The New Republic Online: Easterbrook
Gregg Easterbrook sounds off on the lack of positive press coverage of Bush's "environmental initiatives".
I started wandering around the CBO site and the EPA site, trying to get a feel for how the budgets have changed over the past decade or so. It's pretty hard to do -- the budget offices have conveniently changed their categories and document formats, seemingly every year...which makes it really hard to break out a category, such as air quality, and understand it.
EPA gives the 2004 legal services budget as $46 million or so. That sure doesn't seem like much; $46 million to chase after every non-compliant polluter in the country? My understanding is that the EPA is absolutely snowed under -- major polluters are out there that they simply do not have the budget to go after. In some of these cases, there are crimes being committed. The budget just isn't there to pursue it.
My overall impression is that Bush has gutted the enforcement end of the EPA budget. We all know that nothing pisses off a Republican more than some pinko commie environmentalist wanting to save a stupid squirrel or spotted crap-warbler or whatever it is that's currently in front of the bulldozer. Scattered searches have shown me that there's been around a 20% reduction in enforcement manpower over the past two years.
One way to avoid having pollution laws is to stop enforcing them. This is the Bush method.
Easterbrook says "The rub is that existing Clean Air Act power-plant regulations and "state implementation plans," which govern overall airshed quality, have led to runaway litigation, with the typical Clean Air Act rule taking ten years of legal proceedings to finalize, according to a study by Steve Hayward of the American Enterprise Institute. Bush's Clear Skies bill would scrap the litigation-based system and substitute the "cap and trade" approach that has been spectacularly successful at reducing acid rain. "
Makes me wonder if a "cap and trade" system would work for crime. You know, criminals in low-crime communities could buy the right to beat people up or kill people from criminals in high-crime communities. Everybody wins! Crime goes down.
Or, maybe we realize that pollution is a bad thing, and whatever we can do to reduce it is probably a good idea.
Let's remember that Bush is gutting the current legislation, which would have achieved the pollution targets far more aggressively (particularly with regard to mercury -- remember that Bush's EPA suppressed a study on mercury for nine months because they didn't like the scary sounding results), in favor of a much slower approach. The justification is that the current system is "litigation intense". It doesn't make sense to complain on one hand that a system can't litigate fast enough, and then to cut that legal department on the other hand. Bush is essentially creating a problem (or, to be fair, making it worse) by cutting the budget, then pointing at that problem as the reason for scrapping the program.
All I see here is that we could have chosen to enforce the current laws, and air pollution would have been dramatically cleaned up inside of five years. Instead, we're on a 15 year merry-go-round, subject to the whatever the current whims of the energy industry are, as channelled by Bush and Corporation.
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Ross, this strikes me as
Ross, this strikes me as similar to Bush's approach to government in general. Regarding his tax cuts, Bush took the opportunity to eliminate some percieved inefficiencies in the system, much as Reagan did in 1986. For the most part, this aspect of his tax policy is a good thing, as it represents a step towards rationalizing and ultimately simplifying the US tax code.
But I get the sense that this same ethos applies to the environment as well. While most people will agree that less-complicated taxation is a good thing in general, fewer people will see less environmental regulation as an overall good thing.
Some people, like our compatriot Buckethead, correctly point out that we need to balance the need to limit damage to the environment with the need not to destroy entire industries through drastic measures. The trouble is that carried to the extreme this rationale is just as unfounded as the radical green notion that we should all go back to living off the land in huts.
I wish that Bush & co. would show a greater sense of urgency, or at least of seriousness, when dealing with issues like these. At this point, I get the sense that he doesn't give a flying fark about environmental damage, and that's not going to make me any more inclined to vote for him next year.
That being said, I'm definitely in favor of giving market-based pollution caps a shot. If they can be put into place quickly, and have a quick effect on limiting pollution, that's great. That would also free us up to look at more permanent options. The market isn't everything, and it's not a panacea, but in this case, why not try it?
I'd say don't try it because
I'd say don't try it because we'd be much better off if we just spent a little more on enforcement and actually _jailed_ a few polluters. The rest will clean up in a hurry.
The question here is, are the pollution laws that we have _reasonable_? That is, do they set reasonable limits on the crap that can go into our air, water, and food?
I think that by and large, they do. I would hope that there's good scientific consensus on standards, as far as acceptable pollutant levels go.
What we're seeing with the Bush administration is partially political maneuvering, and partially helping their friends out. The "property rights" issue has been an old saw forever. We've dissolved so much of the commons that a man just isn't really free to walk the earth any more, like he was meant to be. Most conservatives perceive property rights as an citizen's personal issue, and that's what's used to generate the votes. That's bullshit, of course...the real beneficiaries of pro-property rights legislation are developers and industrialists. Massive corporate farms destroy the environment around them...property rights advocates whine and bitch that the factory's owner should have the right to do what he wants, but the farmers around him have their livelihood destroyed by that industrial farm.
I don't think a market-based approach will work. Why? Because you have idiot governments like Bush's coming along and deregulating everything. What the market approach does is create a nice set of moving goalposts. Every time the goalposts look a little too close, the anti-environment industrialists buy a few politicians and get them moved farther away.
We had legislation that would have made a real difference and cut these pollutants. Bush eliminated it and replaced it with something that _might_ work, over a much longer period of time. He could have just pushed a little harder in enforcement, but that wouldn't have appealed to his base.
How much acid rain is a mid-west power plant allowed to deliver to Massachussets? Or Canada? This is why, when it comes to the environment, we need federal law. If it goes in the water, it affects other states. If it goes in the air, it affects other states.