National Center for Policy Analysis

MONTH IN REVIEW

Environmental Policy
July, 1996

IS ENVIRONMENTALISM A RELIGION?

Secretary of Interior Bruce Babbitt claims that the Endangered Species Act reflects a "plan of God," quotes the Bible and rejects "mankind's expansion at the expense of Creation." Babbitt is an example of the increasingly religious, apocalyptic, even messianic tone of some environmentalists.

Moderate environmentalists argue that environmental protection is justified because it benefits humanity -- for example, plant and animal species of the rain forests may provide cures to major diseases. They even claim that environmentalism is economically beneficial.

But economists have found that the cost of Environmental Protection Agency regulations, for instance, outweigh the benefits: even the EPA agreed in 1993 that the Clean Water Act provides few direct economic benefits, although it imposes costs of $50 billion a year.

Rather than rational arguments for their case, other environmentalists have adopted religious themes -- Judeo-Christian and animist -- including humanity's guilt and the need for salvation. For example:

Environmentalism would only succeed when it had a religious foundation, concluded Lynn White in a famous 1967 Science article.
Roger Kennedy, director of the National Park Service, declared in 1994 that "wilderness is a religious concept" that should be a "part of our religious life."
Paul Watson, a founder of Greenpeace, said, "We, the human species, have become a viral epidemic to the earth" and the "AIDS of the earth."

Critics contend that it is not a coincidence that the green movement today is strongest in Protestant countries like Germany, Sweden and Holland. And they question how, if environmentalism is essentially religious in nature, it can be taught in the schools and supported by the government.

Source: Robert H. Nelson, "Bruce Babbitt, Pipeline to the Almighty," Weekly Standard, June 24, 1996.

SCIENTISTS DISAGREE ON GLOBAL WARMING

Doubts, disagreements and contradictory data abound in the latest report on possible global warming issued by the International Panel on Climate Change. The report's executive summary and suggested policy options -- which have been heavily criticized even by some IPCC members -- assert that humans are causing global warming and the world's governments must spend billions and take drastic action immediately to avoid catastrophe.

Proponents of the theory of global warming stake their theories on two bits of evidence and a computer model.

First, ground level measurements of global mean temperature indicate that the earth has warmed between 0.3 and 0.6 degrees Celsius in the last century.
Second, atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) -- a primary greenhouse gas without which most animal and plant life would not exist -- has increased by approximately 25 per cent in the last century and a half.

Thus, the global climate change theory blames warming on an increase of CO2 in the atmosphere and recommends it be immediately reduced -- or calamities ranging from floods to crop failure will befall us all.

The executive summary predicts that absent massive action, we can expect an increase in temperature somewhere between 0.8 and 3.5 degrees Celsius over the next 100 years.
This figure is well below the level of warming forecast just four years ago.
In fact, with every new report, the range of warming falls.

Even if the current figure is correct, the increase is well within the natural range of known temperature variation over the last 15,000 years. Most of earth's plant life evolved in a much warmer CO2-filled atmosphere and any warming would primarily affect night-time temperatures.

There is little evidence to link increased CO2 with any temperature increase this century, since most of the warming occurred before the 1940s and the widespread use of automobiles. While some scientists are proclaiming impending disaster, others of at least equal repute say the evidence of global warming is questionable at best. And even some of climate change theory's foremost advocates admit that there is nothing we need do now that we can't just as well do ten years hence.

Source: Former Gov. Pete du Pont (National Center for Policy Analysis), "Warm Up Eco Noises," Washington Times, July 7, 1996.

IS RECYCLING GARBAGE?

Millions of Americans sort their garbage, avoid disposable packaging and feel guilty about waste. But many experts think that the cost of recycling outweighs its benefits and that Americans are actually quite efficient. For example:

The typical household in Mexico City produces one-third more garbage than an American household, chiefly because Mexicans buy fresh food in bulk and throw away large portions that are unused, spoiled or stale.
Lightweight plastic packaging and foam make produce less likely to spoil, and require less energy to manufacture and transport than cardboard or paper.
A typical McDonald's is so efficient, it discards less than two ounces of garbage for each customer served, less than the waste from a typical meal at home.
Juice cartons take half the landfill space occupied by glass bottles, and 12 plastic grocery bags fit the space used by one paper bag.

In 1986 about 10 percent of solid waste was recycled at little cost to consumers or taxpayers. Today, about 25 percent is recycled, but achieving that level has been costly. Most states initially set even higher goals, such as 50 percent in New York and California , 60 percent in New Jersey and 70 percent in Rhode Island -- but none achieved them.

At today's prices, curbside recycling programs typically add 15 percent to the cost of waste disposal.
And in New York City collecting a ton of recyclable items is three times more expensive than collecting a ton of garbage -- $200 more per ton than it would cost to bury the material in a landfill.

While recycling does sometimes save energy and reduce pollutants because less paper, glass and metal are manufactured, there may be more cost-effective ways to achieve the same goals.

You would have to use a ceramic mug 1,000 times before the energy consumed per use was equal to using polystyrene cups -- and if the mug broke after only 900 washings, it would have been more efficient to use 900 plastic cups.
Requiring 5 cent bottle and can deposits may cost $500 for every ton of cans and bottles collected, but states like Texas and Washington have proven that the most efficient way to reduce litter is to hire roadside clean-up crews.

Where will we put all the garbage? America today has more landfill space available than it did 10 years ago, and if the nation keeps generating garbage at current rates for 1,000 years, the garbage would only fill a landfill 100 yards deep, and 35 miles square.

Source: John Tierney, "Recycling Garbage," New York Times Magazine, June 30, 1996. U.S.

IMPOSES ENVIRONMENTAL AGENDA ABROAD

American environmental groups are using U.S. foreign aid to undermine market economies abroad and put American businesses at a competitive disadvantage.

In Indonesia, for example, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) gave more than $1.3 million to the Wahana Lingkungan Hidup Indonesia (WALHI) -- the local chapter of Friends of the Earth. USAID claims that it is promoting "democratic values;" its grants make up virtually all of WALHI's operating budget.

For the past two years, WALHI has campaigned against New Orleans-based Freeport McMoRan Copper & Gold, accusing the mining company of polluting an Indonesian river, destroying crops and inciting military attacks on civilians.

In fact, Freeport spends millions to repair land littered with mine wastes, planting grass and crops.
It even built a $2 million lab devoted to testing local fish, water and plants for contamination.
It provides well-paying jobs and helps finance education and health care in backward areas.
There is no evidence of collusion between Freeport and the Indonesian military.

Through U.S. environmental activists, WALHI lobbied the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC), a federal agency that promotes business abroad by insuring companies against the risk of nationalization. OPIC cancelled Freeport's $100 million policy. To placate WALHI and OPIC, Freeport agreed to put $15 million annually into a slush fund for WALHI and fund a $100 million trust for "environmental remediation." U.S. activists' involvement in overseas aid programs began in the 1970s. To settle a 1974 suit by the Environmental Defense Fund and the Natural Resources Defense Council, USAID began assessing the environmental impact of every overseas project it finances.

Today, it is imposing notions of "sustainable development" -- a code word for a subsistence economy -- on undeveloped countries. It even set up the Center for the Environment, budgeted at $79 million in 1995, which gives jobs to activists.

Other U.S. companies have been stung by U.S. environmentalists overseas. For example, Southern Peru Copper, controlled by New York-based Asarco, was sued in Texas state courts by Partners for the Americas for allegedly polluting the air above Ilo, Peru. Partners gets more than half of its $8 million annual budget from the USAID.

Source: Brigid McMenamin, "Environmental Imperialism," Forbes, May 20, 1996.

SAVING THE PLANET

Lester Brown and the WorldWatch Institute have predicted global calamity for 13 years in their annual State of the World. Although their predictions haven't panned out, WorldWatch is one of the environmental movement's most quoted think tanks.

Brown and Worldwatch seize on every change in the weather as evidence of climate change and ecological disaster. For example:

In a 1967 article in Science, Brown concluded that food consumption had overtaken production, and in 1996 predicts spreading scarcity -- despite the explosive growth in agricultural productivity and decades of declining prices.
In 1979 Brown predicted "oil price rises in the 80s likely to dwarf those of the 70s" -- before oil prices fell and production expanded worldwide.
The hurricanes of 1995 are seen as evidence of climate change -- although 1916, 1933 and 1969 were also rough years and 1991 to 1994 were the calmest on record.
Humanity is "experiencing an epidemic of epidemics" and a "growing burden of infectious diseases" -- ignoring lengthening life expectancy in most countries.
"A sustainable economy is one with a stable climate," despite evidence the climate has never been naturally stable over the millenia.

Brown's prescriptions include a mobilization comparable to World War II and a "transformation of individual priorities and values." The State of the World 1996 calls for population policies like China's, that "balance the reproductive rights of the current generation with survival rights of the next generation" -- despite the evidence those policies include infanticide, forced abortions and sterilizations and starvation of children in orphanages.

Source: Vincent Carroll, "Reclcying Doom and Gloom," Weekly Standard, June 24, 1996.

RECYCLING WOES IN THE BIG APPLE

Recycling "is not a religion," says New York City Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, who has denounced the legal requirement that the city recycle 25 percent of its residential garbage as "absurd" and "irresponsible."

New York missed the latest court deadline for reaching the 25 percent recycling requirement. Later this year the city will reduce recycling pickups (which require separate garbage trucks) from weekly to biweekly.

Residential recycling in New York peaked in 1993 at a rate of 15 percent, and today stands at about 14 percent or 2,200 tons a day.
Recycling costs the city $50 million to $100 million annually, but Giuliani cut the 1995 budget for recycling by $29 million.
The volatile market for recyclable goods causes big swings in the programÕs cost; for example, last year newsprint brought the city $160 a ton, while this year the city pays $5 a ton just to get rid of it.

Under a 1989 state law, the city was required to reach the 25 percent recycling goal by 1991. The Natural Resources Defense Council has sued to force the city to meet the goal, which has been upheld in four court decisions over the past five years.

Source: Vivian S. Toy, "Giuliani Assails Recycling Goals in Law," New York Times, July 3, 1996.
NO THREAT FOUND FROM RADON GAS

A new study by the Finnish Center for Radiation and Nuclear Safety concludes that "radon exposure does not appear to be an important cause of lung cancer." It joins other studies that have found no increased risk of lung cancer due to radon gas seeping from the earth into homes.

The Environmental Protection Agency has claimed that residential radon is responsible for 10 percent of the 150,000 lung cancer cases in the United States annually. In the 1980s, it began recommending that homes be tested, and that if the radon level was higher than 4 picocuries (a measure of radiation) per liter of air, homeowners should install additional vents.

But EPA estimates were based on studies of hard rock miners exposed to much higher levels of radon gas -- from which the EPA projected the danger at the much lower exposure levels in homes.
The study in Finland compared lung cancer rates with residential radon gas exposure, but found no increased risk for residents exposed to as much as two and one half times the EPA's recommended maximum.
By comparison, outdoor air contains about 0.5 picocuries of radon per liter (which is one part radon for every two trillion parts of air), and the limit for mine workers' exposure was set at 100 picocuries in the 1960s.

Since the Environmental Protection Agency first issued its radon warning:

Americans have spent about $400 million testing for radon and renovating their homes.
About 11 million homeowners have tested their homes, at $10 to $20 a test.
About 300,000 homeowners have found radon levels high enough to renovate their homes at a cost of $1,000 to $2,000 per home.

Radon, a product of the decay of uranium and radium, is a naturally-occurring carcinogen in high doses. The 1988 Indoor Radon Abatement Act declared the long-term policy of the U.S. is to reduce indoor radon levels to that of the outside air -- which some scientists estimated would cost $1 trillion.

Sources: Associated Press, "New Study Questions Radon Danger In Houses," New York Times, July 17, 1996; Leonard A. Cole, "Element of Risk: The Politics of Radon," (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).

EPA RULE ENDANGERS WATER SUPPLIES

Chlorine, which public health experts say is the most effective killer of bacteria in water supplies, is under attack by the Environmental Protection Agency. The EPA has proposed rules that would require local water systems to eliminate the chlorinating process known as pre-disinfection.

About three-fourths of all U.S. drinking water is treated with chlorine, while most of the rest is treated with a combination of chlorine and ammonia.
Unlike alternative methods of disinfecting water, such as ozonation or ultraviolet light, chlorine keeps on killing bacteria all the way to the faucet.
Eliminating pre-disinfection would cost local governments an additional $4 billion a year and might force small water systems to abandon chlorination completely, according to some public health officials.

Reduction of chlorine in public water supplies in Peru, following the recommendation of the EPA and some environmental groups, made the water supplies susceptible to infection by cholera, a bacterial infection that has killed ten thousand people in Latin America over the last five years, according to the Pan American Health Organization.

The EPA proposals are designed to reduce the risk of cancer from chlorine by-products -- although the increased cancer risk is negligible, even in studies that have found any increased risk at all.

Source: Michael Fumento, "Dirty Water," Reason, May 1996.

RECYCLING TRENDY, BUT OFTEN COSTLY

New evidence suggests that sometimes simply throwing garbage away is more environmentally friendly, financially prudent and safer for human health than following the omnipresent fashion of recycling.

An article by John Tierny, "Recycling is Garbage," which appeared in the New York Times Magazine, challenges the current recycling wisdom. While recycling occasionally makes economic sense (aluminum cans, automobile tires), it is more often a pointless and costly exercise.

Tierny calculates that it costs more than $3,000 to recycle one ton of scrap metal, glass and plastic in New York City.
And one would have to use a ceramic coffee cup 1,000 times before it would be less environmentally expensive than a throw-away polystyrene cup.
Today, about 25 percent of solid waste is recycled compared to about 10 percent 10 years ago, and far below the 50 percent to 70 percent goals originally set in many communities.
At today's prices, curbside recycling programs typically add 15 percent to the cost of waste disposal.

A number of governments are starting to rethink recycling. New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani recently called New York's recycling goals "absurd" and "impossible."

Sometimes mandates to recycle and use recycled products create worse environmental and health hazards than the problems they were meant to solve.

Government-mandated recycling of newsprint requires de-inking -- involving the use of toxic chemicals that create worse disposal problems.
A road in Washington state built with recycled tires had to be closed after it began smoking and eventually burst into flames.

Critics charge that legislated mandates for the use and purchase of recycled products have wasted taxpayers' money, cost consumers more, both at the point of purchase and by limiting product options, dampened the development of resource-saving technological innovations and on occasion harmed the environment.

Technology, they contend, has made it possible to use resources without danger of exhausting them. And as for the space necessary to dispose of solid waste by traditional methods, garbage generated at current rates for the next 1,000 years could be contained in a landfill just 100 yards deep and 35 miles square.

Source: Former Gov. Pete du Pont (National Center for Policy Analysis), "Rubbish Bin of Recycling," Washington Times, July 20, 1996. Note: For related information, the Daily Policy Digest link to NCPA's Environment Index is http://www.public policy.org/~ncpa/pi/enviro/envdex.html

RADON NO THREAT AFTER ALL

The Environmental Protection Agency needlessly scared millions of Americans and wasted millions of dollars in a radon scare. Now it turns out that radon gas at household levels is harmless. That's the conclusion of a study from Finland that was reprinted in the government's own Journal of the National Cancer Institute.

Numerous other studies have reached similar conclusions:

No link can be found between household levels of radon and lung cancer of any type.
In a study of more than 400 U.S. counties, a University of Pittsburgh radiation physicist found that persons with the most radon exposure had the lowest cancer rates.
Major studies in Missouri and Canada concluded that lung cancer levels were not elevated in households with high levels of radon.
Likewise, in populous areas with high lung cancer rates -- including New York City, San Francisco, England and China -- radon levels have been found to be below average.

Yet in the face of overwhelming evidence, the EPA continues to insist that households be tested for radon and that remedial measures be taken if the level is above a certain point. By at least one estimate that would set the nation back some $45 billion.

Source: Michael Fumento (Reason magazine), "Punctured Hot Air Balloon," Washington Times, July 25, 1996.

TAMING ANIMAL RIGHTS ACTIVISTS

U.S. animal rights activists are on a crusade, not only to hinder medical research by denying scientists the right to use animals in research, but also to eliminate the killing of wildlife in Africa. Having endangered scientific research programs here, they are out to deny a source of livelihood to many poor African villagers.

Twenty-nine of the world's 36 poorest countries are African -- with an estimated 150 million to 325 million Africans earning less than $1 a day.
Yet in Zimbabwe, revenues from a sport hunting program has built several health clinics in rural villages and generated millions of dollars split among communities.
In one village, each of the approximately 120 households earned $450 by selling their legal hunting rights to a safari operator, whose clients paid him for the privilege of hunting elephants nearby.

Statistics from Kenya point out just how deadly elephants can be.

At least 358 Kenyans have died as a result of elephant-human clashes since 1990.
In some districts elephants reportedly kill more people who are protecting their own crops than poachers kill elephants.
Experts say that if landowners can't make money from wildlife, they will wipe it out.

Kenya did what animal rights activists proposed: they banned all hunting in 1977. But Zimbabwe granted proprietorship over wildlife to landowners in 1982 and allows hunting.

The result?

Between 1970 and 1989, Kenya's elephant population plunged from 167,000 to 16,000.
But in Zimbabwe, the population increased from less than 40,000 to more than 50,000 since 1982.

Source: Ike C. Sugg (Competitive Enterprise Institute), "Selling Hunting Rights Saves Animals," Wall Street Journal, July 24, 1996.

AMERICANS AREN'T ENVIRONMENTAL ACTIVISTS

American attitudes are at odds with current environmental policies and regulations, according to a new poll by the Competitive Enterprise Institute. It found that most Americans support protection of landowner property rights, want less federal interference and a greater role for state and local governments, and few rate environmental protection as their top concern.

In the nationwide poll of 1,000 registered voters, a vast majority supported reforming -- wetlands regulations and the Endangered Species Act to make them respect private property rights -- with only 11 percent supporting the current federal policy restricting use of private lands without compensation to landowners.
Some 49 percent said they would "do away with government regulation in this area and instead have the government offer incentives to landowners to keep endangered species on their property."
Some 65 percent of respondents believed that state and local government would do a better job than the federal government in dealing with environmental concerns.
And 72 percent said that state and local government should determine what pollution control measures are used to protect air quality.

Less than 5 percent named an environmental concern when asked to identify "the single most important problem facing the country."

Source: Jonathan H. Adler (Competitive Enterprise Institute) and Kellyanne Fitzpatrick (The Polling Company), "For the Environment, Against Overregulation," Wall Street Journal, July 29, 1996.

For more information on Compensation for Takings go to http://www.public-policy.org/~ncpa/ba/ba152.html on the internet.