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Progressive Environmentalism: A Pro-Human, Pro-Science, Pro-Free Enterprise Agenda For Change

National Center for Policy Analysis





Techniques for Empowering Individuals


The bureaucratic approach to environmental problems asks: How can we empower politicians to force people to do what is not in their self-interest? The results of the bureaucratic approach are rules and regulations which everyone has an incentive to violate, manipulate or distort.

The progressive approach asks: How can we use government policy to empower people and create positive incentives for problem-solving? Under this approach, private citizens have a self-interest in protecting the rules which government establishes. Progressive environmentalism does not assume there is a once-and-for-all solution to every environmental problem. Instead, it seeks to create institutions under which individuals acting in their own self-interest can continue to solve problems which large bureaucracies can never solve. The following is a brief list of techniques for achieving this objective.

Wherever Possible, Let Government Be a Protector of Rights Rather Than Owner and Manager of Natural Resources. Some of the worst environmental atrocities, as we shall see, have occurred on land owned and managed by government agencies - atrocities that never would have occurred without government subsidies, financed by taxpayer dollars. Better results are achieved when there are many diverse owners - each pursuing different ways of protecting and enhancing the value of their property. Governments can set the broad framework and the parameters, leaving people free to solve the millions of unique problems found around the world.

Wherever Possible, Create Ownership Rights to Achieve Environmental Goals. Many people regard property rights as a restriction on freedom because the owners are able to thwart trespassers who otherwise would have used the resource for "free." In fact, property rights expand freedom of action, giving people opportunities they otherwise would not have. Property rights empower owners by giving them the right to protect and defend their resource. But property rights also create opportunities for everyone else. All nonowners are potential owners, and the existence of property rights makes everyone else a potential buyer of those rights.

Many environmental groups (for example, the Nature Conservancy) have been able to obtain and preserve ecologically sensitive land precisely because land can be bought and sold. Private environmental organizations have been far less successful in preserving rivers, streams, lakes and bays, and in protecting endangered species, because often no rights to these resources can be purchased.

Wherever Possible, Let Market Prices Allocate Resources. Market prices give people economic incentives and change behavior much more quickly than arbitrary regulations. The price system is also the most efficient mechanism for communicating with people all over the world. As is the case for ivory from elephant tusks, once people realize that something is valuable they have incentives to protect and defend it and prevent its destruction.

Many people regard a price for activities such as fishing, hiking and recreational activities as an unfair barrier to the use of resources which should be "free." But a price of zero for these activities communicates the worst possible message: that the use of rare and valuable resources has no social cost. When fishing clubs in England charge, they are communicating to fishermen that far from being a costless resource, rivers and streams are valuable. A market price encourages users to conserve - to limit their use of the resource in order to maintain its value. At the same time, high prices for the use of resources give entrepreneurs strong economic incentives to find ways of making more areas available for fishing and recreation.

Create Opportunities for Homesteading and Adoption in the Environmental Commons. Homesteading was the method used to administer the largest privatization of land in history. The principle was that when people made improvements to land, they should benefit by acquiring ownership rights. If this principle were extended to ground water or to ocean resources, people would have economic incentives to invest in conservation.

A similar principle governs adoption statutes in some African countries - whereby villagers can acquire ownership rights in rare animals such as elephants. These techniques need to be expanded to encourage people to protect and defend endangered fish and wildlife which would otherwise be abandoned to the "commons."

Adopt the Polluter-Pays Principle. Whether in driving a car or working in a factory that contributes to air or water pollution, in most places people realize no economic gain from the reduction of pollutants and bear no economic cost if they cause an increase in pollutants. If we agree that clean air and clean water have value, and if we want people to perceive and act on that premise, then pollution deterrence should be as individualized as possible. Through fines and fees, the establishment of ownership rights and the use of new technology, we should strive toward a system under which people who pollute bear a direct cost that rises with the amount they pollute and the damage their pollutants cause.

Give People Choices Over the Allocation of Their Environmental Tax Dollars. Currently, a number of state governments allow people to divert a fraction of their state tax dollars to environmental programs - private, nonprofit as well as governmental.123 This practice should be expanded. If people were allowed to allocate some portion of their taxes to any qualified nonprofit organization or public agency, where the money went would be governed by competition and individual choice rather than by politicians.


Ten Principles of Progressive Environmentalism


Although the vast majority of all environmentalists are progressive, they are becoming voiceless in the political capitals of most industrialized countries. Outside the United States, the political agenda is increasingly being set by the reactionary values of the greens. Even within the United States, the leaders of mainstream organizations all too often accept and endorse the reactionary environmental agenda.

For these reasons, it is vital that a new policy agenda be devised - one which is pro-human, pro-science and pro-free-enterprise. What follows is a brief discussion of the principles that should guide the development of this agenda.
1. Private Property Rights Can Unite Environmentalism and Self- Interest.

Reactionary environmentalism almost always opposes private ownership of property. For example, Stephanie Mills (Whatever Happened to Ecology?) equates land ownership with slavery, and reactionary environmentalism with abolitionism.124 By contrast, progressive environmentalists know that virtually all of our environmental problems originate with respect to the "commons" - resources that are owned by no one.

Case Study: The Legacy of Love Canal. To many people, Love Canal is a symbol of corporate greed and irresponsibility - providing irrefutable evidence of the need for government to control land use. The facts show otherwise. The crisis occurred after the Niagara Falls school board (a governmental entity) purchased a toxic waste site which had been lined with clay, filled and capped with clay by the Hooker Chemical Company (a private enterprise). The company demonstrated to the school board that the site was potentially dangerous. Under threat of eminent domain, however, it relented and accepted a one dollar purchase price for the property - after writing into the documents of transfer the nature of the dangers and including a disclaimer of liability for future damages, once ownership of the site was transferred.125

Despite the warnings from Hooker, the school board built a school on the site, later selling the remaining land to a developer. Even before the land was developed, the city built water and sewer service lines through the clay walls that were in place to contain the wastes. These gaps in the walls provided pathways for the chemicals, which were later found in the soil and even the basements of area residents.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was called in to investigate. In a very quick statistical study,126 later discredited, the EPA announced that it had found evidence of long-term health problems - an increase in chromosome aberrations in a sample of residents. Federal funds were quickly made available to purchase the homes in the area. These homes were boarded up and the affected neighborhoods effectively destroyed. Later, additional federal money purchased more homes. To date, however, detailed studies have turned up no clear evidence of cancers or other long-term health threats present in the neighborhoods. And two decades later, in September 1988, about two-thirds of the area was declared habitable by the New York State Department of Health.127

The lessons of Love Canal are: (1) private companies respond to economic incentives to follow environmentally safe practices, and (2) voters need to exercise much greater scrutiny of the behavior of their elected representatives, who usually do not bear the costs of their environmentally destructive behavior. Instead of following these lessons, Congress gave us Superfund (see below).

Case Study: How Environmental Groups Manage Their Own Lands. Some of the most visible environmental disputes arise over what is to be done with someone else's land. Environmental groups have filed thousands of lawsuits against the federal government and private property owners. It is one thing to tell others how to manage their property. Decisions are often quite different when environmental groups manage their own property.128
  • Ten miles south of Intercoastal City, Louisiana, lies the Rainey Wildlife Sanctuary, a 26,800 acre marshland owned by the Audubon Society.

  • The sanctuary is a home for deer, armadillo, muskrat, otter, mink and more than 50,000 snow geese.

  • It also is the site of a number of oil and gas wells and provides grazing land for private cattle herds.
What are oil and gas wells and grazing cattle doing in a wildlife sanctuary? The Audubon Society has been vocal and critical of oil exploration and cattle grazing on lands owned by the federal government. In making decisions about its own property, however, Audubon's perspective is quite different and far more responsible. The managers of Rainey found that the timing, placement, operation and structure of oil exploration could be carefully planned in conjunction with the seasonal requirements of wildlife, and adverse environmental effects could be avoided. They also found that carefully controlled cattle grazing actually improves wildlife habitat.

Under the Audubon plan, everybody wins. The birds and wildlife keep their habitat, the public gets its oil and beef, and the Audubon Society receives funds to buy additional wildlife preserves.

This example is not unique. The Bernard N. Baker Sanctuary (run by the Michigan Audubon Society) was the nation's first sandhill crane sanctuary - created at a time when the cranes were in serious decline. Today, the society receives substantial royalty checks from oil and gas leases - which were carefully negotiated to insure that the crane's nesting grounds are not disturbed.129
2. Environmental Bureaucracies Really Are Bureaucracies.

Reactionary environmentalists have a schizophrenic attitude toward government. On the one hand, they consider government bureaucracies a great evil and a threat to the environment. On the other hand, in political debates they almost always favor transferring more power to government. Progressive environmentalists, by contrast, know that environmental bureaucracies behave like other bureaucracies.

Case Study: Government Mismanagement of our Natural Resources. The United States is generally thought of as a country devoted to the principle of private property. Yet about 42 percent of all U.S. land is owned by government - 33 percent by the federal government and 9 percent by state and local governments.

Among the lands owned by the federal government are treasured resources - rare and beautiful tracts that are home for countless species of foliage and wildlife and contain some of the most ecologically interesting wonders on earth. Yet mounting evidence suggests that the federal government has been a poor manager, often engaging in policies that have led to environmental destruction. For example:130
  • Because of Park Service policies, the white-tailed deer, mountain lion, lynx, bobcat, wolverine and fisher all have vanished from Yellowstone National Park, and the Rocky Mountain gray wolf is now extinct.

  • The Park Service also is responsible for a serious decline in the numbers of black bears, grizzlies, bighorn sheep, mule deer and beaver in Yellowstone. (See the case study below.)
The record of the U.S. Forest Service is probably worse than that of the National Park Service.
  • About 342,000 miles of roads have been built in our national forests - more than eight times the total mileage of the U.S. Interstate Highway System.131 [See Figure VI.]

  • These roads, primarily designed to facilitate logging, extend into the ecologically fragile backcountry of the Rocky Mountains and Alaska, where they are causing massive soil erosion, damaging trout and salmon fisheries and causing other environmental harm.132

  • In many cases, the costs of these logging activities far exceed any commercial benefit from the timber acquired; so this environmental destruction would not have occurred in the absence of government subsidies.133
Taxpayers also have been subsidizing environmental destruction by other federal agencies responsible for environmental stewardship:
  • Bureau of Reclamation projects have eliminated one national wildlife refuge (see the case study below) and others are threatened by water shortage and contamination.134

  • Because of the Bureau of Land Management, more than three million acres of wildlife habitat were cleared with huge chains (600-foot anchor chains weighing 100 pounds to the link drawn across the landscape by 200,000-pound D-8 crawler tractors) and replaced with fields of crested wheatgrass for domestic livestock.135
Space does not permit a full discussion of all of the ways in which federal bureaucracies cause environmental harm. However, a host of other rules, regulations and policies buried within the labyrinth of the huge federal bureaucracy also encourage environmental destruction in sometimes subtle, and sometimes not so subtle, ways. For example:136
  • Special provisions in the tax code, in addition to low-interest Small Business Administration (SBA) loans, have subsidized uneconomic development on the periphery of ecologically fragile areas, including Yellowstone National Park.

  • Conservation measures intended to reduce soil erosion very often have fostered farming practices that cause increased erosion.

  • Price supports for agricultural products have encouraged uneconomical farm development and led to the draining of marshes that formerly provided important habitats for waterfowl.

  • Federal subsidies for flood and hurricane insurance, grants from public utility and highway funds, and projects sponsored by the Army Corps of Engineers all have contributed to destruction in the Barrier Islands along the Atlantic and Gulf Coast regions.

  • The federal government's Animal Damage Control Program still employes 700 trappers whose job it is to kill bears, mountain lions, bobcats, lynxes, coyotes and wolves in order to protect domestic livestock.
Case Study: The Not-So-Superfund. In response to the Love Canal crisis, Congress passed the Superfund bill in 1980 to establish an emergency fund for cleanup of the nation's hazardous waste sites.137 Yet Superfund appears to have benefitted trial lawyers and politicians a lot more than the public:138
  • After seven years of operation, Superfund had paid for cleanup efforts at only about a dozen hazardous waste sites, most of which were still leaking toxic waste into the ground water.

  • Of the first $1 billion Superfund spent, more than half went toward litigation, and the situation has not improved despite billions more being spent.

  • Every state was entitled to at least one hazardous waste site worthy of federal cleanup, enabling every Senator to claim credit for at least one cleanup effort.

  • The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) also was originally instructed to find at least 400 waste sites, roughly matching the number of congressional districts.
Has Superfund made us safer? Few now think so. Superfund's primary method of cleanup has been to transfer hazardous waste from a waste site to a disposal site at which the waste is stored for a period of time. Often, this system has simply spread the waste problem. For example, the Government Accounting Office determined that most Superfund disposal sites are leaking themselves.139

Nor is it clear how anyone could find out if Superfund has made us safer. Except for Love Canal, identified before the creation of Superfund, not a single Superfund site has been analyzed to determine the actual health risks for area residents. In fact, there is only one site for which the government has a complete list of people exposed to the hazardous wastes.140

Perhaps the worst damage done by Superfund is that it has discouraged private sector solutions to the problem of hazardous waste disposal, especially voluntary cleanup efforts. Prior to Superfund and other environmental legislation, firms sufficiently solvent to be accountable for their torts generally did a responsible and competent job. In the case of Love Canal, for example, the protection built in by Hooker (presumably to avoid liability for potential damages from leaks) was judged decades later to be sufficient to meet even the tough EPA standards of the 1980s.141
3. Wealthier Is Healthier and Better for the Environment.

A common attitude among reactionary environmentalists is that in formulating health, safety and environmental regulations we should ignore the economic costs of those regulations. As Laurie Mott of the Natural Resources Defense Council put it, there is "no room for consideration of the benefits of pesticides."142 Yet from the point of view of health and safety, it's hard to imagine worse advice. As it turns out, higher incomes for countries and for individuals contribute more to good health and life expectancy than all government health and safety regulations combined. In general, the higher our income, the more options we have - to change our lifestyle, regulate our diet and select our risks.143

Case Study: Life Expectancy and Economic Growth. The higher our income, the more likely we are to fly rather than drive, to drive larger and therefore safer cars, to pay for safety equipment and safety-enhancing maintenance on our automobiles, to maintain working smoke alarms in our homes, etc. Higher incomes open the door to literally thousands of opportunities to improve our health and safety.

Table I presents life expectancy data from countries around the world. As the table shows, people in more developed countries have considerably longer life expectancies than people at lower levels of economic development. What is true of whole societies is also true of the individuals within them. For example:144
  • In England, adult males in the highest socioeconomic class earn more than twice as much as individuals in the lowest socioeconomic class.

  • Death from cancer among males in the highest socioeconomic class is 25 percent below the national average and death from respiratory disease is 63 percent below.

  • In contrast, death from cancer and respiratory disease is 31 percent and 87 percent above the national average, respectively, among males in the lowest socioeconomic class.
Similar evidence exists for the United States. One study of mortality and income for U. S. counties found that a 20 percent increase in income reduces mortality by 1.0 percent.145 Based on this study, Peter Huber calculated that increasing the income of a 45-year-old man working in manufacturing by 15 percent would do more to extend his life expectancy than eliminating every single hazard from his workplace.146

Case Study: Government Regulation of Health and Safety. Government regulation in general, and health and safety regulation in particular, may have done far more harm than good when measured solely in terms of effects on health. For example:147
  • Between 1959 and 1969, productivity in U. S. manufacturing increased by almost one percent annually.

  • Between 1973 and 1978, however, manufacturing productivity fell by more than one-half of one percent annually.
Studies indicate that a significant portion of this drop was caused by regulations imposed by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and the EPA. In particular:148
  • Thirty-one percent of the overall drop in manufacturing productivity was due to regulatory burdens created during the 1970s by OSHA and the EPA.

  • Nineteen percent of the drop in productivity growth was due to OSHA regulations and 12 percent to regulation by the EPA.
Moreover, the productivity drop between 1973 and 1978 did not affect all industries equally. Productivity fell by more than two percent per year in highly regulated industries, yet rose during the same period in less regulated ones.

Increases in workers' incomes are roughly equal to increases in productivity, thus the damage to health and safety OSHA and the EPA have caused by reducing income growth may have more than offset any health improvements these agencies have made through regulation.149
4. Money Matters.

According to the Environmental Protection Agency, the United States spends $115 billion per year to clean up the environment. This equals 2.3 percent of our GNP, 40 percent of the defense budget and almost three times the amount spent on the environment by the entire European Community.150

Are we getting our money's worth? Progressive environmentalists recognize that there is a limit to society's willingness to spend money to achieve environmental goals. As a result, progressives support spending in ways that assure the "biggest bang for the buck."

Case Study: The War Against Cancer.151 About one in every three Americans will get cancer. About one in five will die from it. What should be done? An executive of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) says that the most effective way to combat cancer would be to give the entire EPA budget to the American Cancer Society.152

But that's not what the bureaucrats are doing. Despite the fact that industrial products and food additives cause less than 3 percent of all cancers,153 the federal government is imposing billions of dollars of costs on the American public in its efforts to prevent exposure to trace amounts of chemicals in our environment. The most common government standard is that a chemical should be outlawed if one person out of one million exposed over a lifetime could theoretically get cancer from it. Even though 300,000 people out of one million will get cancer anyway, regulations cost the public billions to prevent the theoretical death of one more.

Typical EPA methods for evaluating the public health risks from air pollution greatly overstate those risks. For example, the EPA calculates potential risks from exposure to an air pollutant by testing the chemical for toxicity in laboratory animals:
  • The chemical is administered to rats and mice in massive daily doses just below the amount that would kill them immediately.

  • At these high levels of exposure, one out of every two chemicals ever tested (both natural and man-made) eventually causes cancer in at least one species of rodent.

  • The EPA then extrapolates from rodents to humans and estimates the human risk of cancer from exposure to the same chemical.
Scientists are increasingly skeptical about the value of extrapolating from these rodent experiments the risk to humans from ordinary exposure. Many are also skeptical about what the EPA does next:
  • To calculate the "risk" to human populations, the EPA postulates an imaginary "Most Exposed Individual" (MEI) who lives on the property line of the emissions source and breathes the highest level of emissions from that source for 70 years, 24 hours each day.

  • The EPA then assumes that everyone is an MEI.154

  • Even with these pessimistic assumptions, the EPA estimates that only 1,700 to 2,700 cancers are caused each year by exposure to approximately 90 potentially hazardous air pollutants.

  • While that hypothetical number may seem large, it is a small fraction of the almost one million cancer cases occurring each year in America.155
Even if the EPA's risk assessments were correct, the cost of preventing cancer through EPA regulations is extremely high. Some estimate that the air toxics section of the amended Clean Air Act will cost from $20 billion to $30 billion - about 10 to 15 times the entire budget of the National Cancer Institute. But because the regulations target only the largest polluters, the maximum reduction in cancer cases is 350 to 500 per year. That represents a cost of between $40 million and $86 million per cancer avoided.156

The EPA's extreme risk models are notoriously faulty, however. A new study of the largest concentration of industrial coke ovens in the country (Allegheny County, PA) concludes that the EPA's estimate of cancer caused by coke emissions is exaggerated by a multiple of 100:157
  • By the EPA's own calculations, its regulations on coke emissions cost $6.8 million per cancer prevented.

  • Based on more realistic calculations, the cost is $682 million to prevent a single instance of cancer.
The EPA's cost-is-no-object approach is also reflected in its new benzene regulations, which impose a cost of $200 million a year to prevent an EPA-estimated 3.4 cases of cancer:158
  • By the EPA's own calculations, its new benzene regulations will cost $59 million to prevent a single instance of cancer.

  • By more realistic calculations, the cost of each cancer prevented will be $5.8 billion.
Applying this more realistic method to all air toxics, it appears that the Clean Air Act's new air toxic regulations may prevent three to five cancers per year rather than 350 to 500. The cost per cancer prevented will be between $4 and $9 billion per year. [See Figure VII.]

The National Cancer Institute's goal is to reduce the nation's 470,000 annual cancer deaths by one-half by the year 2000. Yet the institute does not even mention reducing carcinogenic chemicals in the environment as one of its objectives. Maximizing gains from the use of resources is not necessarily a goal of Congress however.

Case Study: Government Efforts to Reduce Smog. Perhaps the greatest "success story" under the old Clean Air Act is that automobile tail pipe emissions of carbon monoxide and hydrocarbons are down 96 percent, and emissions of nitrogen oxides have decreased about 76 percent. This has cost consumers dearly. But the "easy" gains, as expensive as they were, have all been made. Future reductions in automobile emissions, which would be even more expensive, might not produce any benefits.

All new cars and about 75 percent of the oldest cars on the road currently meet the EPA's tail pipe emission standards. The older cars that don't meet these standards are causing most of the problems. In fact, only 10 percent of the cars on the road produce about 50 percent of the pollution. Since more stringent new car standards will not reduce the pollution from this dirtiest segment of the U.S. car fleet, the new Clean Air Act calls for a mandatory switch to "clean" fuels in nonattainment areas. Clean fuels including methanol, ethanol and natural gas are so called because they produce fewer major pollutants when burned than does gasoline. However, each fuel has its own drawbacks, such as limited supply, difficult refueling processes or extreme toxicity to humans. For example, the most highly favored gasoline substitute, methanol, is both dangerous and expensive:159
  • Methanol emits 10 times more formaldehyde (a potential carcinogen) than gasoline and is 25 times as toxic to humans.

  • By one estimate, the widespread use of methanol would increase annual health care expenditures by $50 to $100 million.

  • The use of methanol would virtually double the price of motor fuel per gallon at the pump.
Incidentally, methanol appears to be the cheapest alternative to gasoline overall, and no large sources of any alternative fuel currently are available to satisfy transportation needs.

Case Study: A Better Way to Reduce Smog.160 Millions of dollars are already being spent in Arizona, Colorado, Nevada and New Mexico on the mandated use of oxygenated fuels in vehicles as a carbon-monoxide control measure. Oxygenated fuels cost more, decrease gas mileage and damage vehicle components. Data from the EPA show that simply tuning up the small minority of dirty cars is twice as effective - and much cheaper and simpler:
  • Of 84 vehicles studied, 80 emitted a total of 397 pounds of carbon monoxide, while the dirtiest four emitted 338 pounds.

  • When the entire fleet was put on oxygenated fuel, the total emissions reduction was 203 pounds, with the dirty cars contributing 107 pounds of the improvement.

  • If the dirty four were tuned to emit the average of the rest of the fleet, they would emit a total of 20 pounds-a 318-pound reduction.
Similar findings were produced by a Colorado Department of Health study:
  • Using 10 percent ethanol fuels reduced the fleet emissions of 10 vehicles from 434 pounds of carbon monoxide to 335 pounds.

  • Tuning up only the two dirtiest cars and using normal fuel reduced fleet emissions to 294 pounds.
A team of researchers led by Donald Stedman, a chemistry professor at the University of Denver, has developed a device that can measure the carbon monoxide emissions of an automobile as it passes a sensor. Using the device would enable municipalities to detect precisely which cars pollute and require corrective action. A program based on remote sensing and tune-ups of the worst polluters would cost about $40 per ton of carbon monoxide removed-versus an estimated $500 per ton with mandated oxygenated-fuel programs.

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