Michele Bachmann, The EPA, And Environment-Related Idiocy That Never Seems To End
I haven’t commented in print on Michele’s Bachmann’s rantings in the past because they seemed unworthy of the effort. One rant from the congresswoman from Minnesota and Republican presidential candidate, however, has been hitting too close to home. Her oft-repeated comment that the EPA is this country’s worst “jobs killer.”
I spent more than a decade of my professional life during the 1980s and 1990s writing about a new environmental economics. It was not based on so-called “sustainability,” the view that one day bad environmental behavior would have negative economic consequences. Rather, it was the readily observable view that in advanced economies making, transporting and marketing goods in environmentally appropriate ways produces better net profits, more jobs, and a strong competitive edge.
I wrote several books on the subject along with scores of articles and Op Eds that appeared in such high profile pubs as The New York Times and Wall Street Journal. I was a regular commentator about this subject on National Public Radio. I taught a course in the new environmental economics at New York University.
It never occurred to me when I moved into other realms in the early 1990s that nearly 20 years later people running for public office, indeed, the highest public office, would still be blathering some version of the hackneyed foolishness that we have to choose between the environment and the economy; that in tough times especially we can’t afford to push people toward better environmental ways of doing business; and as Rep. Bachmann so often opines these days, that government agencies like the EPA that help us transition from the old pollution-based ways to more economically evolved, environmental accommodating ways, are “job killers.”
It’s almost embarrassing to have to point out why Rep. Bachann’s views here are so pernicious as well as foolish. So I’ll just touch on the most obvious points.
When polluters spend to clean up their act, that spending does not involve taking money out behind the factory and burning it. It goes toward paying polluter-cleaner-uppers. It creates jobs in the clean up industry. At worst, its a zero sum that transfers an equal amount from bad polluters to good cleaner uppers. In a larger sense, though, it helps build industries needed to compete in the 21st century world economy.
Noting, as Rep. Backmann and others often do, that EPA rules that keep polluters from hiring people to do things that produce more pollution is a job killer, is like saying that cops who enforce laws against meth and crack peddling are cutting into the jobs these activities most certainly generate. Neither jobs that produce added pollution nor those that foster addiction, however, are the sort of jobs a leading edge economy needs to produce.
One further thing about environmental regulations that should be so obvious it requires no explanation — but tragically still does. It’s the fact that these regs over the years are responsible for more innovation that anything with the possible exception of wars. An industry facing a huge bill for polluting behavior has almost never paid that bill in full. It simply changes, innovates, and ends up with better products and services.
Need an example? The cars we drive today are much, much better than the stinkers that used to be produced in this country, and massive improvements over those produced in the far less environmental friendly old Soviet Bloc. Accommodating environmental imperatives, including the desire of consumers for such imperatives, was a very big factor at work here. Or perhaps Rep. Bachmann and company would prefer to to drive around in their old Yugos and Trabants, which were not produced with any EPA enforcers doing a no-no..
A few leading edge economies like Germany’s are rapidly getting away from making any of those outdated hard choices between the economy and the environment — and are clearly destined to have the best of both. Even China, still addicted to dirty but cheap brown coal for much of its power needs, is making dramatic moves to incentivize solar and other alternative technologies, rather than making the “hard choice” to stick forever with burning long dead fossil remains. In doing so, China is eating our lunch with these huge growth industries.
In this country we seem endlessly locked in an idiotic environment-or-economy paradigm. It’s still deeply embedded in our politics. How terribly, terribly, sad this is. For the present. For the future.
More from this writer at http://blog.wallstreetpoet.com
12 Responses to “Michele Bachmann, The EPA, And Environment-Related Idiocy That Never Seems To End”
Even if the EPA killed jobs, it is better than unfettered corporations that kill people if they think they can get away with it or the costs from being taken to court are less than the savings on not having to clean up their toxins or care about what happens to their surroundings.
Corporations are not evil, just predatory. You don’t have to romanticize or be cynical about predators, you just have to have someone around to keep a check on them. I shouldn’t have to explain this to grown people, but I forget that many right-wingers have a view of capital-owners that is just as deranged and harmful to society as that of Stalin’s, only polarized.
The GOP attitude toward the EPA, the need for sane, stringent and enforceable regulation and oversight, and indeed responsible stewardship of the environment in general, is one that has long been one steeped in backwardness and corporate sycophancy. Their continued counterproductive positioning (long after the jury has been in) speaks volumes about their short-sighted approach to governing. The fact that citizens put up with it is a sad commentary on the electorate as well.
It’s almost too much fun to remember that the National Environmental Policy Act was signed into law by Republican President Richard Nixon, who later proposed establishment of the EPA and brought the agency into being during his administration.
The Republican Party hasn’t always been the way it is today.
I worked within the EPA’s regulations for more than thirty years designing and building heavy industrial plants. There is a lot you can criticize the EPA and environmental regulation for, they lack understanding of the industries they regulate, permitting is handled by the states which means you face fifty different sets of regulations, the grandfather clause prolongs the life of old inefficient installations, but the one thing you can’t say is that they cost jobs.
To say that there are fewer jobs because of the environmental regulations would mean that industry has had to spend less, has actually saved money, because of them. It is more likely that the fact that industry has had to spend more money, creating more jobs, that causes the Republicans, with their close corporate ties, to oppose the regulations.
The argument that the tight regulations in the United States forced companies to build plants overseas is equally bogus. I built plants in the PRC, the Philippines, Indonesia, India, Sri Lanka, Lebanon, Brazil, Venezuela, Canada, Ireland, Iran… well you get the idea, and nowhere can you escape environmental regulations. In fact, most countries don’t even write their own standards, they just state that the plant must be built and meet either the United States or the European standards. The PRC requires you to meet the toughest of the standards, which ever they maybe.
This is a mantra, a chant that the Republicans say over and over hoping that people will believe it if they hear it often enough. And it does work, especially after it is repeated enough to wear down anyone who would object to it.
Merkin,
Progressive constantly complain that about off-shoring jobs and the loss of manufacturing jobs but fail to connect with the idea that the clean water act, clean air act, RCRA, and TSCA all affect the motivations of off-shoring jobs. There is no way that a new refinery will be built in the U.S. again. It is so much cheap and easier to off-shore the plants while keeping the old plants going.
In addition, CERCLA has made many formerly industrial sites less than worthless and thus unusable for creating jobs.
The message of the EPA has been clear for decades and the message is that business is better off just not doing whatever they want to do. So China gets the industrial plants that the U.S. used to have and the U.S. tries to figure out how to employ everyone as cubicle dwellers how have a low environmental footprint but who actually do not do anything.
Superdestroyer -
Or it just could be that in China you can pay a worker 100 times less than here, lock them in your factory, work them to death or disability, and bribe government officials to look the other way.
And wow – these enlightened corporations you’re so willing to trust and give the benefit of the doubt to jump on that opportunity. Human decency, basic human rights, and any semblance of a moral compass are traded in for a few more bucks. Sometimes I think our ultra-conservatives won’t be happy until they’re chained to a machine and working 14 hour days for a crust of bread. That does seem to be the world you’re working for.
Oh, and please tell us the story again of how liberals are all Women, Jews, and Blacks who all want free money. I never get tired of hearing you tell it.
Wrong, wrong, wrong…
Sometimes I think our ultra-conservatives won’t be happy until you are chained to a machine and working 14 hour days for a crust of bread. That does seem to be the world they’re working for.
Most of them are just to f**ken stupid to understand that they will be chained right next to us…
Except for maybe when the turn off the water in the San Joaquin to allegedly protect a fish that isn’t even native to San Francisco Bay. Or when Obama’s 86TH (!) Executive order establishes a Soviet style agenda 21 dictatorship power over the entire swath of rural America….
What’s missing? Cost-benefit analysis as well as other sensibility and reason. Certain “types” simply want the federal government to regulate or otherwise control everything, constitutional federalism and propriety notwithstanding. (Note what “types” scoff at these.)
pandoranage,
WTF are you talking about?
Executive Order 13575—Establishment of the White House Rural Council
Where in this document do you see a Soviet style agenda 21 dictatorship power over the entire swath of rural America?
How many times have we heard this BS? [chuckle]
(from Executive Order 13575)
“The Federal Government has an important role to play in …”
(Everything, the Little Totalitarians insist)
I wonder how many times that was said in the mid-1960s. [grin]
Hopefully it will be learned someday that not only is it wrong for the federal government (properly left uncapitalized!) to “play a role” in anything and everything conceivable, but we can’t afford it.
The GOP’s wish for govt. to be replaced by a sort of Lord of the Flies on steroids would be laughable if they weren’t serious.