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.

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