The environment is a campaign issue in at least one congressional race in Minnesota. Recently I saw a TV commercial that extolled the incumbent Democrat’s pro-environmental record and quoted his Republican challenger as saying that current environmental regulations are “cumbersome.” The ad then piously intoned: “That’s not what Minnesotans think.”
Well, gee! I am a Minnesotan, a Democrat and an environmentalist. But I certainly agree with the Republican candidate that many environmental regulations currently in place are cumbersome. And I know a lot of other environmentalists, most of whom are Democrats, who feel the same way.
Moreover, many of us who feel that real progress on reducing pollution and improving environmental quality will only come when a majority of Americans realize there are alternatives to current policies. These alternatives are more effective in improving the environment and, at the same time, less costly to national income.
One example of such a measure is the system of acid-rain emissions certificate trading program that was included in the 1990 Clean Air Act. In this program, power plants are given permits for emissions based on historic levels. The permitted levels decline over time, and the permits are tradeable.
Plants that find it cheaper to install hardware than to pay the value of these permits on an open market can do so. Plants that find it cheaper to buy additional permits on the market, rather than install costly equipment, can also do so. But the total amount of permitted emissions declines over time.
Society as a whole benefits from cleaner air, and acid rain levels have dropped by 30 percent since this program went into effect. But private companies decide on the cheapest way to achieve these levels. Cheaper measures ultimately translate into lower costs for consumers.
Virtually all of the major environmental groups, including the Sierra Club, World Wildlife Fund, Audubon Society, and Izaak Walton League, recognize the effectiveness of this program and support it. There are many more measures of this type that could be implemented—in environmental protection, in natural resource conservation and in occupational safety and health. And it is clear that many laws on the books have not worked well.
Some parts of Superfund legislation are a good example of current laws with perverse effects. By assigning legal liability for cleanup to anyone who ever owns a tract of land that was previously polluted, Superfund discourages job creation in existing urban areas and promotes the paving over of rural areas for new factories. This is far worse than cumbersome; it is an economic travesty and a social tragedy.
So much for a slap at Democrats. These same issues bear on the national race.
George W. Bush has repeatedly criticized the Clinton-Gore administration for inaction and missed opportunities. This is high irony coming from the son and avenger of President George Bush, who probably missed more opportunities than any other president in recent history.
George Bush was a moderate Republican following an ideologically conservative one. He had a window of opportunity to reach out to moderates in both parties to implement intelligent reforms of many programs.
By 1990, two decades of research and trial had shown that there were many government programs where it made more sense to work with market forces rather than against them. There was an emerging consensus among environmental organizations and think tanks on both the right and left on the desirability of such changes.
The acid-rain permit program and other sections of the Clean Air Act are successful examples of such measures.
But after that act was passed in 1990, the Bush administration decided to call it quits. Bush the elder sent his aide, Dick Darman, to tell Congress that as far as the administration was concerned, its work was done and it could go home. It is hard to imagine a greater lost opportunity, a greater degree of inaction.
Those who value the environment need not be overly concerned by the choice we face in a few weeks. Al Gore is not nearly as radical in action as the rhetoric in his book, Earth in the Balance. George W. Bush is not as anti-environment as his critics make out.
Anyone interested in a longer, thoughtful discussion of how the two candidates might act on environmental issues should read Gregg Easterbrook’s article “Green Surprise? How Bush or Gore, as president, might pull a ‘Nixon goes to China’ on environmental issues” in the September 2000 issue of The Atlantic Monthly.
Easterbrook argues that “because Bush is expected to favor the fossil-fuels industry, he might be the ideal president to press for global warming reform. And because Gore is expected to favor more rules and more bureaucracy, he might be the ideal president to seek the rationalization of environmental law that is advocated by nearly all economist and by a surprising number of environmentalists.”
I am not sure that hopeful prediction will pan out, but Americans are lucky to face another window of opportunity for environmental improvement at little economic cost. The economy has grown greatly over the past decade, and Congress is returning to centrism after a decade of harsh partisanship.
However, taking advantage of this opportunity will require us to think beyond superficial election cheap shots, such as equating the belief that many current measures are cumbersome with being anti-environment. Voters are capable of more complex analysis than many candidates apparently think.
© 2000 Edward Lotterman
Chanarambie Consulting, Inc.