Brooks on the Environment

Lots of Iraq talk of late in this space, so let's change gears and discuss David Brooks' NYT column on the environment.

Now, we can be fair about this:  Brooks is not explicitly taking sides.  But he's sure dumbing down the debate.  Hence, he must be destroyed.

he journalist has the ultimate power, a cynic once said, the power to choose whom to be co-opted by.

That temptation is never greater than when you are writing about environmental policy. You can go to the environmental groups and get one set of facts. Or you can go to the industry groups and get an entirely different set of facts. Both sides have long histories of exaggeration and distortion, and there's no other realm of public policy in which it is so hard to find honest brokers, capable of offering a balanced perspective.

There is a kernel of truth here.  I know from working at an enviro group that we always seized on the numbers that best helped us out, rhetorically.  So, for instance, we were always flinging about the "only 6 months of oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge" when most studies said it was still quite low but not that low.  However, this falls into the trap that I despise, which is insinuating that the lies told by PAID "special interests" are as bad as the lies told by NON-PROFIT "special interests."  There's little question that industry plays with the truth far more--they, after all, have a profit incentive to do so.  How does the Sierra Club or Greenpeace or whomever have a profit incentive to lie?  They don't.  Additionally, nonpartisan groups like the National Academy of Sciences almost never--possibly never--side with industry on their environmental claims.

Nonetheless, over the past couple of decades, I've stumbled across a few, and I've been consulting them in the hope of getting a grip on the Bush clean-air record.

The first thing to be said is that air pollution trends are unchanged under President Bush. For the past three decades, the quality of our air has steadily improved. Air pollution from the six major pollutants has decreased by 48 percent over that time, even though our economy has grown by 164 percent. If you look at the charts showing that decline, you can't tell when the Clinton era ended and the Bush era began.

Shameful.  Just shameful.  Air pollution trends don't change over three years.  The question is what Bush's policy changes will have over the next ten to twenty years.  This is not altogether unlike saying "Missile defense is not a big deal--we have just as much missile defense now as we did under Clinton!" while ignoring the fact that we've sunk BILLIONS more into the program, which has a long-term impact.

The Bush administration's biggest air pollution failure has been its inability to restart the global warming debate. There is ample evidence that we have a long-term global warming problem, and the sooner we address it the better. The old approach, the Kyoto treaty, was never going to be ratified by the Senate. But the administration could have moved aggressively to find another way forward. Instead it proposed a pitiable voluntary program, which has had no effect

True.

The administration's biggest success has been its regulation of diesel fuels. In the face of fierce industry hostility, the Bush crowd decided that the benefits of diesel regulation far outweighed the costs. The Bush initiatives were applauded by even its most ardent critics. An official from the Natural Resources Defense Council called the diesel emissions regulations "the most significant public health proposal in decades."

Might have been nice if Brooks had noted that the diesel regulation was a Clinton plan that Bush has graciously allowed to go into effect.  Not his plan, see?

The most ambitious Bush proposal is over the nature of environmental regulation itself. Bush inherited a command-and-control regulatory regime called new-source review, which has metastasized into a regulatory behemoth. Bureaucrats try to issue rules site by site. Industries have a perverse incentive to rely on older high-pollution plants. The review process is opaque, expensive and riddled with litigation.

GOP/industry (note the inseparability) talking points right here.  The new source review program did NOT provide an incentive to rely on older plants.  It provided a disincentive to do so.  It was, in fact, the dodging of the NSR requirements that resulted in reliance upon high-pollution plants.  If the electric power industry wasn't so dedicated to minimizing costs irrespective of externalities like the environment and human health, then NSR would have worked perfectly.  That's not to say the thing couldn't be tinkered with or streamlined, but the Bush administration did their tinkering with a sledgehammer.

The administration is trying to supersede it with a cap-and-trade system, in which the government would set caps on overall emissions, allow companies flexibility on how to meet them and give firms the chance to buy and sell emissions credits. This general approach was recently embraced by a comprehensive study by the National Research Council. It builds on a phenomenally successful cap-and-trade provision in the 1990 Clean Air Act, which controls sulfur dioxide emissions at 25 percent of the cost of the old regulatory system.

Nonetheless, for two years Jim Jeffords and a Democratic-led coalition have blocked the Bush initiative. Many Democrats have in the past backed cap-and-trade reforms, but they don't want to allow Bush a victory. This has had several bad effects. The administration has tried to enact the reforms by administrative fiat, which means litigation and delay. More important, it means that there is no discussion or compromise on some remaining points of dispute.

Oh, my.  Blaming the Dems?  Where to begin......first of all, it's true that NRDC and various other environmental groups have embraced the policy of cap-and-trade for various pollutants.  But embracing the system theoretically doesn't mean you embrace the system in whatever pathetic incarnation that it includes. 

Loosely, cap and trade systems involve setting a cap on the total level of pollutants and then selling "permits to pollute" that can be traded.  So, to simplify it, one could set the cap at 10 million tons of CO2 a year.  Then there are 10 million permits, each worth one ton of CO2.  If a company emits no CO2 at all, they can sell their permit to another company who wants to emit CO2, or needs to.  Thus, there's an incentive to improve emissions, because if you don't emit you don't have to pay for a permit.  And the cap ensures that overall emissions lower.

But there are three issues:  where to set the cap, when to start the system, and what pollutants to include.  Enviros hate the Bush plan because the caps proposed are generally barely better than the status quo, if at all, so if the enviros want a 50% cut in NOx, then Bush only wants a 20% cut.  Also, Bush wants these things implemented slowly--for example, he wants mercury standards to be pushed back fourteen years.  Finally, Bush wants to include mercury in the cap and trade program.  As I've written before this is really bad, because unlike high-atmosphere pollutants, mercury is too heavy to transfer on prevailing winds and consequently stays close to its emissions point.  So companies that are allowed to emit a lot of mercury will create serious mercury poisoning problems nearby. 

Brooks is essentially saying that Bush's plan shouldn't be blocked because it's better than nothing.  But it's BARELY better than nothing, in some cases worse, and allowing one terrible plan will stop any good plans from moving forward.  That's simple legislative reality.

It could have been worse, but Brooks is still shilling for Bush on the environment.  He faults enviros and the Dems for not coming up with something else, but it's clearly because he doesn't understand the difference between offense and defense.  When George Bush is the president, it's necessary to play defense all the time when you're one of the good guys.  Because he's always got the ball.  Trying to play offense on the environment is a waste of time, and it just exposes you to the fast break.  Stopping Bush plans is a victory, even if it means the status quo prevails.

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