There are a lot of ways to approach environmental regulations. Which of the following sounds more reasonable?
1) Identify the amount of pollution that can be safely dispersed into the environment, limit industrial activity to that amount, and otherwise leave industry free to adopt the technologies and practices to meet that requirement.
2) Create uniform limits for all areas, industries, and scenarios, apply those limits to every individual piece of equipment, mandate that industries adopt only particular government-approved technologies (regardless of the technical and economic effectiveness of other technologies), and require that each piece of equipment be measured at least hourly for review by the authorities?
Most people would go with the first. This is exactly what the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) – the State’s equivalent of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) – does with its “flexible permitting” system, which has had great success in improving environmental quality within the State while enabling the economy to flourish.
It clearly takes humans as the standard of value, balancing people’s need for industry and the wealth it creates with our desire to live with clean air and water.
Yet, California and the federal EPA prefer the second model, and the EPA has even federalized the permitting process in almost 50 facilities statewide. Why? This approach to environmental quality creates tremendous regulatory and compliance costs, which must ultimately be borne by consumers in the form of fewer and more expensive goods and services.
But every consumer must also be a producer – fewer goods, fewer productive jobs. It is rather instructive to compare Texas’ and California’s unemployment rates and cost of living.
We’ve only just skimmed the surface, though, because this comparison only deals with known costs. Every policy also comes with unknowable costs that can only rarely be estimated.
Take the BP oil spill. A revolutionary water processing machine, developed by Kevin Costner, can scrub out over 99% of the oil from contaminated water. Better than just cleaning the water, it salvages the oil that would otherwise be wasted, BBC reports that it can process 210,000 gallons a day, and it’s cost effective.
Under EPA regulations, though, it is illegal to use. It’s not approved technology, and never could be: 99% isn’t good enough for the EPA. One would think that the device would be an asset for environmental catastrophe cleanup. The device is only legal now that disaster has struck and government regulators are in a panic about how to fix it.
It gets worse. Emboldened by a 2007 Supreme Court case and at the direction of President Obama, the EPA is now going to regulate carbon dioxide under the Clean Air Act in the name of enviro-stasis.
Whatever the merits or demerits of the science behind climate change and CO2, the Clean Air Act is not the appropriate legal authority. Set aside for a moment the fact that CO2 is not a pollutant (it causes no harm when ingested, even at elevated levels).
The Clean Air Act mandates the same regulatory system noted above for all sources greater than 250 tons, which includes most industries, some small businesses, and even private homes. Those same costly regulations now apply to most economic activity in the country.
Currently, the EPA is illegally ignoring anything under 25,000 tons, probably because they recognize the economic damage caused by their regulations and don’t want to cause too much harm. No matter – they will be forced to regulate those smaller sources by court orders in the wake of pending lawsuits by environmental groups.
California and the federal government have imposed regulatory regimes that cause incalculable economic damage and stifle innovation, when competing regulatory regimes have achieved similar pollution reductions with far less cost. Their regulations fail any rational cost-benefit test.
But this is really not about BP, carbon dioxide, or any other environmental issue. It is about a political culture that not only authorizes, but encourages, ambitious “do-good” bureaucrats to take control of the lives of everyone else. In the name of “the environment” or the ever-vacuous “public welfare,” they propose to dictate to citizens what we can and cannot produce, what we can and cannot consume, what we can and cannot do.
It’s time to take a look at more than just the particulars of a policy. We should be thinking about the moral principles that formed the foundation of our society. They include, first and foremost, freedom: the freedom to live as we choose, to work as we choose, to think as we choose. And that requires a repudiation of any policy or person that presumes to manage our lives in any manner whatsoever.