Krishna Kumar at Foreign Policy has the details:
On December 10, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff announced his top-secret plan for saving the planet from global warming. Debuting at Washington’s Dulles Airport, and then being rolled out to all ports of entry to the United States in 2008, all incoming aliens between 14 and 79 must now have all 10 of their fingerprints electronically scanned and recorded.
Now you might think that this was all about spotting false identities – but only if you’re an idiot, as Kumar explains:
When you look at what’s actually been accomplished by fingerprinting aliens, it’s clear that mistaken identity can’t be the real purpose. Since 2000, according to Secretary Chertoff, the U.S. government has stopped nearly 2,000 people from entering the country because their fingerprints didn’t match. But the United States has more than 400 million visitors a year, including returning Americans—or roughly 2.8 billion visitors since starting the program. That translates to a success rate of well over one in a million.
So what can be the real reason? Well, this is where Chertoff’s genius starts to shine through. Already, the scheme has notched up one major success:
It has gotten the Europeans in a hissy fit. With the recent decline in the dollar, Americans ought to be seeing hordes of Europeans flying west to take advantage of the bargains. But while the number of international visitors is starting to recover from its 2001 low point, travelers from Europe are not returning in the same numbers. Many whine about “Soviet-style” border-control officials and say they’re being treated like criminals.
And thank goodness for that:
Europeans are so cheap they have entire countries, such as Luxembourg and Andorra, that exist only to sell discounted products to their neighbors. Imagine what would happen if they realized that the world’s largest consumer economy is having a 50-percent-off sale. Imagine the chaos in malls across the United States as non-English speaking Europeans tried to navigate parking spaces and checkout lines and buy what should rightfully be Americans’ post-Christmas discounts. And imagine if German- and French-speaking entrepreneurs had more opportunities to invest in U.S. assets, pushing up stock prices for the rest of us. Without the fingerprints in place, the prospect of Europeans streaming across our borders, armed with cash, could be a lot more alarming.
But even this can’t be the whole reason, given that today’s global economy still hampers Homeland Security’s valiants efforts to “keep unwanted euros out of the US economy”. And that’s where climate change comes in.
If DHS can reduce demand on those flights by scaring away Europeans (and hey, why not include the Japanese in this, too?), the department can help drive struggling U.S. airlines into further financial distress by eliminating their most profitable routes. And fewer flights means fewer emissions. Zero trans-oceanic flights would be the ultimate goal.
What kind of effect might even partial success have on carbon emissions? Here’s a back-of-the napkin estimate. Since 2000, there’s been a dramatic decline in visitors from the 27 (mostly European) countries that participate in the Visa Waiver Program. Using 2000 as a baseline, there are more than 22 million missing visitors. By not taking trans-Atlantic flights (and flights from Australia and Japan), they have saved more than 60 million tons of carbon dioxide from being emitted by airplanes. By comparison, in 2006, we saved just 45 million tons of CO2 by installing windmills worldwide.
What’s even better is that this brilliant climate-change plan is being adopted globally. Japan has announced it is starting to fingerprint all visitors, and even the Europeans are getting into the act. If other countries begin to scare away the millions of Americans who travel abroad by fingerprinting them, too, a more carbon-free future surely awaits.
You know, a lot of people knocked the Department for Homeland Security when they started out. But you gotta hand it to them: they’ve become a veritable turbo engine for joined-up government…
