Is it possible that we have reached a turning point for environmentalism? Perhaps we have already reached it, but don’t fully recognize it yet?
Let’s start with a basic axiom: the environment is too important to be left to environmentalists. Ever since the first Earth Day in 1970, which can be said to mark the birth of the modern environmental movement, environmentalism has been wedded to a narrow and often fanatical policy architecture that can accurately be described as demanding billion-dollar solutions to million-dollar problems, almost always choosing strategies that maximize political and legal conflict. The result is a kludgy regulatory regime and ongoing political gridlock. Sometimes, policy delivers perverse results in the form of worsening some environmental conditions.
How did it come to this? A review of the political and cultural history of modern environmentalism is useful in setting the scene for a reformed approach to environmental issues.
Let’s start with a quick quiz—who said this?
[There is an] absolute necessity of waging all-out war against the debauching of the environment. … The bulldozer mentality of the past is a luxury we can no longer afford. Our roads and other public projects must be planned to prevent the destruction of scenic resources and to avoid needlessly upsetting the ecological balance.
This sounds like something Al Gore, Ralph Nader, or Leonard DiCaprio might say. In fact, it was Governor Ronald Reagan, in his 1970 State of the State address, shortly before he signed into law a number of sweeping new environmental statutes that passed the legislature often by unanimous votes. Ironically, Governor Gavin Newsom recently pressured the California legislature at the fiscal equivalent of gunpoint—he threatened to veto the budget—to undo one of those Reagan-era statutes, the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), arguably better understood as the “Full Employment for Environmental Lawyers Act” as it turned out in practice.
Let’s take in another assertive statement from a prominent political magazine around the same time:
If [corporations] do not stop [polluting] we must find ways to compel them in some way to do so. … Important people must be interfered with before notice will be taken of disagreeable facts. Instead of demonstrating on Fifth Avenue on behalf of baby seals, the saviors of the environment would get far better results picketing the country clubs of Nassau, Fairfield, and Morris counties.
Sounds like The Nation. Or The New Republic. Or Mother Jones. Perhaps The Progressive. All describing the kind of activism we see today from Extinction Rebellion. In fact, these words, in the author’s first-person voice (not quoting a protestor or activist), appeared in … National Review. A few years later, NR devoted a cover story to defending the Endangered Species Act from early critics. Lost now in the mists of time is that co-sponsors of the Endangered Species Act included Sen. James Buckley (Bill’s brother) and Strom Thurmond. Barry Goldwater was a long-time member of the Sierra Club. In 1970, President Nixon was locked in competition with Sen. Edmund Muskie—a frontrunner to oppose Nixon in 1972—to see who could propose the toughest clean air act.
Although business and industry were wary of the potential new regulatory burden coming their way, the loudest critics of Earth Day and the flurry of new policy activity came from the left. Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and other anti-Vietnam War groups said Earth Day was a Nixon plot to distract attention from the war, and urged a boycott of Earth Day events on college campuses.
The New Republic carried an editorial about what it called the “ecology craze,” saying, “Rallying around the ecology banner is the biggest assortment of ill-matched allies since the Crusades. … Worst of all, of course, the ecology binge provides a cop-out for a President and a populace too cheap or too gutless or too tired or too frustrated or too all of them to tangle harder with some old problems that have proved resistant and emotionally unsatisfying to boot.” In Science magazine, Amitai Etzioni dismissed ecology as a “fad,” and thought that “the newly found environmental dangers are being vastly exaggerated. … Fighting hunger, malnutrition, and rats should be given priority over saving wildlife, and improving our schools over constructing waste disposal systems.”
These criticisms were mild compared to the blasts that came from black civil rights leaders. The most bitter attack came from Richard Hatcher, the African-American mayor of Gary, Indiana: “The nation’s concern for the environment has done what George Wallace was unable to do—distract the nation from the human problems of black and brown Americans.” Whitney Young of the National Urban League was equally distressed: “The war on pollution is one that should be waged after the war on poverty is won. Common sense calls for reasonable national priorities and not for inventing new causes whose main appeal seems to be in their potential for copping out and ignoring the most dangerous and pressing of our problems.” A “black militant” in Chicago, as Time magazine described him, bluntly told the reporter: “Ecology? I don’t give a good goddamn about ecology!”
Environmentalism became a fresh and powerful angle of attack against free markets and capitalism.
In the abstract, concern for the environment would seem to be a perfectly natural conservative enthusiasm. Among other obvious things, conservative and conservatism share the same etymological root with conservation and conservationism, and while conservationism and environmentalism may not be identical, they are clearly blood relatives.
But the easy consensus and bipartisan policy milestones of the early 1970s did not last long, and for two reasons that were readily evident at the time. The first is that the Malthusianism of environmentalism hardened around the time of the first Earth Day, perhaps best exemplified by Paul Ehrlich’s international best-seller The Population Bomb (published in 1968), whose framework and predictions were falsified in short order, but whose apocalyptic mood spread rapidly, yielding the “limits to growth” projections that were also soon falsified. The news media was happy to bolster environmental mania, reporting every dubious alarmist claim with complete credulity—arguably the largest single media malpractice of any modern public issue that continues to this day with egregiously incompetent reporting about climate change.
The second was the left’s belated recognition that there were political power and redistribution opportunities to be had through the issue. A good example is New Republic columnist James Ridgeway, who wrote just three years after TNR dismissed ecology that “Ecology offered liberal-minded people what they had longed for, a safe, rational and above all peaceful way of remaking society … [and] developing a more coherent central state.” It was probably inevitable that environmental agitation would curdle into a full-blown-ism commensurate with—and often melded directly to—socialism. Just as socialism often presents as a secular religion, so too environmentalism, with its own doctrine of the apocalypse, promised salvation for the entire planet.
In other words, as the late Sir Roger Scruton put it, environmental concern was “confiscated by the state. … Alarms turn problems into emergencies, and so bring the ordinary politics of compromise to a sudden stop.” Absolutist policies were demanded (ban plastic bags!—the data be damned), even if most actual policies were incremental in practice by necessity. Environmentalism became a fresh and powerful angle of attack against free markets and capitalism. For a long time, anyone who brought economics into the discussion was roundly denounced: “Economics is a form of brain damage” was a prominent cliche of leading environmentalists for a time, never mind that imposing needlessly costly and highly inefficient regulations is wasteful of resources, and by definition, adverse to conservation. (A speaker at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio elicited rapturous applause from the large audience of delegates by saying that “all economists ought to be rounded up and put into re-education camps.”) Some environmental statutes actually direct the government to disregard costs in developing regulations. In such a social-political hothouse, anyone to the right of Ralph Nader was put off by this extremism, and a common-sense approach didn’t stand a chance.
The scene has gradually changed and improved over the last decade for a variety of reasons. By degrees, most environmentalists have come to understand that economics is essential, and environmental economics is now nearly as important a subfield as environmental law. The inexorable necessity of confronting tradeoffs could only be denied for so long. Perhaps the biggest factor in causing some reconsideration of environmental policy is the frustration with the failure of climate policy to reduce our use of hydrocarbon energy by any meaningful amount. After 50 years of aggressive policy interventions and trillions in subsidies to promote “renewable” energy sources, oil, natural gas, and coal still account for about 80 percent of total global energy—about the same share as 1970—and haven’t significantly accelerated the long-term trend of decarbonizing our energy supply. Even the slogan of achieving “Net-Zero” by 2050 is a cheat phrase concealing that fossil fuels will remain our dominant energy source for decades to come. The “peak oil” hypothesis that was wildly popular 20 years ago now looks as ridiculous as phrenology. Regardless of the magnitude of climate change decades from now, future historians are likely to regard the monomaniacal climate fixation with suppressing fossil fuels over the last 35 years as the climate policy equivalent of wage and price controls to contain inflation in the 1970s.
The outline of a new generation of more sensible environmental policy has been coming into view for a while now. Far from being the primary cause of environmental degradation, capitalism and market exchange are a superior solution to environmental problems, especially when property rights are secured and respected. The centrality of property rights is most quickly grasped with a simple question: how come no one ever washes a rented car? Private owners are better stewards than politically- or bureaucratically-controlled resources.
One clear implication is that the commons should be privatized to the fullest extent possible. The famous “tragedy of the commons” is better regarded as an opportunity to extend the blessings of property rights and gains from trade to new domains. This is no simple step, to be sure. Some common problems, like urban air pollution, defy simple property rights solutions, as Friedrich Hayek warned in his chapter on town planning in The Constitution of Liberty. Examples of semi-privatization of common-pool resources are often imperfect replicas of property rights as historically understood. But there is mounting empirical evidence that privatized commons, even in seemingly unlikely arenas such as ocean fisheries, are more effective in preserving habitat and wildlife than regulatory schemes that are intrusive and cumbersome to enforce. Similar rights-based market mechanisms have been applied successfully to water.
The noisy fringe, along with the climate hysterics, seeking to exploit environmentalism for radical ends will always be with us.
One of the tragedies of modern environmental policy was extending the demise of common law remedies for air and water pollution, toxic waste, and other “externalities.” Nearly a century before modern, centralized regulatory regimes imposed uniform conditions and instituted permit systems for air and water emissions and land use nuisances, traditional common law remedies were highly effective in abating harmful pollution or providing damages to parties directly affected by industrial pollution or negligent land management. Common law categories of nuisance, trespass, and riparian rights (for shared water resources) were effectively applied to individual conflicts both in the United States and England. There are numerous instances in old case law of courts shutting down or awarding damages to paper mills, cesspools, and other point-sources of pollution that damaged neighbors. The most famous case is Rylands v. Fletcher in Britain in 1868, which extended the common law tort rules of strict liability for “non-natural use of land.” This framework was quickly adopted and applied for several local conflicts in the US.
A few instances can be found in relatively modern times in the US, such as a 1950 case in Louisiana in which International Paper was required to pay compensation to downstream landowners for their discharge of effluents into local waters. The most striking example of the transition away from common law to arguably less adaptive regulatory remedies is the 1972 case Illinois v. Milwaukee, which involved the successful common law nuisance suit that Illinois brought against the City of Milwaukee for its dumping of raw sewerage into Lake Michigan, which degraded Chicago’s drinking water. The ruling was vacated, however, by the passage of the federal Clean Water Act a few months later, which instituted a new federal permit system that enabled Milwaukee to delay its cleanup of its sewage system. The irony of supplanting the older common law of strict liability with a centralized regulatory program is that it foreclosed many future efforts by private parties to use to common law to enforce environmental protection. For example, in 1992, Oklahoma sued Arkansas in federal court to stop polluted water from Arkansas from slowing into Oklahoma. The claim was rejected because Arkansas conformed to federal standards, negating Oklahoma’s stricter state standard.
There are some good arguments in favor of centralized regulatory standards and enforcement, especially for some interstate environmental issues. But an irony lost on most simple-minded environmentalists is that many big business interests supported displacing common law liability with federal regulatory and permit systems, because it was more predictable for industry and eliminated potential liability, and in some cases, created anti-competitive effects. A few Marxist-leaning scholars, such as Morton Horwitz, Martin Sklar, and Gabriel Kolko, stumbled across the public choice implications of centralized regulation of all kinds, but missed the obvious lessons to be drawn from it. A reinvigoration of common law remedies for environmental problems would be a major step in restoring the use of local knowledge, Coasean bargaining, and customizing the application of general principles to changing circumstances.
But most important are the increasing number of long-time environmentalists who have shed the old Malthusianism of the 1970s and 1980s. The noisy fringe, along with the climate hysterics, seeking to exploit environmentalism for radical ends will always be with us (and get disproportionate media coverage), and the old Malthusian religion is hanging on under a new banner—the so-called “De-Growth” movement, which, its advocates tell us, doesn’t necessarily mean negative growth, but more “planning” and control to keep our resource use within some unspecified limits. In other words, the old Malthusian vinegar in a recycled bottle.
More persuasive and capacious are the “Ecomodernists” who explicitly reject the old Malthusian pessimism and embrace markets, technology, and innovation as the cornerstone of a more hopeful future for humans and the environment. Ecomodernists embrace rather than denounce many familiar targets of environmental activists, such as large-scale agriculture, active forest management, and resource extraction, highlighting the “de-coupling” of environmental degradation and resource use, let alone economic growth.
Alongside the rejection of the “limits to growth” outlook, the Ecomodernist embrace of technology and innovation is also a significant break from the anti-technology strain of ’70s-era environmentalism that was always redolent of Martin Heidegger’s famous “Essay on Technology.” The Heideggerian strain of anti-tech environmentalism suffuses Al Gore’s 1992 best-seller Earth in the Balance, for example. In no area is the Ecomodernist departure from environmentalist hostility to technology more evident than in nuclear power. Some of the most intransigent opponents of nuclear power have quietly dropped their opposition, while others have regretted ever listening to Jane Fonda and Ralph Nader a generation ago. Gov. Gavin Newsom’s reversal of the decision to close California’s last nuclear power plant at Diablo Canyon (which supplies nearly 10 percent of California’s electricity) was a major turning point. Canada and Japan are making plans to reopen some of their closed nuclear plants, and expect Germany to consider reversing its foolish anti-nuclear course soon.
Traditional big-unit nuclear power remains very expensive to build, and we’re awaiting demonstrations that a new generation of small modular reactors (SMRs) can be scaled up and drive the cost curve down. The enthusiasts and skeptics alike all agree on one thing: our nuclear and utility regulatory structures badly need an overhaul if any new generation of nuclear technology is to flourish.
The need for regulatory reform isn’t limited to nuclear power. The problem with many regulatory regimes is not simply the slowness and expense of the process, but that in many cases, it creates perverse incentives against innovation and improved environmental protection. Some industries delay modifications or innovations to their facilities that might trigger a new adversarial round of regulatory compliance problems.
Another classic case is the Endangered Species Act, whose threat to potential land use creates the incentive to “shoot, shovel, and shut up” if you discover an endangered species on or near your land, but not yet swept into a designated habitat protection zone. (Two-thirds of all listed endangered species are on private land.) Private forest managers in the southeast, for example, take great care not to let their timber stands grow too tall or too large, which would attract the protected red-cockaded woodpecker that prefers older growth trees. The result: a reduction in potential habitat. The usual remedy of the bureaucracy is ever more intrusive forest management plans and mandates, when reversing the incentives would likely achieve better results at much lower cost and political friction. In other words, landowners should be rewarded rather than penalized for having endangered species on their land. “Conservation will ultimately boil down to rewarding the private landowner who conserves the public interest,” Aldo Leopold wrote in his justly famous Sand County Almanac. Of course, doing so would put out of business the Center for Biological Diversity (and similar litigation machines), whose only real interest in “diversity” is determining which court to file their next lawsuit. This is why many environmentalists oppose any reform to the ESA, even as they know it does a poor job of achieving its objective.
The “abundance” movement, currently having a moment among liberal elites, recognizes the deleterious effects of regulatory obstacles to progress and prosperity in many domains, and tacitly but carefully acknowledges that environmental regulations are among the worst-performing regulatory regimes. Even the modest proposals for federal permitting reform to enable faster rollout of the Biden Administration’s green energy program couldn’t pass Congress because of environmentalist intransigence. If the “abundance” movement prospers, this may start to change.
New ideas inconceivable 20 years ago give some reason for optimism that the age of rigidly statist and adversarial environmentalism may be drawing to a close.
One tool that has been little contemplated in environmental and energy policy is a monetary prize for specified innovations. Many environmental regulations have deliberately aimed to be “technology-forcing,” such as automobile and truck tailpipe emissions standards and power plant emission standards. This incremental strategy has had its successes and failures. It is less certain that this strategy has led to major technological breakthroughs; the empirical evidence is mixed. Government-sponsored prizes for breakthrough technologies go back to the eighteenth century (the British government offered a prize for a breakthrough in ocean navigation), and the US government used prizes to accelerate airplane performance a century ago. More recently, there have been some privately funded prizes, such as the $10 million XPRIZE for a breakthrough in suborbital rocket flight, which was won in 2004 by Burt Rutan and his company Scaled Composites.
The advantage of prizes is that they leverage private capital rather than using public funds that often fall prey to political favorites or incumbent research efforts. Like privatizing some kinds of common-pool resources, prize goals need to be carefully defined. And it will be difficult to agree on the goals: is a radical advance in battery technology worthy of a major prize incentive, when there is already a lot of research and development underway? Or a scalable, cost-effective means of air capture of carbon dioxide to fight climate change, when the estimates of climate risk are still highly uncertain and contested? There will be no escaping the hazards of political judgment in these matters, but it seems superior to hidebound regulatory regimes or mandates that are difficult to reform.
It is possible that many potential innovation prizes will go unclaimed or prove unworkable, but the point of contemplating such a novel step is to break out of our half-century rut of proposing yet another tax credit, subsidy, mandate, or ever more complicated regulatory scheme for every environmental problem or energy challenge. This model has run its course. It is long past time for something new. The old order of ’70s-era Luddite-Malthusian environmentalism will die hard (Al Gore is still “skeptical” of nuclear power, for example), and the climate change fanatics will hold on hardest against any course change, but the succeeding generation of environmentalists and new ideas inconceivable 20 years ago give some reason for optimism that the age of rigidly statist and adversarial environmentalism may be drawing to a close.