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Environmentalists punish companies without protecting people
Thomas Molitor
I want to discuss a theoretical idea regarding the economics of pollution, called “externalities.” Despite what some readers might think, I do care about the environment. I just don’t see current government regulations as a way to solve our problems. In fact, those regulations often make the lives of average people worse.
Let’s start with positive externalities. They’re a little harder to come up with but I’ll try to make a good example. Suppose that I buy a rundown house on a nice block. I put a lot of money into fixing it up and doing some amazing landscaping work. Suddenly, this former dump on the block becomes one of the best-looking houses. My property value increases, but so do the property values of my neighbors. They didn’t put a single nickel into my project, yet their property values may rise by thousands without the eyesore next door. This unpaid gain is a positive externality.
In a way, externalities are inefficiencies. We want people to produce positive externalities, but we often have no way of compensating them for doing so. One is not going to make friends by giving a neighbor $200 and telling him, “It would be great for the whole neighborhood if you would fix your yard.”
The bigger concern is negative externalities
Suppose a coal-powered plant is located near someone’s house. The person buys electricity from the plant at market prices. However, along with the price of electricity, the customer pays an additional price from the increased pollution. The fish nearby have more mercury in their bodies, and the air is horrible. Not every customer pays this price. For those living much farther away from the plant, the externalities are lower. The coal plant does not pay the price of this damage; instead the plant’s neighbors pay the price in a reduced quality of life. Yet pollution is a cost of production.
Just like the positive externalities problem, it’s difficult for an individual to be compensated by the coal plant – especially if the damages are hard to quantify. Furthermore, what’s the price of clean air? I don’t know. For some people who enjoy living in the countryside, it could run in the thousands of dollars per year.
To produce good economic incentives, these externalities must be accounted for. After all, society benefits from production only if value is created. For example, let’s consider a company that manufactures cleaning chemicals for $4 and sells them for $5. Society gains by at least $1. Resources worth $4 have been transformed into products worth $5 to someone. The economic incentive is to keep repeating this process until the profit disappears. However, imagine this case: The chemicals cost $4 and can be sold for $5, but the process also causes $2 of environmental damage. The producer doesn’t pay the cost of the environmental damage, but he still has a personal incentive to produce the chemicals. However, society is worse off overall, because the process costs $6 for only an output of $5.
This is where the government economists step in with suggestions for taxes. If we place a $2 tax on the chemical company, then the incentive will be aligned. Yes, that’s partially true. However, this doesn’t necessarily solve the problem of pollution. Think again about the example of living next to a coal plant. Suppose the government places an extra tax on the plant, and it continues to operate. Who will pay for that tax? Unfortunately, the customers will likely bear some of the cost through higher prices. In fact, the resident will be worse off after the tax. He still bears the damages from pollution, and he must pay higher prices. That tax money doesn’t go toward compensating the victim of the pollution – it goes to paying additional bureaucrats at the EPA.
Laws that punish companies but don’t protect people
Environmentalists almost always support laws that punish companies but don’t actually protect people. In fact, they actually make things worse for the regular Joe. If a company meets the regulations and pays its taxes, it can basically do whatever it wants from there. And that’s a big reason why I’m not a fan of current regulations. The environmental laws are more often than not just barriers or taxes. They don’t do a good job of protecting the little guy.
So what would be my solution? Make companies respect the private property and lives of other people. Don’t hold them responsible to the government; rather, hold them directly responsible to individuals in the community. If a company is hurting people and their property, the firm better be writing them checks instead of sending money to the EPA. It’s really not a radical idea. We do this in court all the time. If a business hurts someone, it’s accountable. For some reason, the same thing doesn’t apply to pollution. Rather than devising environmental regulations and taxes, just hold the companies accountable for damages. That should create all sorts of positive incentives regarding pollution and the location of industrial sites.
It’s time for Congress to look at new ways to protect people and communities, rather than protect the EPA.
Molitor is a regular columnist for this site. You can reach him at tgmolitor@comcast.net.
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Invisible hand? Magical thinking of the right-wing at it’s worst. How do you reason with that level of audacious irrationality? This is a return to the Dark Ages.
Naomi Klein in Capitalism vs. the Climate
http://www.thenation.com/article/164497/capitalism-vs-climate?page=0,1
“But now there is a significant cohort of Republicans who care passionately, even obsessively, about climate change—though what they care about is exposing it as a “hoax” being perpetrated by liberals to force them to change their light bulbs, live in Soviet-style tenements and surrender their SUVs. For these right-wingers, opposition to climate change has become as central to their worldview as low taxes, gun ownership and opposition to abortion. Many climate scientists report receiving death threats, as do authors of articles on subjects as seemingly innocuous as energy conservation. (As one letter writer put it to Stan Cox, author of a book critical of air-conditioning, “You can pry my thermostat out of my cold dead hands.”)
This culture-war intensity is the worst news of all, because when you challenge a person’s position on an issue core to his or her identity, facts and arguments are seen as little more than further attacks, easily deflected. (The deniers have even found a way to dismiss a new study confirming the reality of global warming that was partially funded by the Koch brothers, and led by a scientist sympathetic to the “skeptic” position.)
The effects of this emotional intensity have been on full display in the race to lead the Republican Party.”
What is worse is that this false discrediting of Climate Change has sucked the oxygen out of the vast ecological movement seeking to protect people and the eco-systems form other horrible sources of pollution and unsustainable practices causing irreversible damage and robbing our future generations of health, security and quality of life.
@gofdisks
We have never had a free-market system. Mercantilism, yes. Free market, no.
It is mistake to read the The Wealth of Nations as a justification of amoral (or selfish as Wednum59 suggested) greed. Wealth was Adam Smith’s further attempt to make life better. In his The Theory of Moral Sentiments which came before Wealth he wrote, “To love our neighbor as we love ourselves is the great law of Christianity.” But note the simile that Christ used and Smith cited. The Theory of Moral Sentiments is about the neighbor. The Wealth of Nations is about the other half of the equation – ourselves.
IP, Smith’s “invisible hand” concept was indeed about economics and society. This quote from an excellent essay by Helen Joyce for mathsplus.org is typical:
“Smith was profoundly religious, and saw the “invisible hand” as the mechanism by which a benevolent God administered a universe in which human happiness was maximised. He made it clear in his writings that quite considerable structure was required in society before the invisible hand mechanism could work efficiently. For example, property rights must be strong, and there must be widespread adherence to moral norms, such as prohibitions against theft and misrepresentation. Theft was, to Smith, the worst crime of all, even though a poor man stealing from a rich man may increase overall happiness. He even went so far as to say that the purpose of government is to defend the rich from the poor.”
Imagine that?
Capitalism vs. the Climate by Naomi Klein Excellent article suggested for the intellectuals amongst us.
http://www.thenation.com/article/164497/capitalism-vs-climate?page=0,1
Arriving at the new systems is going to require shredding the free-market ideology that has dominated the global economy for more than three decades. What follows is a quick-and-dirty look at what a serious climate agenda would mean in the following six arenas: public infrastructure, economic planning, corporate regulation, international trade, consumption and taxation.
The fact that the earth’s atmosphere cannot safely absorb the amount of carbon we are pumping into it is a symptom of a much larger crisis, one born of the central fiction on which our economic model is based: that nature is limitless, that we will always be able to find more of what we need, and that if something runs out it can be seamlessly replaced by another resource that we can endlessly extract. But it is not just the atmosphere that we have exploited beyond its capacity to recover—we are doing the same to the oceans, to freshwater, to topsoil and to biodiversity. The expansionist, extractive mindset, which has so long governed our relationship to nature, is what the climate crisis calls into question so fundamentally. The abundance of scientific research showing we have pushed nature beyond its limits does not just demand green products and market-based solutions; it demands a new civilizational paradigm, one grounded not in dominance over nature but in respect for natural cycles of renewal—and acutely sensitive to natural limits, including the limits of human intelligence.
Climate change is a collective problem, and it demands collective action. One of the key areas in which this collective action must take place is big-ticket investments designed to reduce our emissions on a mass scale. That means subways, streetcars and light-rail systems that are not only everywhere but affordable to everyone; energy-efficient affordable housing along those transit lines; smart electrical grids carrying renewable energy; and a massive research effort to ensure that we are using the best methods possible.
The task of our time is to insist that we can afford to build a decent society—while at the same time, respect the real limits to what the earth can take.
The private sector is ill suited to providing most of these services because they require large up-front investments and, if they are to be genuinely accessible to all, some very well may not be profitable. They are, however, decidedly in the public interest, which is why they should come from the public sector.
Traditionally, battles to protect the public sphere are cast as conflicts between irresponsible leftists who want to spend without limit and practical realists who understand that we are living beyond our economic means. But the gravity of the climate crisis cries out for a radically new conception of realism, as well as a very different understanding of limits. Government budget deficits are not nearly as dangerous as the deficits we have created in vital and complex natural systems. Changing our culture to respect those limits will require all of our collective muscle—to get ourselves off fossil fuels and to shore up communal infrastructure for the coming storms.
Mr. Molitor:
First it should be noted that Smith also variously used the phrase “invisible hand” throughout his life to philosophically refer to the influence of the divine in (among other things) human morality and astronomical phenomena, and not just as a convenient sound-bite answer for latter-day proponents of anti-citizen economics who promote destructively simple solutions to remarkably complex problems. Indeed, the “invisible hand” was a factor of Smith’s religious viewpoint, not his economic one, and was anything but “unintentional”. More importantly, he also promoted regulating (albeit with caution) against monopolization and collusive business practices that would harm society far more egregiously; he was hardly the irresponsible disciple of laissez faire-economics that you are. Might I recommend actually knowing something about a particular philosopher before invoking their words out-of-context as evidence in favor of viewpoints which they clearly did not support?
@wedum59
Adam Smith viewed individuals pursuing their own interests in a free market as an “invisible hand” that unintentionally, but efficiently, promotes the best interests of the public at large.
Thanks, DJ. But if humans won’t control their overpopulation, they better learn to control their appetites, and the use of fossil fuels is one of the things that needs to be controlled, IMHO.
wedum59 says: “And we humans are greedily appropriating all the resources, such as the rainforests, and eating all the food, leading, for example, to the death by starvation of the world’s whale population. Two hundred years is the blink of an eyelash in geological terms, and this human population explosion is devasting our planet.”
I would have to agree and thank you for reminding me about another scientific argument wrt delta C13 numbers oft quoted as “proof” of massive human CO2 inputs on earth (ie Suess effect). With the rapid depletion and burning of the rainforests, the respiration products of that vegetation into the natural CO2 system is greatly reduced, while the boreal vegetation and higher latitude crops respiration (much more enriched in C13 and close to coal values) increases, thus the increased uncertainty and ambiguity of using delta C13 as “proof” of AGW. But I also think you are spot-on about the huge and unnecessary population increases that are indeed killing the earth and denying our grandchildren of a clean, safe planet. If we put half the effort into stopping that disaster as we do into fighting the bogus anthropogenic climate change, we could make real progess in saving our planet, for that is the real problem and elephant in the room, even in Durban.
Hmmm, your first example is typical Republican philosophy. “My property value increases, but so do the property values of my neighbors. They didn’t put a single nickel into my project, yet their property values may rise by thousands without the eyesore next door. This unpaid gain is a positive externality.” You are thinking only about “me first”, not about the community as a whole. The community as a whole has benefitted, you have a nice house to live in and good neighbors, and future buyers of the other houses that will continue to be YOUR good neighbors. It sounds as if you only envisioned selling the house for a profit, not becoming a member of the community.
Re your coal plant example, you state: “Think again about the example of living next to a coal plant. Suppose the government places an extra tax on the plant, and it continues to operate. Who will pay for that tax? Unfortunately, the customers will likely bear some of the cost through higher prices.” Then you turn right around in the next paragraph and state that this punishes the company but does not actually help people, when you also claim that the company just passed the punishment on to the people.
As artiofab has pointed out, your reasoning is a little weak in the scientific department. Here is a simpler argument to consider. In 1800, the human population on this planet was 1 Billion. Today, 200 years later, the human population has increased to nearly SEVEN Billion. And we humans are greedily appropriating all the resources, such as the rainforests, and eating all the food, leading, for example, to the death by starvation of the world’s whale population. Two hundred years is the blink of an eyelash in geological terms, and this human population explosion is devasting our planet.
Not warmer globally but certainly warmer in the Northern Hemisphere, and certainly warmer
for millenia in Mesopotamia of Mesopotamian fame.
Even more significantly, due to orbital variations, Northern Hemisphere summers were longer and hotter
while winters were longer and colder. Average temperatures were warmer while the climate was more extreme.
But this was not a significant hindrance to the budding civilizations.
The Holocene Optimum is a fitting rebuke to the exaggeration over CO2 induced warming.
Borehole and ice core proxies indicate that variation of a few degrees Celsius is quite common.
While it is likely that recent warming is in some part due to forcing from CO2, such a warming is quite normal.
All plants grow faster with increased CO2. There is a difference between C3 and C4 plants, so some benefit more than others, but all benefit.
Nearly all crop plants yield more crops with CO2.
This is certainly settled science. Here are thousands of papers researching this benefit.
There is a similar body of evidence regarding plant water usage.
More people die in winter than in summer.
The pattern appears to be the same in US, Japan, Italy, France, Spain, Canada, Australia, Sweeden, Greece, New Zealand and Cyprus.
I cite the cradle of civilization because of its coincidence with the Holocene Climatic Optimum, but we should remember
that human advancement has taken place long before that – during the last ice age, out of the last ice age, through the HCO, through to today. We have a fairly wide tolerance. So too do any other species which have evolved over a much longer period – they would not have survived as a species if they were not tolerant of variation in climate.
artiofab, when you attack my claim that you are cherry-picking your science (by using a tiny part of the earth’s data set) by saying: ” this time frame contains all of our species’ existence and it’s the time frame that we have the best data for.”, what you are really saying is that man is the only important part of earth’s history (extremely homocentric) and that it is best to look for your lost car keys under the streetlight, not where you lost them, since the light is better there. That is a very unpersuasive argument.
And if you review the published literature on the analysis of ice cores over the years, you will find there is no discussion of the errors in these measurements. There is also no discussion of the facts around sampling errors, sampling inconsistencies between layers, lack of sufficient material for quadruplicate analysis, etc. This type of thing is usually only discussed when the peer-reviewers ask questions during our back and forth toward publication and does not make it into the articles, but sometimes is available in appendixes attached to the original research at the university. At AGU meetings these things are discussed during oral presentations as well, and over the last decade or so I have attended the paleoclimatology sessions, there has been no improvement in errors. It still runs 20-30% +-, but that does not damage the real reasons this was studied to begin with, to determine the cyclicity and periodicity of temp. and CO2 variances and look for trends. We did not start the study of ice cores to pin blame for warming or to follow a political agenda against certain industries, as is being done today by the political scientists involved. In fact, our early work found many things lost today, or ignored, or denied by tortured logic, such as the fact CO2 never leads temp. increases, but vis versa, by 400-600 years, thus CO2 is not causing the temp. swings seen in the cores.
As for the Milankovitch cycles and our current position in same, you should read this paper:
Kerr, Richard, 1994. Milankovitch Plays Climate in Double-Time in the Tropics: Geotimes, v.39. p. 10.
There the 1000 year cycle is shown, and it appears the Medieval Warming period and the Little Ice Age, are part of that cycle. Since it has a 500 year or so half cycle (peak to trough), it fits the data, and thus today we are in the warming upswing, as shown in the data since about 1970 or so when warming started after many decades of cooling. Since this cycle is not as strong as the 20,000 year or 40,000 year , or 100,000 year cycles (which also have some influence on our current temps due to constructive interference of the cycles), we will not see warming or cooling much larger that the previous 1000 year cycles, thus 1-3 degrees. Yes, a few tenths of degrees of the current warming is due to human CO2, but that is small and minor compared to the underlying natural forces at work.
Thus trying to convince the body politic and the public that we need to drastically restructure our industries and economies (in the middle of a terrible global recession no less) to remove all fossil fuels ASAP to “save the earth for your grandchildren” is bogus and not supported by the vast majority of the earth’s science data. Luckily, today we have politicians and policy makers who will resist this ridiculous path and the extremist enviros are on the run and losing all the battles in politics and public opinion. Maybe that is why so many go to extremes to deny the science, they are just frustrated, eh artiofab?
skeptic, I’ll try to be as rational as possible and point out where you’re being either wrong or mistaken. The Holocene Climatic Optimum is not thought to have been globally warmer than today. As more recent research shows, it’s unlikely that there has been coordinated global warming within the past 20,000 years, making current conditions the odd man out.
With that erroneous statement countered, let’s move on to some of your claimed benefits of a higher-CO2 world.
There’s not really a universal-plant reaction to increased CO2 levels, so while some plants show decreases in protein concentration, some show increases in starch content. Maybe this will be a benefit in the final analysis? Similar research needs to be done on the claim that increased CO2 leads to reduced water usage in plants: if the plants are growing faster because of increased CO2, their increase in water usage might be more than matched by the decrease in transpiration.
Different studies have come to different conclusions on whether warm or cold weather causes more deaths in the US. Flu occurs most commonly in the winter in the Northern Hemisphere but other countries don’t show the same pattern, e.g. India has monsoonal and winter outbreaks so an increase in temperatures (and monsoonal events) might increase influenza there.
The above seems to be my main response to your post; your claimed benefits are either still unproven, or seem to only benefit one area of the world. I could go on but I think you and I both get the point: a warmer world is not necessarily a better world, and research into this eventuality can only categorize it as a different world.
Still, it is good to hear that you agree that warming is happening. I, too, hope that humans are able to adapt to it in a timely, economically efficient, and non-disastrous way.
Don’t tell me that the market can and is willing to self-regulate for the public good. I worked as a professional civil servant in the field and in high-level positions in environmental health, safety and risk management, and public administration. Anytime the market can get away with having to undertake something contrary to pursuing profits, they will.
But since it seems you find it easy to just ignore counterpoints you find hard to respond to intellectually; and since I find your whole premise without merit; and since you lean heavily on obfuscation and confusion to forward an argument, then, like you, I will just choose to ignore your meaningless response.
Mr. Molitor, testing on DDT suggests that, due to its long-term residence in human tissue, it might cause cancer in humans, so obviously that’s a situation wherein the benefits must be considered along with the costs.
Until such a time that corporate interests are willing to voluntarily limit their ecological impact, and until such a time that bands of citizens are able to stop corporate interests (this doesn’t really happen very often), the US federal government will use the EPA to do the job. Are there some issues where the EPA is deciding what should be state or local matters? Sure. Is this as prevalent as your article claims? I’m not entirely convinced. I do, however, think your argument is an interesting one to make; it’s good to see that you are essentially on the side of people who chain themselves to trees to prevent deforestation and people who try to keep Wal-Marts out of their cities.
Mr. Molitor:
Once again, you display your complete ignorance of our legal system. “Common law” does not mean what you think it means. Indeed, common law is, by definition, ever-evolving unwritten law created by the legal precedents set within our judicial system… something which you have also railed against. In short, you have just recommended that this country run almost entirely by judicial fiat, or, at the very least, that we depend more on a group of individuals for whom you have shown nothing but scorn. Incidentally, among the many things that judges use to mold the common law is regulation. In essence, you are suggesting that we remove part of the foundation of something that we should then rely more upon the stability of.
Setting aside the reality that your general economic and governmental philosophy has been historically proven to be detrimental to the well-being of the citizens of this country, it has become increasingly clear that you are making up for your near-total lack of functional knowledge about this country’s history or system of government by simply making up the specifics of that philosophy as you go along.
Dr. J, your grad school research was a few decades ago. My assumption (which I would be glad to be told is erroneous) is that the errors associated with CO2 values from ice cores are becoming less extensive and pervasive over time. If the highest levels shown in cores are in the area of ~310ppm (which is around the highest level reported from the Vostok core, correct?), it’s unlikely that these data points have a 25% error attached to them. Therefore, it’s unlikely that values comparable to current values of ~390ppm are recorded in ice cores, meaning that current CO2 levels are unprecedented in the past 400kyr. If I’m wrong in what I’m saying here, please give me some citations showing that the errors are as large as you are saying they are.
You’re correct in saying that CO2 is not the primary factor driving climate change on Earth. We’ve agreed on this before; cosmological and geological factors contribute the majority of climatic control, and climatological factors pick up the rest. Claiming that focusing on only the last few hundred thousand years is “cherry-picking data” is ludicrous: this time frame contains all of our species’ existence and it’s the time frame that we have the best data for. Furthermore, cosmological and geological factors have been fairly constant over such a time frame (the sun hasn’t increased or decreased in its output, no new continents or ocean currents have appeared), so if we’re going to get an accurate idea of what future climate will look like during our civilization’s existence, it makes sense to work with this data.
You misread my ‘assertion’, which is why you found it ridiculous, I’ll restate myself to be more clear. Mr. Molitor argued that human activity only contributes 3% of all the CO2 in the world, therefore who cares. My first statement of fact was that the majority of CO2 in the three active carbon reservoirs (biosphere, hydrosphere, and atmosphere) cycles between these three reservoirs without any gross net input or output. My second stated fact is that human activity is adding CO2 into these three reservoirs from a usually inactive reservoir, namely fossil fuels. Since atmospheric CO2 is changing in its isotopic composition, we know that the additional CO2 is coming from this inactive fossil fuel reservoir. None of what I’m saying in this paragraph is under contention by most scientists.
I’ve never seen the white cliffs of Dover but I have seen some limestone beds across the States. I realize that current human input of excess carbon will eventually be sequestered into the seabed but the rate of this sequestration is slower than our rate of input. So, if higher-than-pre-industrial CO2 is a problem, it will be a problem for a while, with a while potentially being something in the thousands of years ballpark.
I asked you before, and I don’t think I got a response so I’ll try again: is it possible to tell how far along the Earth is on a Milankovitch cycle? That would really help us determine if current warming trends are part of normal background fluctuations or are a novel trend due to anthropogenic carbon flux. Since you know the literature better than me, can you enlighten me as to whether this can or has been done?
@GFA
I will ignore all four of your paragraphs because all four are off-point and do not address the theme of my column.
Let me try and make it simple for you: Leftists, such as yourself, support the maze of environmental and energy regulations, not to mention the complete regulation of the nation’s economy. About the only grumbles one hears from regulation supporters, such as yourself, is that federal agencies do not use their powers enough and more forcefully.
The theme of my column is about the common law system versus the regulatory system.
I put that sentence in bold so you won’t miss my main point, and hopefully, if you choose to respond to this post, you will stay on point.
Let me explain it another way that will perhaps find its way into your field of understanding. First, one must distinguish regulation from law. For example, there are laws against fraud, and long before governments began to regulate the US economy, our environment, or human behavior in a myriad of ways, people brought alleged fraud cases to court, as well as other tort action that existed under a common law system. Thus, the allegations that without government regulation and its regulatory agencies, such as the EPA, there would be no legal oversight of markets and over the public good, are simply untrue.
The Byzantine and out-of-control system of replicating regulations pointed out in a recent column by Michael Swickard “A country with too many laws and rules” points out one man’s frustrations. Michael asked the question, “Can anything be done to reverse this trend.” To which I posted, “yes, cut the government in half and you cut regulations in half.”
To you, I will add a second remedy. To end this growing trend of “too many laws and rules”, is to abolish the entire US regulatory system and return to the common law system that served our country so well for so long.
I believe thre are 1,800 workers at the EPA. How many do you think have technical backgrounds? True scientific backgrounds, in the hard sciences like physics, chemestry, geology, physics. The answer is……about 12-15%. They do have lots and lots of administrative staff….and lots and lots and lots of attorneys and staff bureucrats. And some of the not so technical sciences too… But the are quite light in the hard sciences. By all means do your own research. Nothing like having a bunch of “well intentioned” or may be not so well intentioned bureaucrats telling you what to do. Especially when they regulate areas they aren’t trained in.
Mr. Molitor:
While you might pretend to be a constitutional scholar, and attempt to base any number of your inane positions on its interpretation, (as evidenced by numerous challenges to your comments here over time), I hardly think that gives you any insight into what I read or don’t read.
It’s laughable that you offer the Constitution as your fundamental premise on eliminating the EPA or any other issue, but forget it ever existed as your conservative cohorts in Washington continue the Bush administration’s aim to misinterpret and erode individual rights. (How about warrantless searches and torture?)
And since you mentioned the fears of our Forefathers, consider that John Adams said, “But a Constitution of Government once changed from Freedom, can never be restored. Liberty, once lost, is lost forever.” So, Mr. Molitor, how much have we lost that can never be restored under your protectionist themes?
No, I’m not a constitutional scholar, but one thing was clear: In the Preamble, health, happiness and general prosperity stood on the same grounds as providing for national defense. We now spend $861B for national defense vs. (your cited) $18B on the EPA protecting public health and the environment. I think the $18B is a pretty good deal.
@GFA
So you like a $9 billion dollar federal agency budget and an 18 thousand employee federal agency organization that has far exceeded its original jurisdictions as set out by Nixon’s EPA creation – and continues to grow as fast as the cancer you site in your comment?
You ask my next idea? I’d say go read the Constitution (assuming you never have from your posts). Your collectivist, centralized ideas on government are exactly what the framing fathers feared.
Mr. Molitor’s recommendation to hold companies accountable to people at a local level rather than to impose federal environmental controls completely distorts the intent of environmental protection and public health. He should know that environmental pollution (air and water) is boundless, and thus does and could affect population groups some distance away from the pollution source. This is why, for example, that federal law requires monitoring wells where landfills are located to ensure that the subsurface drinking water isn’t contaminated – water that is destined to be consumed.
Mr. Molitor would rather have people get sick and maybe even succumb to terminal illness, and then force a class action lawsuit for a remedy. No! What is in place, appropriate and needed is environmental law and regulations to prevent the problem from happening and endangering the public health. Next idea, Mr. Molitor?
The ‘cradle of civilization’ corresponds pretty well to the Holocene Climatic Optimum when
temperatures were much warmer than the present, yet not only did our ancestors survive,
apparently, they thrived.
One way we know that the issue is emotional rather than rational is that the discussion is
only of risks and not of benefits.
Consider
- we all benefit from inexpensive energy ( which enhances our productivity and enriches our standard of living )
- increased CO2 increases plant growth and crop yield ( no carbohydrates without carbon dioxide )
- everything you eat today is likely dependent on carbon dioxide
- increased carbon dioxide reduces the amount of water that plants need
- ( because they lose less water through stomates which don’t have to open as wide when CO2 is plentiful ).
- more energy is used to heat than is used to cool homes, presumably, increased temperatures reduce energy use
- increased temperatures would increase the growing season and reduce crop losses
- increased temperatures would increased areas of agriculture
- increased precipitation would help fill reservoirs
- the name ‘flu’ comes from Italian ‘Influenza di fredo’ or ‘Influence of the cold’ because is a cold season disease
- human deaths are much higher in the cold season and much lower in the warm season
The ‘Clean Air Act’ was good, but guess what – It has succeeded at all its goals!
That means ‘No Mas!’
CO2 is NOT a pollutant, we don’t need ‘necessarily skyrocketing’ energy rates, and
we don’t need the Orwellian ‘Green Police’ coming into our homes!
@artiofab
First of all, allow me to disabuse you of the notion that you can separate politics from science, especially science that has been funded by interested parties who employ lab-coaters to deliver the report-findings they are paying for. The IPCC cover-up is the tip of the iceberg (yes, there still are icebergs).
Secondly, actual science is of no importance to the EPA. If the EPA really cared about human life, it would not have a long history of banning beneficial chemicals such as DDT and other pesticides that protect humans against a laundry list of transmittable diseases such as malaria, dengue fever, yellow fever, and so forth.
In truth, the EPA threatens the economy and our lives in so many ways it is difficult to know where to point first.
That said, my narrative thrust in my column has to do with the role of “federalizing environmental issues” at the expense of local problems being locally solved. The EPA is a Leviathan monster growing out of control and taking control away from states and municipalities to solve problems on their own through our judicial system.
This is the crossroads where politics and science meet and are not separate as you suggest.
As i see it the EPA is not a bad institution… Nor are companies perfect. They are all well intentioned broadly speeking. But the road to hell is paved with good intentions. In reality, I think very good and objective cost benefit analysis is needed to validate, verify and provide uncertanty quantification of the EPA rulings and private sector claims too.
Now keep in mind that there is a multiplier effect here. So if we regulate an industry…like lets say the steel industry out of existance or the oil and gas industry…then all the other support industries and their communities are negatively impacted as well. Those impacts depend on the industry. So, lots of folks on this board do not like the extractive industries…Well if you reduce the employment in tht industry in NM by 1,000 workers…you probably reduce other workers by 2,000. Those 2,000 are mostly public sector since that is a larger part of the NM work force. Now if there is a negative impact…then regulation can have a favorable impact as well. Hey I like clean air and water. Who doesn’t. Just think of the consequences prior to enacting the rule. We now mandate clean energy for a % of our electric power. We now pay more for this luxury, and have built redundant systems at a huge cost to implement this strategy. too bad we just didn’t go with natural gas or nuclear. France has..
artiofab, as a paleoclimatologist, let me add some context to your assertions. First of all, 386 or 388 ppm is a very small amount, that is yet to be scientifically proven as the primary factor driving climate change on earth, now or at any time in the last 4.5 billion years. And having worked extensively with ice cores from the polar regions during my grad school research, I can also tell you the systematic and random errors associated with the extraction and measurement of CO2 from those cores is quite large, thus saying 388 is higher than at anytime in the past 400,000 or 740,000 years (when measured CO2 routinely gets above 300 ppm) is not scienficially accurate within the error ranges.
I will also point out that we have good data for many hundred million years of earth’s CO2 variations, which are routinely in the thousands of PPM, without man around, and thus using a small, unrepresentative slice of a few hundred thousand is cherry picking your data to the extreme, apparently based on a political agenda, not science.
And to assert that the 97% of the CO2 on earth which is due to natural factors is absorbed, adsorbed, and otherwise taken care of by the earth, while the tiny 3% is not and out to do Tyndall mischief, is ridiculous. The oceans, soils, plants, and other CO2 sinks have no way to discriminating between natural and manmade CO2 when uptake occurs, and we know how frequently, and many times drastically, CO2 bounces up and down as we see in all the paleo data in the earth’s record. Perhaps you think the processes that are responsible for the many hundreds of thousands of feet of limestone on the earth that have successfully sequestered CO2 through the ages are now somehow inoperable? Remember the law of uniformitarianism, or do you deny that as well?
Mr. Molitor, I don’t mean to intrude on your politics, but you started intruding on science, so as a scientist, I have to intrude back. I pick on two of your sentences because I think they contained the majority of your errors.
CO2 represents a mere 386 parts per million of the Earth’s atmosphere.
You make a small factual mistake here: Mauna Loa observatory readings of atmospheric CO2 is at 388.92 for October of 2011. But that’s not an error I’m worried by.
What I am worried by is your assumption that this ‘small’ amount is not a big concern. Current concentrations of atmCO2 is 25% higher than we can definitively say has existed in the past 400,000 years, a value which currently increases by about 1% every four years. This concentration is arguably higher than CO2 values have been in the past few million years, and we can be pretty confident that it’s the highest value in the past 740,000 years.
We know that CO2 has a relationship with global climate. So a “mere” 388 ppm is a value 25% higher than what we know has naturally occurred in the past three-quarters of a million years. Maybe this increase in CO2 equates to a climate 25% warmer than in the past, maybe it only means only 5%, we don’t know yet. But slowing down the rate of increase sounds like a really good idea, as we are getting further and further from known climatic variability.
Humans are responsible for 3 percent if its generation; Mother Nature produces the other 97 percent
This is a disingenuous attack on the science behind attempts to control human carbon input, by attempting to, once again, argue that human activity is insignificant. Everyone who works on the carbon cycle knows that the majority of CO2 in the oceans, atmosphere, and biosphere at any one time is naturally-produced. However, human activities release an additional amount of CO2 from a source that is not commonly releasing CO2: nature does not drill for petroleum or mine for coal and then burn billions of tons of these substances.
The majority of naturally-produced CO2 is absorbed back into the biosphere and the oceans. A minority of human-produced CO2 is also absorbed back into the biosphere and oceans. However, these two reservoirs have limitations (particularly in a world in which forest mass is being globally decreased at high rates) so the majority of human-produced CO2 goes into the atmosphere, where it helps increase the power of the Tyndall/greenhouse effect.
– and the EPA wants to regulate ALL if it!
I don’t know if you were being serious with this suggestion. If you were, you should be aware that no one, even the most “alarmist” of climate change avoidance advocates, suggests regulating trees. We can achieve significant reductions in carbon emissions with current technology, and we might be able to reduce atmospheric carbon levels to a less climatically-unknown level (say, 350 ppm) with future carbon sequestration technology.
…or we can continue driving our climate into increasingly unfamiliar territory. Maybe one day the free market will finally figure out that doing things that lead to unknown consequences is a bad idea, but until then it seems like governmental regulation is the only way to not make the world more difficult for human civilization.
Quit painting the EPA as a bad thing. Don’t see that any large polluting corporations are doing anything to curb pollution unless they are forced into it. What sort of compensation would coal polluting plants give to their neighbors who have respiratory issues? You are not thinking clearly on this issue Mr. Molitor. Perhaps the government needs to tax the polluters and force them from passing off these taxes to consumers. We need something to level the playing field on this issue.
Republicans are always harping on the legacy of debt we are leaving to our children. Well, debt and money are nothing more than human contrivances whereas, our environmental legacy is real.
EPA’s internal Clear Air Act ‘watch list’
http://www.iwatchnews.org/2011/11/03/7280/epas-internal-clear-air-act-watch-list
The names and locations of 464 facilities on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s internal Clean Air Act “watch list” includes serious or chronic violators of the act that have faced no formal enforcement action. Until now, the list has not been made public.
The list helps the EPA identify “recidivist and chronically noncomplying facilities whose violations have not been formally addressed by either the state or the EPA.
The Center for Public Integrity’s iWatch News and NPR obtained the July and September versions of the Clean Air Act watch list through a Freedom of Information Act request.
Meanwhile, the EPA acknowledged that the list may exclude facilities that deserve to be on it — “particularly if violation data has not been reported properly by the state,” it said in a fact sheet prepared for iWatch News and NPR. And all but 5 percent of the facilities on the latest version of the watch list, dated September, were classified as “high priority violators” — sites regulators believe need urgent attention, an analysis of EPA enforcement records by iWatch News and NPR shows. Not every high priority violator has been formally found to have broken rules.
This watch list is just one of several maintained by the EPA. For the last seven years, agency insiders have compiled such lists of violators of the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act and the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act. Common denominator: Facilities on the lists are those that appear to have escaped scrutiny by regulators.
Still under wraps: specific reasons for each facility’s inclusion on the list. The EPA deleted the information from lists provided to iWatch News and NPR, saying disclosure could impair methods used in law enforcement investigations or prosecutions.
The watch list is a snapshot of facilities that the EPA determines have not been subject to a state or federal enforcement action within 270 days, or nine months, of the discovery of a Clean Air Act violation. Between July and September, 81 facilities were removed from the list. The EPA fact sheet describes the list as a “management tool used to facilitate discussion between EPA, state and local agencies on some enforcement matters” — though not necessarily a catalog of sites that pose the greatest risk to public health or the environment.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/the-center-for-public-integrity/many-americans-left-behin_b_1079251.html
@lealeith
I understand the unmeasureable aspects of pollution compensation you point out as quite a challenge. Let’s take regulating CO2 as a “pollutant” for example. Labeled as a “greenhouse gas,” in the eyes of the EPA it is an “endangerment” to the health of humanity in general and Americans in particular.
Yet, CO2 is as vital to all life on planet Earth in the same way as oxygen. It is what plants consume in order to grow, much as oxygen is essential for life among living creatures that, in turn, are dependent on vegetation, crops, for their substance. It’s neat little cycle that has existed since life emerged on Earth.
If the EPA gains the power to regulate CO2, it will have the power to regulate the activities of every individual and the entire economy of the nation. Is this what you want? CO2 represents a mere 386 parts per million of the Earth’s atmosphere. Humans are responsible for 3 percent if its generation; Mother Nature produces the other 97 percent – and the EPA wants to regulate ALL if it! Again, I ask, is this what you want: an even more bloated federal agency to enforce more bloated regulations that exceed its original charter?
Molitor, are you thick or what? What local institution do you propose to be powerful enough to be able to levy fines and get money from multi-nationals with hundreds of lawyers ?
It is just such nonsense as yours that gave rise to the EPA in the first place. Those thousands of government attorneys
are one reason the wrongwingers have found it necessary to subvert and plant sedition against the U.S. government
this last forty-plus years.
My, how much cheaper it would be for a local oil company to contain oil spills…or a manure processing plant! if it only had to buy local legal system representatives. What a cost savings! Not that anything like that could ever happen here in New Mexico.
But it would be cheaper. Probably the way to start would be to obtain the services first of a mouthpiece. Go ahead, write another article.
As an environmental advocate, I’ve ALWAYS believed that externalities need to be incorporated into the cost of doing business and, in accounting for externalities, we can reduce (but not eliminate) some regulations.
However, a couple of key problems with relying largely on accounting for externalities:
1) in some cases, compensating everyone affected by pollution is impractical or impossible: how do you allocate the relative costs of emitting carbon pollution, for example? I’ve always been a stronger supporter of carbon taxes than cap-and-trade (it’s aimed more at reducing externalities than on regulation), which–with appropriate implementation–can be both revenue-neutral and progressively applied. The problem, of course, is that compensation will still be required to future generations for the harm already caused by climate change–even if we can somehow manage to reverse the trend right now.
A more common situation, however, is one where the impacts are less global. For example, in the case of mercury in fish: how do you compensate every fish consumer or pregnant woman? If they choose not to eat fish, they’re sacrificing; if they choose to eat fish, they’re either affected by the mercury, and/or they’re paying a higher price for the fish because of reduced supply as a result of mercury contamination. Ditto the visiting anglers, who might be expending money fishing in our state, but can’t consume the fish they catch because of mercury warnings. How to compensate them?
2) how to deal with the fact that many companies–faced with the need to compensate for their pollution–simply go bankrupt or disappear? the legacy of the uranium boom in New Mexico is groundwater contaminated to the point that it simply cannot be reclaimed, or it is prohibitively expensive to do so. how to compensate future generations for the lost opportunity of that water? most of the companies responsible have disappeared, although their principals have moved on to other ventures–many in exactly the same field. I’d be ecstatic to hear that the author feels that principals in a company that can’t afford to pay appropriate compensation should be held personally responsible for paying it as a non-dischargeable debt (meaning they can’t simply declare personal bankruptcy and move on). Or companies could be required to post adequate bonding/insurance to cover the ENTIRE costs of clean-up and compensation. Either way, this system would require quite a few regulations–the very kind to which the author seems to object.
The fact is, we DO need to do a better job of accounting for externalities (local impact fees for development are an example of a somewhat-successful system for doing so). But we will always need baseline regulations to protect against activities for which there is no adequate compensation (cancer, asthma or death, for example).
“I wholeheartedly disagree with the article’s real premise – dismantling the EPA or painting it as an evil govt agency part of the bigger discourse of “gov’t being the problem.”
@Beco
Yes, I am for reducing the size of the federal government. After all, it’s broke and we need to reduce government spending before we join Greece in budgetary purgatory. Accordingly, I am for reducing the size of the EPA and returning its authority back to its original intent. Richard Nixon created the EPA in 1970 by executive order. There was no vote in Congress. Today the EPA has an annual budget of $9 billion and some 18,000 full-time employees.
The real environmental debate sharpens down to (1) how stringently should regulations be enforced, (2) who should do the enforcing – the EPA, state governments, environmental organizations through third-party lawsuits (the scenario I describe in my column), or (3) some combination of the three?
Many comments on this column seek (whether they are aware of it or not) to federalize environmental issues. I disagree. I think local problems are best solved locally. Since its inception, the EPA has expanded its original intent (authorized powers) given it to ensure clean air and water and has never ceased to seek expanded powers.
So, to answer your accusation that I see the EPA “as an evil govt agency part of the bigger discourse of “gov’t being the problem” – I would say to you, the EPA is yet another example of Congress abrogating its constitutional responsibilities and allowing “regulatory federal agencies” to be created to take care “of the problems” that may better be solved at the local level through the courts rather than through a bloated federal bureaucracy.
To start with, throwing out the Koch brothers in these discussions is intellectual laziness, almost as much as just posting a bunch of links, as if that proves anything (it doesn’t).
In my experience with EPA and the regulatory development process, the biggest challenge was that the agency normally lacked a good technical understanding of the industry it was regulating nor of the economic impact of new regulations. I do think there are many intelligent and well meaning people involved, however too often the results come from the bureacratic need to do something (anything) rather than an identified and well understood problem.
In orginizations like EPA/NMED, etc., enforcement/inspections in regard to existing laws, is the hard, unrewarding work, much better to go after new ground.
Here is another real pollution situation in Ponca City, Oklahoma.
http://www.npr.org/2011/11/07/141990498/powdery-pollution-coats-oklahoma-town
So what is the answer – less regulation? That is a joke and an insult to Americans, who are victims of pollution!
” Environmentalists almost always support laws that punish companies but don’t actually protect people. ”
Yet, Mr. Molitor has not provide on scintilla of evidence to support such a patently false and absurd statement. He has provided nothing but a weakly constructed, meritless collection of words that have no foundation in fact, evidence or rhetorical support. Perhaps he could bother to provide us with at least one example to support his claim rather than just throw out a claim which would not survive scrutiny from a freshman debate team.
The EPA protects us from people like the Koch Brothers who pollute our environment. Watch this video:
http://kochbrothersexposed.com/cancer/
This is tragic. Mr. Molitor talks of “externalities.” However, let’s speak about real people and situations.
I see the word “factual” in the host’s instructions below, yet no facts supporting the publications above.
It is not a generality that people are a part of the whole earth’s ecology. If we make a habit of considering this in our every act, perhaps we can reverse the dilemma we’ve caused.
Well said Mr. Molitor, there are numerous problems with our current approach to pollution regulation by our inept, incompetent, and politically motivated government. They always ignore that companies don’t pay for the high costs of these regs, the consumers do. But, since the government is very good at lying and concealing this fact, the typical free market economic signals to the consumers are suppressed and rendered ineffective thus allowing irrational economic behaviour and the resulting economic problems. The lack of rational price signals due to the regs, mandates, subsidies, etc. all lead to many of the economic problems we see today. Another problem is the fact the EPA and our state’s environment department (under the Richardson regime, so we have hope it will improve), go after the wrong “pollution” and ignore real pollution. The current politically motivated witch hunt, without solid scientific evidence and facts, on CO2 rather than O3, Hg, Pb, SOx, NOx, etc.allows real pollution to increase and spread while they attack fossil fuels for CO2. Thus we make no progress on actual public health issues at the expense of a left wing political agenda to destroy fossil fuel companies due to imaginary pollution.
I wonder if Molitor wrote this piece or just forwarded it from a Koch brothers think tank. The problem is he makes a false assumption leading to a false conclusion. Govt regulatory agencies don’t just collect taxes in the form of fines and spend the money on themselves as he implies. Rather they create rules to fix a problem and use fines as a mechanism to ensure that those creating the problem change their ways.
Ask the people in the Northeast US if the reduction in acid rain forced by EPA regulation of the power industry hasn’t had a positive economic benefit.
Ask the people in the Midwest if the Clean Water Act has had positive economic benefit. Remember when the Cuyahoga and Chicago Rivers regularly caught fire?
Ask the people alive today because our food supply chain is regulated and therefore clean and safe.
Ask the people not fighting skin cancer because the ozone hole is closing due to regulation of hazardous chemicals.
Ask the kids who are not stunted becasue lead was removed from gasoline and paint by govt regulation……The list could go on and on.
The current system certainly needs strengthening but Tom’s suggestion, if it was possible to implement, would destroy it and not replace it with anything workable; but would cause great financial gain for thousands of lawyers.
While I tend to agree with the one of the points of Molitor’s article on having environmental regulations more directly benefit communities harmed by pollution-prone industries, I wholeheartedly disagree with the article’s real premise – dismantling the EPA or painting it as an evil govt agency part of the bigger discourse of “gov’t being the problem.” We need direct govt action sometimes – in protecting the environment the “average Joe” benefits from having a body regulating what is occurring in the field of clean air and clean water (somehow Im not very optimistic that polluters will be very intrinsically motivated or self-conscious to write out worthwhile checks to people harmed by the company’s industrial activities).