If You Pollute, Will They Prosecute?

There has always been a battle between environmental purists and big business over the “cost” of environmental pollution. What’s a life worth, or the quality of living versus shutting down a big industrial polluter and killing jobs or imposing expensive emissions restrictions that make a U.S. company totally uncompetitive in a global market?

Federal air quality statutes date back to the 1960s with tons of new laws and amendments ever since. Odd that the statutory roots of what we call “cap and trade” pollution policies (which allow companies either to meet legal pollution limits or pay for the right to pollute by buying and selling so-called “carbon credits” – pollution “permits,” if you will – on the open market) were developed during the George H.W. Bush Presidency to deal with the battle between smoke stack industries and the decimating impact of acid rain (resulting from sulfur emissions). The President’s compromise, a 1990 amendment that literally implemented our first cap and trade policy, passed easily: 401 to 25 in the House and 89 to 10 in the Senate. Its main strength: it was the easiest bill to sell to the Congress.

A little more than a decade later, George’s son… W… backtracked, pretty much stopped the Environmental Protection Agency dead in its tracks… and simply refused to enforce most of our environmental laws, until the U.S. Supreme Court ruled, in April of 2007, that the EPA’s failure to regulate greenhouse gasses as required by the Clean Air Act was simply unlawful. But H.W.’s earlier act made a huge difference on acid rain, despite the fears of environmentalists that it was just too easy for big business to buy the right to pollute. It worked.

The May 16^th NY Times: “[T]he sulfur dioxide cap, a roughly 50 percent reduction in emissions over the next decade, held. The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that compliance with the program is close to 100 percent… ‘Our proposal was at first ridiculed by environmentalists as little more than a license to pollute,’ said Representative Jim Cooper, a moderate Democrat from Tennessee and an early supporter of tradable permits. ‘But today, few dispute it is one of the government’s most successful regulatory programs ever.’”

But today, we have a new administration, and change is in the air. Congressmen Henry Waxman (D-Cal) and Ed Markey (D-Mass) are working on using that same fundamental cap and trade concept in legislation to create a new greenhouse emissions statute to bring the U.S. into compliance with international treaties and standards. Gone is the rhetoric of “voluntary compliance” or generally working towards reducing such carbon emissions, but will this new cap and trade bill find the kind of support that a Republican President generated with his efforts almost two decades ago?

And while acid rain was a terrible consequence of industrial growth, it was relatively containable and not even close to the order of magnitude of regulating global carbon emissions. Many debate whether this is even the correct methodology, a policy which seems to have had a difficult start in Europe. Environmentalist and former Vice President Al Gore is part of a chorus of supporters of a more direct tax on those who burn fossil fuels and emit carbon into the atmosphere: “Tax what you burn, not what you earn,” he chants, although he readily acknowledges that the cap and trade proposal fits in well with the efforts of other countries and is probably an easier political sell to Congress.

Whatever the remedy, it is time for the United States to step up to the plate and begin a process of solving a global problem rather than participating in its expansion. After all, just about every molecule of carbon emitted by mankind since the invention of fire and trapped in the upper atmosphere is still there. It is cumulative, and as I watch the seemingly unending California fire season, I have tangible proof in my own backyard that we need immediately to begin some pretty dramatic actions to curtain global climate change. I am joined by hurricane victims, drought-pressed farmers, flood victims, and a growing list of environmental casualties.

I’m Peter Dekom, and I approve this message.