A HealthFactsAndFears.com Interview
HealthFactsAndFears.com: What was the occasion that led you to testify to the Senate Committee on Government Affairs?
Kenneth Green, D.Env., Chief Scientist for the free-market Reason Public Policy Institute: Sen. Joseph Lieberman is running hearings that are intended to show that the Bush administration is not enforcing environmental laws and is backsliding on environmental protection. Even thought it's too early to judge the effects there are no data that say one way or the other what's going on what they're arguing about is the fact that the Bush administration takes a different approach to environmental problem-solving than the command-and-control, mandatory, and centralized approach that the environmental left supports.
They lined up these people to tell horror stories about some local environmental issue in which they feel the administration is acting irresponsibly. In one case they didn't feel the administration was pushing hard enough for punishment or fines against polluters, and in another case they didn't think the administration was suing with the vigor they should have instead of negotiating a compromise. I was invited by Sen. Fred Thompson to inject some balance and point out that a change in approach does not mean a change in goals.
HFAF: Isn't the Bush administration attacking environmental regulations?
KG: They're not attacking them at all. In fact, they've let the vast majority of the evironmental rules that were in the pipeline go through. What they're doing is taking this raft of last-minute environmental rules that was passed under the previous administration and they're trying to figure out whether or not they make sense. So, they're reviewing quite a few of them to see if they do more harm than good.
HFAF: You mentioned in your testimony that we've eliminated many open dumps, our air's getting cleaner, and surface pollution in rivers has decreased. Isn't all that because of old-style environmental regulations?
KG: No, not really. Certainly, there's some credit that goes to the environmental laws, but if you actually look at the history of the clean-ups take air pollution, for example and look the time of the clean-up compared to when they passed the laws, what you find is that the driving force in leading to air pollution reduction has been action at the local level when prosperity reaches the point where local people can afford to pay attention to that. So, in California, it was the local regulations on smoking vehicles that started the process toward cleaning the air up and the regulators just came in and made the regulations wider, then federal, ostensibly for the sake of consistency, but the trends were already well in place before the Clean Air Act or the state-based rules were written into law.
HFAF: So, does the federal way of doing it make things any worse?
KG: They often insist on putting inappropriate measures in place because of their lack of specific knowledge of place and problem. So, for instance, in mandating inspection and maintenance, mandating smog inspection in the Clean Air Act, you have a blunt-instrument solution to a subtle problem: Most of the cars are clean and you should be trying to identify only the ones that are not, but instead every place is now required to test all cars. They wind up being forced to waste resources in order to satisfy the law, rather than focus on the real problem.
HFAF: You offered the example of pollution-trading in Massachusetts. How did that program work?
KG: Instead of having specific permits for each piece of equipment, the Massachusetts Environmental Protection Agency allowed for permits to be done at the facility level. So the whole facility would get a permit and that way the company could decide how best to reduce their total air pollution output.
HFAF: Why isn't that the norm in pollution-reduction rules?
KG: Because of the traditional mindset: Unless everything is specified, some extreme environmental alarmists believe, industry will always try to pollute, unless they specify every single thing.
HFAF: Do people instinctively think you're "getting away with something" if you trade pollution permits or exchange one pollution reduction plan for another one that's easier to implement?
KG: Well, some people get it. Clearly, the ones living in the state get it, and the ones who are working the project locally get it. I'm sure that the alarmist greens would say industry is getting away with something unless they're actively being punished but _their_ view is less about finding a solution than about finding someone to hurt.
HFAF: Do you think the politicians are genuinely interested in finding the most efficient environmental rules?
KG: I would say with most of them, it's not an issue to them unless it's their district, and then they want things done as efficiently and flexibly as possible.
HFAF: Are there pollution-trading programs you mentioned one in New Jersey that are working well now?
KG: There are any number of state-based emission-trading programs that are functioning well, and nationally, there's the acid rain-trading program. There's a great deal of evidence that trading programs like that work at the state and federal levels.
HFAF: Are there any dumb, very expensive things that the rules have decreed that you have to do that could be replaced with a really simple, flexible way of getting the same pollution reduction?
KG: There are hundreds of them. Look at what California did with electric vehicles. They were going to mandate that auto-makers sell 10% of the vehicles in their fleets as electric vehicles by 1998 or so, pumped huge amounts of money into subsidizing and forcing these things to market. They were overwhelmingly rejected [by consumers], and all that money and energy is wasted.
They also went forward with a hugely expensive smog check system that put cars on dynamometers, and in New Jersey they've had a huge problem because they didn't put enough capacity into the system to process the cars efficiently, and they've got massive lines and waiting and inconvenience, and motorists' time is consumed for virtually no reason because smog check programs don't work very well compared with focusing on the really dirty cars and scrapping programs.
HFAF: Would you still favor a central agency to decide what the permissible pollution levels should be?
KG: Well, there's theory and there's practice. In the ideal world, you wouldn't necessarily have to have an agency because standards would be decided by court cases and precedent. If a firm was polluting and actually causing harm harm to either health or property someone would take that company to court, they would sue, that would establish precedent, after which any firm doing this would also be liable for punitive damages, and you'd solve the problem that way, where the people most affected are the ones defining what pollution is and society discovers over time what constitutes harmful pollution as opposed to just the externalities that we all impose on everyone else by our existence.
HFAF: So, some sort of demonstrable human health effect would become the criterion?
KG: Right, and I think what we have instead is a surrogate for that. That was the intention, I think, of the Clean Air Act in saying that the air quality standards have to protect the public health to an adequate margin of safety. They're supposedly a health-based standard.
The process we have is sort of a surrogate for what the ideal world would be in a court-based system, but it may be that one has to go with a regulatory body that establishes standards. Arguably, that is what government does well is set rules and then enforce them instead of actually telling people how to do things. Air quality poses many challenges for figuring out the best way to deal with the problem. On the one hand, flexible, cooperative, market-based approaches are clearly superior from the standpoint of their performance, effectiveness, and cost. On the other hand, you get to complex questions like air quality where you can't see the one person who's dumping something and you don't know which source is causing harm. Increasingly, though, you can't even tell if harm is being done because the allowed levels are so low they're below the radar for epidemiology studies.
The full text of Green's Senate testimony can be found at: www.rppi.org/031302.html
For information on last year's best-known environmental regulatory controversy, see ACSH's report on arsenic in water.