The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, April 19, 2005

Shocking news! Stop the presses. New data leaked during this Earth Week tent revival reveal previously unacknowledged environmental secrets. Sit down, Mama, the revelations are coming hard and fast:

• Air pollution fell last year to the lowest levels ever recorded in this country.
  
• Bald eagles, down to fewer than 500 nesting pairs in 1965, are now estimated to number more than 7,500 nesting pairs.
  
• Wetlands, which were disappearing at a rate of about 500,000 acres per year as recently as 1950, have shown a net gain of about 26,000 acres per year in the past five years.
  
• U.S. forests expanded by 9.5 million acres between 1990 to 2000. In the eastern half of the United States, land cleared in the 1800s for farming and grazing has been returning to forests at a rate of a million acres a year since 1910. Total forest area has been stable for more than a century.

These secrets are reported by scholars working for two public policy think tanks, the Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy in San Francisco and the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research in Washington.

What follows here is something readers and listeners almost never get, especially from commentators on the left breathlessly reporting the latest threat to the welfare state from liberal institutions such as Brookings and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. American Enterprise is a center-right think tank; Pacific is conservative.

Once a year, though, as the two organizations have done for a decade now, it is useful to get an assessment of environmental progress that does not constantly equate process with reality. Reporting process --- prosecutions of polluters, a decline in Superfund cleanups, more fish-consumption advisories for rivers and lakes --- invariably sets up advocacy-group alarmists for they're-all-corrupt and we're-all-dying screeds.

But as principal author Steven F. Hayward and others note in their national index of environmental indicators, these process of government stories "have no direct linkage to measured environmental conditions or results."

Fish advisories, for example, reflect stepped-up monitoring, but despite having spent $600 billion over the last 35 years on water pollution abatement, the nation lacks the water quality monitoring capability to accurately gauge trends.

Ultimately, the greatest missing element in getting past interest-group hype and hysteria is a national Bureau of Environmental Statistics, argues Hayward. At least 15 efforts have been made in Congress to create such an objective fact-gathering body, but all have failed, with environmental groups often leading the opposition, he says.

This is the point where most conservatives and liberals begin to part company on public policy. Conservatives recognize that money is finite, both ours and the government's. The proper way to spend, therefore, is to gather accurate, measurable data and to apply cost-benefit analysis to proposed solutions. What are we getting in quality-of-life enhancements for the investment we make?

It's what Georgians should expect from transportation spending, from education, and from the environment.

Gov. Sonny Perdue just commissioned a Congestion Mitigation Task Force. Its job is to measure traffic congestion, and to develop cost-benefit standards for selecting projects based on how much relief the public gets for the tax dollar. That same approach should guide where also-limited environmental protection dollars go.

Liberals rely on emotionalism, imagined Big Business-Big Government conspiracies and sympathetic judges to win public policy debates. They hate cost-benefit analysis and are loath to assemble data that might lead the public to conclude that we're not at doomsday's door.

It's OK, though, to be optimistic, to note, as Hayward does, that "the entire nation has met clean air standards for four of the six pollutants regulated under the Clean Air Act, and the areas with the highest pollution levels have improved the most." And of those two, ozone and particulates, ozone pollution in 2004 was at the lowest recorded level in U.S. history.

And, "the EPA's own models project that emissions from the auto fleet will decline by more than 80 percent over the next 25 years."

But enough of these revelations,. Too much good news for the environmentally starved can blow Mama off her chair.

Jim Wooten is associate editorial page editor. His column appears Sundays, Tuesdays and Fridays. He can be reached at jwooten@ajc.com