|
|
|
Advertisements
|
|
|
|
MINING
AFFAIRS FORUM
THE
CASE
AGAINST
THE EPA
BY KEN
THORNBERG
President
George Washington, in his Farewell Address, gave a piece of wise advice to the
new American citizens: “If in the opinion of the People, the distribution or
modification of the Constitutional powers be in any particular wrong, let it be
corrected by an amendment
in the way which the
Constitution designates. But let there be no change by usurpation;
for though this, in one
instance, may be the instrument of good, it is the customary weapon by which
free governments are destroyed. The precedent must always greatly overbalance in
permanent evil any partial or transient benefit which the use can at any time
yield.” (My emphasis) Well, an Executive Order of President Richard Nixon
created the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) on December 2, 1970. It was an
act of usurpation; there was absolutely no Constitutional authority to create
it.
It
was actually an illegal act that our other branches of government allowed to
happen. Today, that 20,000-employee agency has adopted central planning of our
environment with power as its theme over environmental quality, to paraphrase
law Professor David Schoenbrod, a former activist attorney from Yale who helped
launch the EPA.
It
is time to abolish this dinosaur at its ripe old age of 37 years. It is becoming
a more and more popular cry for people representing both left and right
political persuasions. This may sound like a radical position to take in this
day and age, but the EPA’s failures to protect our environment over what
common law accomplished in our past gives us pause. Even environmentalists are
noting that it has been a colossal failure.
EPA
Abolition Has Its Supporters
Dr.
Milton Friedman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, was one such leader who
suggested its abolition, prior to his death in 2006. Believe it or not, it will
not send America back to the Dark Ages. One reason I am sure Dr. Friedman saw
the wisdom in such an action was the fact that this largely unaccountable agency
spends most of its time and money on “ridiculously small risks to (our
environment),” according to Professor Bruce Ames, director of the National
Institute of Environmental Health Sciences Center at the Univ. of California.
Said Ames, “It misdirects vital economic resources that should be spent on far
more serious threats to health and safety.” The EPA regularly levies
burdensome sanctions and fines on companies, farmers and local communities for
what Professor Carl Winters, of the nation’s leading toxicologists, calls
“superexaggerated risks.” The EPA has this arrogance of a presumed moral
authority as the guardian of America’s health and environmental quality, a
role that the public has allowed it to adopt from a surrendering spirit. It is a
real shame that this mask has continued to be put up with. The central planning
model of caring for human health, safety and environmental quality is not the
efficient, salutary mechanism supporters had expected. Instead, it has become
hostile to anticipated fruit, according to former supporters such as Schoenbrod.
EPA
Successes are Misplaced
One
example of false assumptions of the EPA’s benefit has to do with air quality.
Environmentalists who favor big government credit the EPA with improving our air
quality. Yet, the truth is that air quality has been steadily improving since
the 1950s, due to technological advances and state and local air-pollution
standards targeting smoke, soot, and other emissions. Consider how many cities
have car emission rules that have been around for decades. The EPA had nothing
to do with those. Dr. Indur Goklany, who was in charge of technical assessment
for the National Commission on Air Quality, noted, “By the time the Clean Air
Amendments of 1970 had federalized air pollution control, smoke had been
conquered in most urban areas, and air quality was improving substantially in
the most polluted areas—particularly for the very pollutants perceived to be
causing the worst problems.” One
of EPA’s best-known failures has been the MSBE debacle. The agency required
this additive to gasolines in order to reduce air pollution that it did little
of. It cost refineries and consumers billions of dollars only to find that the
benefit was negligible at best. Gas spills discovered that this chemical would
not break down quickly like gasoline and thus it has ended up contaminating much
of our land. Even worse, it has found its way into the groundwater used by many
cities and communities throughout the U.S. Professor Schoenbrod postulates that
“the federal government should regulate only the very small fraction of
[pollutants] that states cannot regulate on their own without hurting other
states or other countries.” He would agree with me that bigger is not
necessarily better.
A
Better Solution
Returning
to Constitutional federalism of an earlier era by reducing regulatory control to
constitutionally appropriate state and local levels and thus restoring vital
checks and balances that are essential to sustainable liberty, is a better
solution. Why should Washington simply “know better?” Why should a
bloated federal government do a better job than state governments? The transfer
of power to the Feds has short-circuited a very important shield that protected
not only the environment but also the authority of state and local governments,
as well as private property rights (maybe the biggest issue).
Common
law, write Roger Meiners and Bruce Yandle in The
Common Law: How It Protects the Environment, “Common
law reflected the view that free people must take responsibility for their
actions and must be held responsible for their actions, with the courts
providing an important avenue for holding them accountable.
Today, in contrast, law is mostly regulatory management.
Citizens and their lawyers negotiate, arbitrate, and litigate with the
many arms of the pervasive regulatory state.”
They go on to observe, “Long ago, before the terminology of
environmental degradation evolved and the regulatory machinery began to
determine what constitutes illegal pollutants, people knew that they and their
property could suffer from noxious pollutants. Such pollution was offensive;
sometimes it injured people’s health and sometimes it damaged property values.
The protection against this invasion came primarily through legal actions for
trespass and nuisance. Those who allowed something noxious to escape their
control and invade the property of others could be held accountable for their
actions…” Meiners and Yandle went on to note that common-law protection of
water does not apply only to those who own property that abuts a waterway but to
all who have a right to use the water. Meiners and Yandle have found from their
survey of case law the past two centuries
that
courts have consistently upheld the property rights of farmers, small
communities and small landowners against pollution caused by big government and
big business. “The record is clear in common law cases: it imposes tough
liability on those who damage the environment - it works (better than)
politically inspired policies to impose costs on all.”
Why
It All Happened
Common
law was abandoned in favor of central planning even though it could not be based
on evidence of superior performance by government bodies. The evidence continues
to mount that governments are poor environmental stewards and that government
regulation is wasteful, cumbersome and sometimes ineffective.
Prof. Schoenbrod gave a startling admission to this: “As my generation
of petulant young elitists came to understand the ways of power, we learned the
trick of using the magic wand of idealism to obtain power.” It is this will to
acquire and exercise power, dangerous to both liberty and environmental quality
that our nation’s founders worked so hard to stymie, and they succeeded in
setting up our system of checks and balances. James Madison, in Essay #45 in the
Federalist Papers, wrote,” The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution
to the federal government are few
and
defined. Those which are to remain the state governments are numerous and indefinite.
The former
will be exercised principally on external objects, such as war, peace,
negotiation and foreign commerce…the powers reserved to the states will extend
to all the objects which…concern the lives, liberties, and properties of the
people, and the internal order, improvement and prosperity of the state.” My,
haven’t we forgotten so eloquent an idealism that we once took for granted?
It’s time. It is time for readers to begin asking their state and federal
representatives and senators to strongly consider putting an end to usurpations
of power in the name of protecting not only our environment, but also our own
lives and private property. Only then can we protect both our freedom and
environment for our future generations.
|
