is expected this spring.

Ideally, both the international negotiations and the Kerry bill will collapse under the weight of their own complexity. That would be ideal if you favor progress against greenhouse gases! The threat of artificially triggered climate change is all too real: see more on that below. But new thinking – not more top-down bureaucracy – is the best hope to reduce greenhouse gas accumulation.

Both the international proposals, and Kerry’s bill, seek to create ultra-elaborate regulatory regimes that would guarantee cushy jobs for bureaucrats and big paydays for lobbyists, but not necessarily much reform. Both reflect what many hate about government – prescriptive top-down regulation combined with ample opportunities for insiders to direct giveaways to themselves. Among Washington insiders, especially the think-tank set, there’s a sense of delight that a mega-elaborate greenhouse-gas regulatory hierarchy is coming. Thousands of lobbying pressure-points will be created, while some gigantic Department of Atmospheric Administration will result, top heavy with senior-grade functionaries who spend their days infighting about whose signature goes on memos. Elites in Washington and Brussels surely will benefit from the complex approach to greenhouse regulation. Will anybody else?

First the international situation. At the Rio global-warming summit in 1992, heads of state made symbolic nonbinding commitments about greenhouse reduction while praising themselves, then pledged to serious action sometime soon. At the Copenhagen global-warming summit in 2009, heads of state made symbolic nonbinding commitments about greenhouse reduction while praising themselves, then pledged to serious action sometime soon. Insert another city name and future year, and the sentence will read the same.

Two decades of international negotiations on greenhouse gases have led to almost nothing of substance, beyond some European Union trial programs. The only concrete achievement is an annual Conference of Parties, via which highly paid delegates fly in jets burning fossil fuels, and ride in low-mileage limousines, to meet in luxurious circumstances and demand that someone else conserve resources. Milan, Bali, Copenhagen – the 2010 Conference of Parties will be held in Cancun. Why aren’t these meetings in Chengdu or Fargo? International elites need to be in resort locations to think about why average people’s use of fossil fuel must be restricted!

George W. Bush withdrew the United States from the Kyoto Protocol underlying the international talks, and though President Barrack Obama sends U.S. delegates to international greenhouse negotiations, he has not endorsed any international carbon-restriction language that would be binding on the United States. Denmark and Germany, the industrial nations with the strongest commitment to greenhouse-gas reduction, might actually accept strict international greenhouse rules, which would for intents and purposed be international control of internal energy policy.

It’s hard to believe many other countries would. Even Japan, host for the Kyoto agreement, has merrily ignored the carbon-emission restrictions that Tokyo appeared to accept there.

International agreements on relatively minor ecological subjects have proven hard to implement – enforcement of a whaling ban continues to bedevil the world’s nations, and whaling has almost no economic significance. To think there can be international regulation of fuel use – energy production is the single largest economic sector – is a fantasy. Though, a good excuse for a taxpayer-subsidized week in Cancun.

The key point is that international greenhouse regulation isn’t necessary! Smog is declining almost everywhere in the world, though no international agreement governs smog. Smog is way down in Mexico City and in Los Angeles, somewhat down in Beijing. If you saw the Olympics smog, rest assured, it was far worse a decade ago.

Smog is declining because anti-smog technology has been invented, and proven affordable and compatible with economic growth. Last week, EPA administrator Lisa Jackson noted that air pollution in the United States has declined 60 percent in recent decades, even as GDP doubled. Now that affordable anti-smog technology exists, nations are switching to such technology of their own volition, because it is in their interest to do so. The lack of international involvement in smog reduction has been a reason for rapid progress. No complex rules to satisfy, just implement the best ideas as quickly as practical. National self-interest is a far more powerful motivator than empty speeches at conferences.

Like smog, greenhouse gases are an air-pollution problem. What is needed is for greenhouse gas reduction technology to be invented, then nations will adopt such technology on their own, because it is in their self-interest to do so. No Bible-sized international greenhouse gas treaty ever will be enforced; negotiations toward this end are a complete waste of everyone’s time. The climate change problem will be solved when nations act on their own.

Where will greenhouse-gas control technology be invented? In the United States, the world’s most innovative, tech-savvy nation – and the place where smog-control technology was invented. Once greenhouse-gas emission ceases to be free in the United States, control mechanisms will be invented – then other nations will switch to them, of their own volition. That’s the realistic way to stop artificially caused climate change. Tech-savvy China surely also will contribute, but the United States must lead the way.

The Kerry bill, subject of year-long negotiations among many senators, would create a super-complicated sector-by-sector cap on carbon emissions from various industries, impose a puzzling number-from-a-hat goal of 17 percent greenhouse gas reduction by the year 2020, and authorize still more legislation on the details of sector-by-sector rules. All the media attention would be on the Kerry-bill vote, which would be seen as a dramatic commitment to global warming prevention. Lobbyists would take command when the sector-by-sector rules were enacted, larding them with subsidies and giveaways. (Reform at Risk, an excellent 2008 book by University of Virginia political scientist Eric Patashnik, shows how the media swarm over symbolic legislative votes but ignore the later amendments by which lobbyists rewrite rules to create handouts to political donors.)

Editorialists and environmentalists are likely to say that Congress must hurry to enact the Kerry bill because climate change is happening. It is. But it’s taken a century for greenhouse gas accumulation to become a problem; the fix will take at least decades. The response must be smart and flexible. Well-drawn legislation is the priority, and however well-meant, Kerry’s approach is way too complex and bureaucratic. It won’t work – and that would cause public cynicism about greenhouse gas reduction, setting back the cause.

Rather than a super-complex regulatory scheme, what the United States needs is a carbon tax. That’s right, a t-a-x. As in, TAX.

We live in a moment when tax is a forbidden word, yet ever-higher national debt is okey-doke. That equation needs to change. Whatever government taxes, society gets less of. Right now government mainly taxes capital and labor, which society wants more of. Pollution, on the other hand, society wants less of. Taxing greenhouse gases will give inventors and entrepreneurs a profit incentive to think of ways to reduce global warming emissions, which currently are free. The result will be that society gets less air pollution, while money generated by a carbon tax reduces the deficit.

A carbon tax would be far simpler and less bureaucratic than any sector-by-sector cap scheme. Even Republican economists such as N. Gregory Mankiw, who was a chair of George W. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisors, have announced support for carbon taxes.

In a carbon-cap system, federal bureaucrats would make all decisions, surely after years of delay and special-pleading lobbying. In a carbon-tax system, individual inventors and business people make the decisions, quickly and flexibly, driven by the chance at profit. Appeasing bureaucrats or gaining profits: Which seems to you the stronger source of motivation?

If the United States imposes a carbon tax – acting on its own, forget the international negotiations – American innovation may produce greenhouse-restricting technology, clean energy and business models that other nations will adopt of their own volition. This was the model that worked against smog; it should be used against the next air pollution problem, greenhouse gases.

Obviously, no politician wants to advocate a t-a-x. But Barack Obama is the most persuasive political leader since Ronald Reagan. He of all people can show the American public the logic of the situation – especially since a carbon tax would be infinitely preferable to corporate and income taxes in fighting the deficit.

Footnote 1: senators Susan Collins of Maine and Maria Cantwell of Washington State have proposed a variation on the carbon tax, via which carbon-tax revenues would annually be rebated to individuals. This is a noble idea, but with an ever-worse deficit, carbon tax revenues should go toward debt retirement. There’s also a worry that if the Cantwell-Collins scheme was enacted, the money would just end up redirected to special-interest groups. (“Because of the [insert word] crisis, this year the carbon revenue is going to [insert group that bought most favor]. Next year we promise that…”) The Cantwell-Collins would do a better job at reducing greenhouse gases than the Kerry bill, but wouldn’t help with the national debt.

Footnote 2: Incorporating its 27 amendments, the United States Constitution is about 8,000 words long – about 35 pages double-spaced. The recent health care bill was about 235,000 words, or 29 times the length of the Constitution; the 2010 Defense Authorization Act was 120,000 words, 15 times the length of the Constitution. The Kerry greenhouse gas legislation is expected similarly to rival in length the final Harry Potter book.

Why not a standard that legislation cannot exceed the length of the Constitution? That would cut away non-germane riders and sweetheart language inserted at the behest of campaign donors. If Congress cannot express its will in less than the length of the Constitution, chances are it is lobbyists who are the ones expressing themselves.

IS ARTIFICIAL CLIMATE CHANGE REAL?

The National Academy of Sciences, which through the 1990s was skeptical of global warming scare-mongering, said in 2005 that climate change is real. I don’t pretend to know more about science than the National Academy of Sciences. So this is good enough for me.

There is indeed a strong scientific consensus regarding a danger from climate change – those who claim otherwise aren’t being honest. But the consensus is quite mild – those who claim a doomsday consensus aren’t being honest, either.

The consensus is that in the last century, air has warmed by somewhat more than one degree Fahrenheit; the oceans have warmed a little and become more acidic; ocean warming means more than air warming, because the oceans have far more mass than the air; rainfall patterns have changed in some places; most ice melting has accelerated; ocean warmth (not melting ice) has caused modest sea-level rise; human action plays at least some role in all this.

The consensus hardly means crisis. Glaciers and sea ice, for example, have been in a melting cycle for thousands of years, while air warming has, so far at least, been good for farm yields. But climate change has serious possible negative consequences, especially if rainfall shifts away from agricultural regions or sea-level rise accelerates. Climate change, rather than global warming – rising temperature in itself can be beneficial — is the big worry. All the world’s major science academies have said they are convinced climate change is happened and that human action plays a role. That is an ample consensus to justify reform.

Gregg Easterbrook is a Reuters columnist. Any views expressed are his own.

World leaders meeting in Washington last week engaged in a competition to see which could make the strongest remark about Iran not getting an atomic bomb. President Barack Obama has asked Russia, China and other nations to form a united front against the Iranian atomic program. Vice-president Joe Biden recently said, “The United States is determined to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, period.”

The comments seem eerily similar to those made by presidents George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, plus other world leaders, about preventing North Korea from acquiring the bomb. This happened anyway. Current anti-Tehran blustering and posing will be about as effective. Soon Iran will become an atomic power. The world community must prepare for this moment.

The simple reality is that other nations cannot prevent Iran from fashioning an atomic device. Cannot, except perhaps by an all-out nuclear first strike that obliterates much of the country, or invasion and permanent occupation of a nation substantially larger than Iraq and Afghanistan combined. Conventional aerial attack might slow but cannot stop an atomic program using underground facilities – or conventional aerial attack would have been used against North Korea. (See details below on the reasons conventional airstrikes aren’t the answer regarding the Iranian program.)

Iran will acquire an atomic bomb — and it may happen soon. Here, U.S. military officials estimate  that Iran should have sufficient fissile materials for a bomb by 2011.

Various forms of American and Western fist-shaking against Iran have had little apparent impact beyond convincing Tehran to accelerate its bomb program. Last year, Obama set a “deadline” Iran had to meet, then another “deadline,” then a third “deadline” – all of which were ignored and promptly forgotten. In March, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said there would be “real consequences” if Iran did not immediately end its atomic program. Iran did not, and there were no consequences.

Western nations cannot so much as agree on a new sanctions policy against Tehran. And this is just as well.  The recent history of sanctions show that they do not change government behavior, but do cause the innocent to suffer. Strong sanctions against Cuba, North Korea and Iraq when under Saddam Hussein resulted in no government-behavior changes. Sanctions are a factor in starvation in North Korea and poverty in Cuba, and caused a dramatic increase in child mortality in Iraq in the 1990s — the dead being children of average families, not of government elites. If stronger sanctions were imposed against Iran today, this would only make the Tehran government all the more determined to acquire the bomb, while causing average Iranians to suffer. Iran has a significant pro-democracy movement, one gaining in size and influence. What justice could be found in causing Iran’s pro-democracy citizens to suffer?

The lack of practical ways to stop the Iranian atomic bomb effort is seen in the fact that since the world leaders’ anti-proliferation summit in Washington, the focus of Western action has shifted to producing yet another United Nations resolution tut-tutting about Iran’s bomb project. Three Security Council resolutions on this topic since 2006 have accomplished little. Maybe the next one will contain different adjectives — that’ll show ‘em!

Of course is it alarming to think of an atomic bomb in the hands of a nation at least nominally ruled by the dull-witted anti-Semite Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. But experience suggests that an Iranian atomic bomb would be employed in the same way as all other atomic munitions since 1945 – to deter attack. That is to say, Iran will use an atomic bomb by not using it: the observed pattern followed by other nuclear-armed states.

Since Nagasaki, no nation possessing atomic or nuclear weapons has employed this power, because the logic of nuclear deterrence is overwhelming, If Iran acquires an atomic bomb and fires one against Israel, Tehran will be leveled 30 minutes later. The current rulers of Iran may be repugnant, but they are not madmen.

Wouldn’t possession of an atomic bomb enable Iran to bully other nations? Nuclear missiles did not do much for the old Soviet Union, even enable it to bully its weak neighbor Afghanistan. Nuclear bombs haven’t helped China bully anyone – Beijing still has little credibility in Tibet, despite its fantastic edge in power. As Peter Scoblic noted in his important 2009 book “Us Versus Them”, thousands of nuclear missiles failed to restrain America’s adversaries in the Korea and Vietnam wars, failed to intimidate Saddam, and have not helped the U.S. position in Iraq or Afghanistan. Atomic power hasn’t allowed Pakistan or India to bully neighbors, and surely has not allowed Israel to get its way.

Sixty years of actual experience suggests that atomic weapons are practical only for one purpose: to prevent your nation from being attacked. You don’t have to be political scientist Kenneth Waltz (see his 2003 book “The Spread of Nuclear Weapons”, which argues that nuclear proliferation is mainly good because it prevents war) to want to live in a world where nations don’t attack each other. Deterrence has, since 1945, ended great-power war. Deterrence has  reduced and might end regional war. There is a gamble involved, obviously. But the likely outcome of Iranian possession of an atomic bomb is that no nation will attack Iran. Why shouldn’t Iran desire this? The United States, Russia, United Kingdom and other nations desired deterrence against attack and would have been entirely outraged if lectured otherwise by the Security Council.

Assuming Iranian acquisition of atomic weapons is near-inevitable, the international response should not be more fist-shaking for the cameras and empty verbiage, but outreach to return Iran to the family of nations. A core lesson of the Cold War is that bluster fails, constructive engagement succeeds. Engagement with Iran would lower regional tensions and lend support to the Iranian democracy movement. The first step regarding Iran “should be a much more aggressive approach to diplomacy than we’ve displayed thus far,” Obama said while a senator. The best defense against Iranian nuclear arms is better diplomatic relations with Iran.

WHY WOULDN’T A MILITARY STRIKE SOLVE THE PROBLEM?

The reasons are four: that Iran is too far from Israel for that country’s air force to handle this task; that Iran’s atomic installations are too numerous and too deeply buried for the United States to handle the task without weeks of bombardment; that any attack on Iranian atomic facilities would kill Russians, with awful international consequences; and the morality of trying to solve a political problem by dropping bombs that, no matter how accurate, will kill civilians.

In 2008, Israeli fighter-bombers staged a training exercise in which they flew 900 miles across the Mediterranean, carrying ordinance and refueling in the air: 900 miles is the distance from Israel to Bushehr, location of Iran’s large nuclear reactor. The exercise was a reminder to Tehran that in 1981, Israeli warplanes badly damaged a reactor in Iraq, while in 2007, Israeli fighter-bombers destroyed an atomic facility in Syria.

But the 1981 and 2007 raids were against single installations, neither underground. Multiple raids on many Iranian installations would be far more daunting. And while Syria is adjacent to Israel, and Iraq can be reached by flying across Israel’s enemy Syria, there is no route-of-flight from Israel to Iran that does not involve airspace violation of neutral or friendly nations.

To use the best route of flight to Bushehr, Israeli warplanes would need permission to cross Saudi Arabia, permission the Saudis are unlikely to grant: Israeli breach of Saudi airspace could spark war. Israeli planes could fly across Iraq to Iran. But an attack on its territory staged through Iraq would give Iran a casus belli against Baghdad, and create a legal pretext for Iran to target U.S. soldiers in Iraq. Flying much of the way through Syrian airspace is possible – Israel used U.S.-built electronic countermeasures to blind Syrian radars during the 2007 raid. But in this case, Israeli warplanes still would need to cross part of Iraq, or violate the airspace of Turkey, the region’s sole Islamic democracy. Israeli violation of Turkish airspace might radicalize Turkey against Israel, only adding to its enemies.

In theory, Israeli warplanes could fly hundreds of miles out of their way, first south along the Red Sea, then turning north across the Arabian Sea, and enter Iran without use of a neighbor’s airspace. This would require so many airborne refuelings both going and coming back that the logistics are hard to imagine. All Israel strike aircraft are short-range fighters: the country does not possess heavy bombers that can travel long distances without refueling, or aircraft carriers that could launch a strike from international waters. And even if an all-overwater flight worked, Israel would need to stage many such raids to more than damage Iran’s multiple nuclear installations.

The United States, which has long-range bombers and aircraft carriers, could conduct a sustained air campaign against Iranian weapons sites. In 2006 and 2007, Pentagon planning for an attack on Iranian atomic facilities assumed not some quick event but two weeks of air and cruise-missile strikes involving hundreds to thousands of tons of munitions. U.S. pilots would be flying against Russian-built air defenses, some of them late-model. Russian technicians would die in the strikes. Moscow-Washington relations might be sent back to the Cold War: imagine how the United States would feel if Russian bombers spent weeks attacking an American client state, killing many Americans in the process. Even if bombing of Iranian atomic facilities worked in the technical sense, it would be likely to make the international situation worse rather than better.

As for morality, let’s hope things have not gone so far that the United States has stopped considering this.

Gregg Easterbrook is a Reuters columnist. Any views expressed are his own.

Space policy is a small fraction of the U.S. federal budget – around one percent, when NASA and Air Force spending are combined – and much less important than topics such as health care, defense or debt. But if government can’t get minor policy right, how can it be trusted with major issues? That is the underlying question of President Barack Obama’s appearance at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida today. Cable-news commentary may focus on the political fight: who gets the biggest handouts. More important is whether Obama can change NASA from an example of what’s wrong with government (wasteful projects that serve only political favorites) to an example of what can be right (an agency that provides tangible benefits to taxpayers).

Yes, the Apollo moon landings were significant and memorable, but the last one occurred 38 years ago. In recent decades, NASA’s record has been spotty. The agency’s space science program – probes of the outer planets, telescopes that scan the far heavens – is successful and cost-effective. But for decades manned space flight, which receives the bulk of NASA funds, has accomplished: um, what? More money than was spent for the Apollo moon missions has been invested in the International Space Station, whose primary function is to give the space shuttle a destination. The shuttle, in turn, exists mainly to fly to the space station. The space station has no notable scientific achievements: it is such a white elephant that already NASA is studying the best way to “deorbit” the whole 380-ton structure, meaning allow it to burn in the upper atmosphere. This may happen as soon as 2016.

While spending freely on the space station and the shuttle, NASA has avoided research into new launch strategies that might cut the cost of access to orbit. Lower cost isn’t wanted – the whole point is to make the manned program expensive! And NASA has done just shy of nothing to plan for protecting the Earth from an asteroid strike: more on that in a moment.

Looking ahead to the inevitable demise of the space station, in 2004, NASA and the George W. Bush White House cooked up a plan to return astronauts to the Moon. That didn’t make much sense – because the Apollo landings found nothing of pressing scientific interest, NASA had gone 25 years without so much as launching an automated probe to the Moon. But sustaining spending, not finding a valid objective, was the goal.

To make a return-to-the-Moon seem like something more than a warmed-over reenactment, Bush declared that a Moon base would be a steppingstone to Mars. Physicists and engineers winced. There is no possibility a Mars mission would stop at the Moon; all proposed Mars missions involve departure directly from low-Earth orbit to the Red Planet. Landing first at the Moon, then blasting off again, would use up nearly all the mission’s fuel to accomplish, um, what?

LUNAR PORK-BARREL

Obama’s proposed fiscal 2011 budget cancels the Moon-return program, which is oddly called  Project Constellation, though it has nothing to do with the study of constellations. (And not called Project Artemis: she was Apollo’s sister, NASA can’t even come up with good names anymore.) There will be a nasty fight on Capitol Hill over canceling the Moon return, a presidential decision Congress must approve, because politically favored contractors and congressional districts would lose pork-barrel spending. It is essential that Obama’s rejection of Project Constellation is made to stick. If the president cannot impose fiscal rationality on an issue as minor as space spending, how will he ever wrestle the national debt to the ground?

A sure sign of the pork-barrel essence of the Moon-return idea is that proponents are going directly to the lamest possible arguments in its defense: jobs and China. You’ll hear a lot today, and in weeks to come, about how canceling the Moon return will cost jobs. NASA currently has $108 billion scheduled for spending on Constellation, with 6,000 jobs directly tied to the project. That’s $18 million per job created, an absurd amount. Washington could create more jobs by spending that $108 billion on something else, or better by not spending the money, returning capital to the free market.

Going deeper into silliness, Rep. Pete Olson of Texas, whose district includes the Johnson Space Center, which would control a second Moon mission, recently said the president “seems willing to hand off American dominance in human spaceflight to nations like Russia and China.” Russia does a number of things well in space, including affordable launching, but does not challenge the United States in any way: decades after the Moon race, cosmonauts still have never left low-Earth orbit. FKA, Russia’s answer to NASA, today is essentially a NASA subcontractor; “The USA May Order a Remote-Sensing Satellite in Russia” is the current lead headline on the FKA website.

China? The Chinese space program is about where the United States was in 1965; China’s best manned-space hardware is equivalent to NASA’s obsolete Gemini rocket-capsule stack. If China lands a man on the lunar regolith half a century after the United States reached “been there, done that” status for this objective, it is hard to see how that threatens America – let China be the country to waste a huge chunk of national treasure looking for ice on the Moon! Old-timers from NASA, and pork-barrel proponents such as Rep. Olson, want to depict China’s 1960s-vintage space effort as a national threat, because then money will flow without any need to prove the case. If a return-to-the-Moon made sense on its own, proponents would argue on the merits.

Obama’s NASA plan involves canceling the Moon return, and canceling two new rockets, Ares and Ares V, both under development; starting a new development program for a very powerful rocket that could be used to reach asteroids; keeping the manned space program in business at a lower budget; postponing the burn-up of the space station till 2020; temporarily paying FKA $56 million per seat to fly U.S. astronauts to the space station (space-shuttle launches cost about $150 million per seat); directing more funds to satellites designed to study Earth and the Sun; and encouraging a commercial-space industry that would develop private launchers to replace the FKA flights. Obama does not propose any commitment to Mars travel – surely this will happen someday, but for now the technical obstacles appear insurmountable, unless truly vast sums of money were spent.

FREE-ENTERPRISE ROCKETRY

There is good and bad in the White House plan. More study of the Earth and Sun has long been needed, since this could discover information of tangible benefit to taxpayers. More study of Venus is needed, too – that planet has a runaway greenhouse atmosphere, and Earth governments are contemplating greenhouse regulation. Canceling Ares V development is a puzzling step, since that rocket would be very powerful – exactly what another part of Obama’s plan seeks to develop. (This part of the plan would make sense if there is a propulsion breakthrough; Ares V uses existing engine technology. Flight to Mars would become less impractical if higher rocket speeds were achieved.) Keeping the space station in orbit is politically expedient, since this postpones the incredibly embarrassing day when Obama, or some president, has to explain why the single most expensive object ever constructed is being deliberately burned up above our heads.

Obama’s plan to encourage free-enterprise rocketry sounds great, but is extremely unrealistic. Only one company, Sea Launch, has ever succeeded in placing a large, privately funded rocket into orbit, and right now Sea Launch is in Chapter 11. The capital requirement for reaching space is very high, the customer base modest. (Here are details about Sea Launch and private rocketry.)

The White House would provide $6 billion over five years to encourage development of private rockets, but this is a drop in the bucket. The new Boeing 787 and its engines cost about $13 billion to develop, and the 787, while beautiful, is just an airplane. A new “human-rated” — multiple redundant systems — rocket capable of carrying significant payloads to orbit could easily require $25 billion or more for development. No private company will be able to raise such a sum without a long-term guaranteed NASA contract, at which point you might as well just have NASA develop the next rocket. (Private flight to orbit will happen someday, but absent a major breakthrough, perhaps not for decades. The winged “spaceship” being developed by Richard Branson is not a spaceship; it will fly higher than conventional aircraft, but not reach orbit.)

Overall, the Obama NASA plan is the first serious attempt to reorient the space agency away from pork barrel and toward rational spending priorities. Will Obama succeed, or will oink-oink rule on the Hill? Let’s root for the president and rationality, even if Obama’s plan needs improvement. Washington is under the thumb of countless agencies and programs whose justification is slim, but whose funding continues year after year for pork reasons. Obama must show he can break the psychology of permanent spending before he can face larger budget challenges ahead. NASA is a good place to start.

And asteroids? Just because an asteroid strike was the premise of a ridiculous Bruce Willis movie is no reason to think this can’t happen. As recently as a few decades ago, researchers believed asteroid strikes were extremely unlikely, or had been confided to the mists of the far past. Recent research shows that near-Earth asteroids are far more common than thought, while major strikes have occurred much too recently for comfort: including a probable asteroid strike in the year 536 that might have caused mass extinctions, if the rock had hit land instead of the ocean. Here is detail on asteroid-threat research. And here is the running count of asteroids that might threaten Earth – 280 as of Wednesday, and nearly all of them discovered in the last 10 years.

Yet NASA has no program to counter an asteroid threat – not one piece of equipment in development. This 2008 Air Force “war game” concluded that it would be possible to deflect an asteroid away from Earth, but that five to 10 years of preparation would be needed. So why are we gambling the existence of humanity by doing nothing? True, an asteroid-deflection rocket might never be used. But we built ICBMs in the hopes they would never be used. And an asteroid-deflecting project should cost substantially less than the amount NASA is eager to waste on the Moon.

One can appreciate that neither the space agency, nor the White House, wants to announce a program that sounds like a Bruce Willis movie. But the threat is genuine, and if we wait until a large asteroid is observed approaching, it will be too late. Unlike a Moon base, asteroid protection could return tangible benefits to the taxpayer. Stopping an asteroid from striking the Earth could be, well, the greatest achievement in human history. Didn’t somebody say NASA needs an inspirational mission?

Today, Barack Obama and Dmitry Medvedev meet in Prague to sign an agreement that will eliminate more than 1,000 large nuclear bombs from the Earth. Ho-hum! Commentators are carping that this development is not splashy or dramatic enough. Quite the contrary: it is magnificent news for our world.

When historians look back on the present generation, they will say that there were three trends of historic import – and none involve the effluvial trivia that dominate most contemporary discourse.

One trend of historic import is the spread of democracy, a sanguine development which seemed impossible as recently as the 1980s. The second is the rapid decline of global poverty – an improvement barely remarked upon in the West, because it isn’t happening there, and violates the chic-pessimism script preferred by tastemakers. China has moved 220 million people, nearly the population of the United States, out of poverty in a single generation. This production-and-output achievement is every bit the equal of America’s production-and-output achievement to win World War II. Poverty is declining in many though of course not all other developing nations.

The third great development of the present generation is steady decline in the world’s inventory of Armageddon weapons. According to estimates from the Federation of American Scientists, at the peak, in the mid-1980s, the United States and old Soviet Union possessed 80,000 nuclear warheads – sufficient to end human life, if not life on Earth.

Following a quarter-century succession of agreements backed by Democratic and Republican presidents alike in the United States, and reformers and zealots alike in Russia, the total is down to about 15,500 nuclear warheads. That is still too high. But when else exactly in history has fourth-fifths of any category of military power voluntarily been given up, to say nothing of within a single generation?

Today’s agreement binds the United States and Russia to a further reduction of about 1,600 thermonuclear devices, and the ones to be eliminated are the worst kind – “strategic” warheads up to 125 times as powerful as the atomic explosive dropped on Hiroshima. In the 1980s, each side possessed about 10,000 strategic bombs of extreme destructive force. Under the terms of today’s agreement, each side will be limited to 1,550, representing an 85 percent reduction in the worst category of nuclear threat.

The Prague agreement further sets the stage for a renewed push for nonproliferation — unfortunately, not likely to succeed in the short term — and for U.S.-Russian negotiations toward a sharp reduction in short-range, Hiroshima-class “tactical” nuclear weapons. There may be no realistic means to get Iran or North Korea to abandon nuclear-weapon efforts. But it is quite realistic to hope the United States and Russia will agree to more cuts in tactical nuclear arms: Moscow has already signaled its desire for this. Tactical nuclear munitions don’t engage public or political attention, because a single one cannot incinerate a city. But because tactical nuclear bombs are so numerous, reducing them is important, too.

Once today’s agreement takes force, the United States and Russia combined will have about 3,000 strategic nuclear devices and about 11,000 tactical bombs – far less than the two sides possessed at the height of the Cold War. Future historians may express amazement that so little heed has been paid to such reduction: though nuclear arms are by a huge margin the worst threat to human life.

Nor is much attention paid to related treaties by which Washington and Moscow have agreed to keep most nuclear warheads in storage – most of today’s bombs could not be fired by accident because it would take days or weeks to re-initialize them; agreed drastically to reduce the number of ICBMs, the missiles that carry the worst kinds of nuclear warheads; agreed to halt development of new ICBMs; and agreed it make it harder, though not impossible, to target ICBMs against cities.

Grousing that today’s Prague agreement somehow isn’t impressive enough, because it represents only one phase in reducing the nuclear-war threat, betrays a lack of any sense of history. Today’s agreement is magnificent: showing the leaders of the United States and Russian Federation share a positive vision of walking the world back from the brink of midnight.

As president, Jimmy Carter supposed that nuclear warheads could be reduced until each side possessed only 100: he felt that would be ample to insure against attack. Last year, Obama said he sought a “world without nuclear weapons.” Neither of these idealistic goals may come to pass. It’s not even clear a world without nuclear weapons would be desirable. For 65 years, nuclear deterrence has prevented great-powers war: the maintenance of small nuclear inventories sustains that deterrence.

But it is undeniable that shrinking the doomsday arsenal is a global good, and today’s agreement is another step. For two decades, nuclear-warhead facilities in the United States and Russia have run in reverse, disassembling bombs rather than making them. Today’s agreement gives the bomb-disassembly facilities a few years’ more business. If only every day brought such welcome news.

Gregg Easterbrook writes a weekly column for Reuters.com. The views expressed are his own.

Speaking at the White House today, President Barack Obama said, “The federal budget has become an accounting swindle little different from Enron. We are showering money on interest groups while passing unconscionable levels of debt to future generations. I apologize for my role in this: I have talked fiscal responsibility while borrowing to spend without restraint. Social Security benefits simply are going to have to be cut – it’s the only way out of the mess both parties have made of Washington. The time has come to state this honestly.”

Speaking on Capitol Hill, House Minority Leader John Boehner apologized for his fist-shaking speech calling the health care bill a “disgrace” that represents “the last straw for the American people.” Boehner said, “My behavior has been petty partisanship at its worst. The country cannot move forward when lawmakers like me act like spoiled children. I’ve been encouraging destructive politics and I was wrong.”

Also speaking on Capitol Hill, prominent Democratic representative Barney Frank expressed contrition for calling opponents of the health care bill “clowns.” Frank said, “I am no-one to talk, considering how many billions of dollars my mistakes about Fannie Mae have cost the country. Rather than ridicule political rivals, people like me should be seeking common ground. I’ve been engaging in gutter politics and I was wrong.”

Speaking in Texas, former Vice President Dick Cheney said, “For me to question the patriotism and honesty of Barack Obama’s government has been completely wrong. Imagine how angry I would have become if former officials from the administration before mine had said about me and President George W. Bush the sorts of things I am now saying about the current administration. I’ve been a horse’s rear end, and I apologize.”

In New York City, political commentator Keith Olbermann said, “My anti-Republican exaggerations have gotten out of hand. Red-in-the-face screaming that anyone who disagrees with me is immoral or evil has become a caricature of the very nonsense I originally went into newscasting to oppose. I will stop going directly to questioning the integrity of those I don’t like, and apologize for the times I have done so.”

Also in New York City, political commentator Glenn Beck said, “I feel ashamed that I have resorted to such low tactics as calling those I disagree with communist, anti-God or anti-American. That is the sort of behavior engaged in by the very cheapest of demagogues. I vow to stop playing to the lowest common denominator and treat others with respect.”

At the Vatican, Pope Benedict XVI declared, “For too long the Church has been more concerned with protecting its power and wealth than with stopping sexual abuse of children. I have been part of this problem and when exposed, I blamed others rather than searching my own soul. I profoundly apologize for setting such an un-Christ-like example.”

From Tehran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad announced, “My anti-Semitic ravings and embrace of dictatorship bring disgrace to the Iranian people. Persians are educated and sophisticated: for me to be their public face is an embarrassment. From now on, I will advocate freedom and peace.”

In Tel Aviv, Benjamin Netanyahu said, “It is past time the Israeli government kept its word and stopping building more settlements. The settlements have become a pretext for endlessly sustaining the conflict. Might does not make right, and I am deeply sorry for acting as though it did.”

From the Pentagon, Admiral Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said, “I have no idea why the United States continues to occupy Iraq. Regardless of what the original reason for the invasion was, seven years have passed, and we’re still there. Just like in Vietnam, we have no clear mission definition. No U.S. soldier serving in Iraq can tell you what the mission is. Yet our troops remain, the young dying so the old can avoid accountability.”

From London, Martin Sullivan and Robert Willumstad, former CEOs of AIG, issued a joint statement declaring, “We knew our company was engaging in dubious transactions intended to bilk investors. Yet we stuffed our own pockets, then when caught, handed the bill to the taxpayer. We express regret to the public for our greed and cynicism.” Alan Greenspan, attending the press conference, said, “My blunders helped trigger a global recession. It is time I admitted what a terrible job I did.”

From Alaska, former governor Sarah Palin said, “I have spent the last two years building myself up by tearing others down. What exactly have I ever accomplished? Nothing but self-promotion. From now on I will offer a positive vision, and stop spending all my time pointing the finger at others. I need to become a constructive force. This isn’t high school anymore.”

In Moscow and Beijing, people surfed the Web, browsed in bookstores and bought newspapers at newsstands, free to read and say whatever they wished. In central Africa, food production increased while corruption declined. Between the Koreas, soldiers of both nations shook hands and exchanged cigarettes as they worked to disassemble the DMZ. In Saudi Arabia, women voted in favor of a conversion of the kingdom into a European-style constitutional democracy.

In Cuba, Major League Baseball awarded an expansion franchise to Havana, in celebration of the end of the United States embargo. In eastern Afghanistan, the final remnant of al Qaeda surrendered to United States Marines.

In Israel, the West Bank and Gaza, hardly anything happened. People went about their mundane tasks, free from terrorism and from oppression. When evening fell, they gathered in cafes for friendly conversation.

In other news, Gregg Easterbrook wished everyone a happy April Fool’s Day.