Environment/Reclaiming Conservative Ground

...Environmentalism is the occupational disease of landlords...

...Ruckelshaus's answer was short...

...They argue that "we need more information before we can do anything...

...Even the major environmental organizations are becoming far more receptive...

...Both are right...

...Once these rights are on the market, industries will buy and sell them among each other, until each company reaches the point where it is cheaper to clean up its remaining pollution, rather than to buy more rights to pollute...

...How would it work...

...As an owner of resources, you want to conserve them...

...Take, for example, the issu&of acid rain-an admittedly thorny subject, which Ruckelshaus has called the biggest environmental problem facing the nation today...

...Power companies would look for the cheapest way to take sulfur out of the air-instead of stonewalling, as they do now...

...There is no reason why the Administration can't begin publicizing its efforts, either...

...How does a landlord do this...

...Scientific studies on one side show that forests in the Northeast may soon be wiped out...

...But these movements soon became much more violent than even the radicalized upper-middle-class people of that era were willing to tolerate...

...The first Reaganauts to arrive at EPA were suspicious of the bubble policy, because it had originated under the Carter Administration...

...We have no landed aristocracy...

...Again the questions are: 1) How bad is it...

...At first, they used their new security to patronize black radicalism and the "youth rebellion...

...After about an hour of complaining over recent EPA decisions from these people, I managed to pose "one last question...

...The question of what happened in the United States during the 1970s to make environmentalism a "liberal" issue is one worth long pondering...

...If you want to solve an environmental problem, the first thing to do is to hire an academic consultant to write a 3,000-page environmental impact statement...

...Benign government intervention is always the solution...

...When Sierra Club Director David Brower took sides in the 1956 election, he ran considerable risk by announcing himself a "Republican for Stevenson...

...OPEC, for example, has always claimed it was only "conserving" oil by charging the highest possible price...

...Market solutions are usually only acceptable as compromises of last resort...

...Environmentalism has always been a conservative issue...

...They go around telling each industry what kind of equipment to put on every smokestack...

...If en-vironmentalism really is "everybody's issue," there is no reason it can't be a big item on the agenda of the new Republican majority.n it can't be a big item on the agenda of the new Republican majority...

...As it is today, the EPA and state pollution agencies make all the decisions themselves...

...What they fear- quite rightly-is that these mechanisms will not replace existing regulation, but will only become another layer of bureaucracy superimposed on the current morass...

...David Stockman and the Grace Commission criticize the same projects because they squander government money...

...It's not that corporations don't like market mechanisms for pollution control...

...This is what the Conservation Movement tried to do in the early 1900s, and what many environmental groups would like to do even more of today...

...They know the halcyon days of the early Carter Administration are gone forever...

...Theodore Roosevelt was a Republican, as was his fellow Conservation leader, Gifford Pinchot...

...Because they own the resources themselves...

...The EPA puts an imaginary bubble over a large factory, and assumes that all the emissions are coming out of a single smokestack...

...Yet there are obviously better ways to resolve the problem...

...In my book, Progress and Privilege: America in the Age of Environmentalism, I spent considerable time trying to explore how this process occurred...

...Federally owned water in the West, for example, often sells to farmers at only one one-hundredth its potential market value...

...Republicans have been helpless against this onslaught...

...You want to keep them in the best condition, holding up their value, and-if they must be sold-putting them on the market for only the highest possible price...

...Environmentalists have always been outraged by these practices, charging that they overexploit natural resources...

...What they soon discovered was another kind of "anti-establishmentarianism"-the old, aristocratic, anti-business attitudes that have been lying around among the "old rich" since the early days of the Industrial Revolution...

...Take, for example, the problem of air pollution...

...That was itThis dispirited performance amazed me...

...Environmentalism, for example, has always been a huge growth industry in academia...

...As it stands now, the situation is in the hands of the "experts"-which is to say at the lowest rung of the political ladder...

...That is why everybody-from hard-nosed industrialist to ethereal bird-watcher-is usually an environmentalist in his own neighborhood...

...All the Republicans can do is hold their breath and hope the public won't judge them too harshly on the issue...

...These people would start conserving electricity-which is the exact, appropriate response needed to improve the situation...

...Around California, right through the early 1960s, being in the Sierra Club was almost the equivalent of membership in the state's Old Republican Guard...

...There is no point in debating that subject...

...John Baden, Richard Stroup, and the young economists at the Center for Natural Resources and Political Economy in Bozeman, Montana, have written dozens of monographs and books dealing with government policies on Western lands...

...That is absolutely correct...

...All parties will come to them only after each has abandoned the idea of winning the game entirely through outright control of the bureaucracy...

...Why is it that the Republicans continue to squander one of their best opportunities of the decade to rid themselves of a false issue, and instead continue to hand over the diadem of environmental purity to the Democrats...

...First, Midwestern utility companies would have to buy up some of the rights, in order to continue operating...

...It is a question of the public's desire for industrial prosperity versus its countervailing desire to minimize pollution...

...This has been the fate of all the old Conservation agencies-the Reclamation Bureau, the Bureau of Land Management, and the National Forest Service-that were set up or revitalized under Theodore Roosevelt...

...Then he reminisced a bit about the day in 1972 when he and Senator Edmund Muskie went down to the Internal Revenue Service and tried to get them to accept a "pollution tax" as a way of dealing with sulfur emissions into the atmosphere...

...Yet landlords have a crucial role to play in modern capitalism...

...Private motivation- "greed," as it is called-is always the cause of environmental problems...

...In this kind of situation, the responsibility of government should be to construct a mechanism by which people can choose the kind of environment they want...

...The great virtue of such a system would be that all the parties would get to make their own choices in the matter-instead of having everything depend on who can put the most political pressure on the bureaucracy...

...In Europ'e, environmentalists have nearly always been members of the "activist" aristocracy...

...This way, everyone's private interest can be turned to the cause of improving the environment...

...Yet it is precisely in these situations that political leadership becomes most important...

...Dozens of economists have studied it, and all have come to the same conclusion...

...The solution we have come up with in the United States is to let the government retain most of the resources, and practice conservation out of good will-rather than economic incentives...

...Costs would be shared, and people would get what they pay for...

...Why sit back and accept the portrait foisted on them by the press and environmentalists that Republicans are the enemies of the environment, while Democrats are the knights in shining armor rushing to save Mother Nature from the clutches of Big Business...

...Instead, accurate information would become crucial in making the right decisions...

...They conserve resources by pursuing their own private interest...

...The EPA now has thriving "pollution markets" operating in Louisville, Seattle, Pittsburgh, and San Francisco...

...With an, irreplaceable resource- priceless scenery, for example-you don't want to sell it at all...

...Thus, the landlord maximizes his own profit and conserves the resources, all at the same time...

...This is the normal way in which the market achieves "environmental protection...

...Landlords are the forgotten players in modern industrial economies...

...Since people on both ends would be paying the cost of their choices, there will be a premium on getting the best information possible, rather than parading out wild exaggerations for the benefit of "policymakers" and the press...

...It comes with the job...

...The best way to deal with air pollution is to have the government sell "marketable rights" to dump waste into the atmosphere...

...2) How are we going to do it...

...The real questions are: 1) What kind of standards of purity are we going to try to achieve...

...In fact, it once was...

...They finally realized its virtues, however, and began promoting it...

...Yet this is exactly what we don't have now...

...In England nearly all the trout streams are privately owned...

...The Anglers won, and the power companies were quickly forced to clean up their technology...

...The Sierra Club has just come up with its own blueprint for a government-controlled economy...

...With the renewable or non-renewable natural resources, his strategy is to market the resource as slowly as possible, at the highest possible price...

...As a consequence of all this, scientific studies would no longer be political footballs that experts throw back and forth at one another...

...For the life of me, I can't understand it...

...On Earth Day in 1970, Barry Goldwater was the featured speaker at one liberal Long Island University...

...In America, however, there has always been one great problem...

...It is their responsibility to protect resources...

...This would give all sides of the controversy the means to settle the issue among themselves, without waiting four, eight, twelve, or sixteen years to see what kind of policy emerges out of Washington...

...Why, I asked Mr...

...The Natural Resburces Defense Council fought the case all the way to the Supreme Court, before the bubble policy was finally upheld in a unanimous decision last spring...

...The factory owner is then left free to decide where he will clean up in order to meet the emissions standard...

...When 1960s liberals became 1970s environmentalists, they brought with them their entire-set of intellectual baggage...

...The resolution of these conflicts is determined by who has the political muscle to make his "expert opinion" stick...

...Everyone is in favor of clean air...

...Economic mechanisms have unlimited potential in dealing with the nation's environmental issues...

...The pollution tax, which the Nixon Administration toyed with in 1972, is markedly inferior because it involves endless government guesswork about where to set the tax...

...Scientific studies on the other say that power plants may not even be involved-or that the damage has been exaggerated...

...To the extent that they are still acknowledged, landlords are perceived only as enemies, both by the business community, and by the great mass of consumers...

...A clean environment and a healthy economy is not an either/or proposition...

...Consumers would conserve electricity, since they would now be paying the long-hidden external costs of their consumption...

...The costs they incurred would be passed on to users of electricity-who would thus start paying the "external costs" of their consumption...

...and 2) the amount that pollution-conscious people in New England and Canada (or anywhere in the country, for that matter) are willing to pay to reduce acid rain...

...There is no reason that the marketable-rights concept can't be quickly elevated to a national policy and applied to all kinds of environmental problems...

...This means you dole the resource onto the market as abstemiously as possible, always weighing possible future worth against present potential value...

...Second, the people in Canada and New England would have the option to buy up some of the marginal rights and "retire" them, forcing polluters to cut back on their sulfur emissions...

...When confronted with an environmental issue, Republicans automatically cede the high ground to the purists...

...This way, we would get the same reductions in pollution, but at the cheapest possible cost...

...Environment RECLAIMING CONSERVATIVE GROUND by William Tucker Last September, I was invited to Washington by the Heritage Foundation to join a group of people meeting with William Ruckelshaus, then director of the Environmental Protection Agency, to discuss second-term issues...

...Upper-middle-class liberals took their new-found political activism and fused it with this old, aristocratic condescension toward nouveau-riche business classes...

...Right now the "we-need-more-information" advocates have the upper hand...

...The group was generally drawn from that army of Washington lobbyists who spend their time buzzing around congressional committees and federal agencies, trying to get them to omit a comma here, or reinterpret a clause there, in a way that will ultimately mean millions of dollars to their clients...

...and 3) Who is going to pay for it...

...Perhaps the best way to begin to understand the situation is to realize that environmentalism is basically the politics of landlords...

...Instead, we have a system where Washington bureaucrats are given blanket authority to carry out vague mandates that Congress never really bothered to understand in the first place...

...2) How much are people willing to pay to remedy the situation...

...Thus, all the right incentives would be in place...

...James Buckley has always been an enthusiastic environmentalist, and still writes indignant editorials about endangered species...

...All have ended up captives of their consumer clientele...

...There is no question that sulfur emissions from Midwestern power plants are increasing the acidity of rain that falls in New England and Canada...

...The groundwork for these new approaches to environmental policy has long been laid...

...Paul Portney and Henry Peskin at Resources for the Future, and Robert Crandall at the Brookings Institution, both in Washington, have long elucidated the case for applying economic reasoning to environmental problems...

...Pollution is not a matter of "big corporations versus the public interest...

...Ruckelshaus, did the Reagan Administration have to be so passive about environmentalism...

...Yet this picture is completely false...

...What the federal government should do is to put an imaginary bubble over the entire Midwest and sell the rights to dump sulfur into the atmosphere over Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Michigan...

...It would put the environmental decision-making back in the hands of the people...

...The federal agencies go their own way, creating monumental, unknown costs to be borne anonymously by the entire economy...

...The marketable-rights approach has already been tried on a small scale with the EPA's "bubble" concept, which was introduced in the late 1970s...

...The result was what I called the "conservatism of the liberals"-modern environmentalism...

...What the government can do well, on the other hand, is to set up property-rights systems, and let private people play the game of environmental protection...

...Democrats consort with the angels, while Republicans wallow in the industrial mire...

...It would get results-and efficiently, too-rather than continuing the endless rounds of scientific evaluations and court cases that are always grinding on in Washington, never leading anywhere...

...Landlords are the world's true environmentalists...

...Why doesn't the Administration call a press conference and announce it is seeking the help of environmental groups in trying to cut the waste of tax dollars on federal water projects...

...Then let the Democrats and environmentalists respond to the Republican agenda, instead of always leaving the Administration on the defensive...

...What we need is a new understanding of environmentalism-an understanding that tells us why environmentalism is always such a universally popular issue in the abstract, but difficult to implement in practice...

...Government, however, does not make a very good landlord...

...They run across the old baronial estates that have been in some families since the Middle Ages...

...By all odds, it should be a Republican issue...

...I guess we should have quit before this last question," he said...

...Democrats and environmentalists propose, while Republicans prevaricate...

...To these questions, everyone has different answers...

...Why do they do it...

...Democrats grandly announce that government will clean up every toxic waste dump in the country, and when Republicans try to enlist the financial support of business to undertake this monumental task, they are "taking polluters to lunch...

...It is, in effect, a marketable-rights policy applied to a single plant...

...Once the proper system is designed, all that is necessary is to "let the market do the work...

...No way," said the IRS, "the tax system shouldn't be used as a vehicle for dealing with pollution...

...And the victimized states would be able to make realistic evaluations of how much pollution reduction they really want- instead of asking for the moon and getting almost nothing, as they do now...

...Every environmental debate begins with this inevitable format...

...The New Republic, for example, had just run a cover story called "The Reagan Chain-Saw Massacre," which debated whether the Administration's policy toward the environment has been a "seduction" or a "rape...

...In fact, on many of these constructive proposals, it is probably business groups that will be the most likely to drag their feet...

...There is considerable damage being done...

...With the "priceless" resource, he doesn't let anybody disturb anything, but perhaps charges people to view it, in order to offset the costs of maintaining it in perfect condition...

...We need a sensible, Republican agenda for environmentalism...

...In fact, OPEC has encouraged so much technical improvement in consuming oil that it is now conserving more oil than it might otherwise have desired...

...You simply want to preserve it, keeping it in its pristine state...

...When I made a tour among the leading environmental groups a year ago, I found many of them had just put economists on their staff for the first time in history...

...Industries would then have to buy the rights to pollute-instead of doing it for free, as they do now...

...On many issues-like subsidized Western water projects-enlisting their support would probably mean nothing more than scheduling a joint press conference between the environmental groups and members of the Grace Commission to announce their common objectives...

...With natural resources that are not unique-renewable or non-renewable energy resources, for instance-you want to conserve them...

...Don't ask me...

...This is the kind of leadership opportunity awaiting the Reagan Administration in its second term...

...A few years ago, when power plants started dumping pollutants into these streams, the landowners formed the Anglers' Association, which promptly sued the power companies on the basis that the power plants were destroying private property...

...The Democrats present them with an agenda-'trees or factories"-and the Republicans can only hang their heads and mutter "factories...

...They overutiiize the resources under their jurisdiction, selling them at subsidized prices and using tax revenues to make up for their losses...

...Environmental groups are obviously looking for compromise...

...Britain's most publicly outspoken advocate for wildlife preservation is Prince Philip...

...Instead, upper-middle-class people needed something that was at once "antirestablishment," but not so obviously dangerous...

...It is usually under too much pressure from the great mass of consumers to overexploit its own resources, turning them over to consumers at artificially low prices...

...Therefore environmentalism in the United States has become a public issue...

...The result is endless court fights, with very little movement toward actual cleanup...

...Politicians can divest themselves of special interest groups, and play a truly constructive role in mediating between parties and setting up a system that works in everybody's interest...

...At this point, the professional environmentalists decided that if the Reagan Administration was for the bubble, they must be against it...

...Almost all larger resources-lakes and streams, deserts and mountains-belong to the government...

...Environmental protection comes about through the operation of the invisible hand in an unfettered economy...

...and 3) Who should bear the costs...

...We tried that under Nixon and it didn't work," he concluded...

...Why not, I asked, put forth a Republican environmental agenda-featuring, among other things, some of the "market mechanisms" that have been proposed by economists in recent years for dealing with pollution problems...

...In the 1960s, I believe, a lot of upper-middle-class people reached unprecedented levels of material comfort...

...In fact, it is probably fair to say that-as with all market solutions- these policies have no real "natural" constituency...

...The marginal price of these rights would reflect two things: 1) the amount that Midwestern electrical consumers are willing to pay to go on polluting New England and Canada...