Earth Day 2002
President Bush used Earth Day 2002 to tout his credentials as and environmentalist and bolster support for his “Clear Skies” initiative to reduce emissions of mercury, sulfur dioxide, and nitrogen oxide by 70 percent. Beside Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Christie Todd Whitman, Bush described the 1990 Clean Air Act amendments signed into law by his father as “a model for success” and argued that “Clear Skies” would build on the Act to further improve air quality, health, and energy availability.
While President Bush bled green in Lake Placid, New York, former Vice President Al Gore did him one better in nationally-covered speech in Nashville, Tennessee. Gore blasted the administration’s porous environmental policies, questioned the role top energy corporations played in formulating set policies, and implicitly accused Bush of willfully deceiving the American public to achieve short-term political goals. Much of the speech was previewed in Gore’s New York Times op-ed published on Sunday.
It is no secret that polls show “the environment” to be Bush’s biggest political vulnerability. In response, strategists inside the administration have advised the president to take steps to blunt this advantage. The acceptance of new rules proposed by the Clinton administration – most notably a reduction in arsenic levels, mandatory diesel fuel reformulation, and the creation of more “roadless” wilderness areas – and the ambitious new Clear Skies regulatory initiative make Bush’s record on the environment at least as interventionist as his predecessor.
Even Bush’s position on the issue for which he has taken the most heat from greens – Global warming – is hardly different from Clinton’s. If anything, it is far more regulatory. Bush would create a “voluntary” program where utilities can earn future tax credits or regulatory favors if they reduce their carbon dioxide emissions below a government-specified level. Although Vice President Gore did sign the Kyoto Protocol, the administration was well aware that it stood no chance of being ratified by the Senate and never took any concrete steps to institute a workable alternative. Bush’s proposal does precisely that.
The great irony in all of this is that Bush’s efforts have not only gone unrewarded, but have actually seemed to stoke the fire of his critics. Listening to Gore on Monday would leave the uniformed observer to believe that Bush was repealing the environmental laws one-by-one. Yet it is not only the uninformed observers who might think that. It seems that reporters from the Washington Post and The New York Times feel that way too.
Perhaps the best example of the media’s inveterate desire to make Bush seem “bad” on the environment was the furor generated by Bush’s decision to delay implementation of the Clinton arsenic regulations pending a more complete cost-benefit analysis. The delay did nothing to change current arsenic levels, but Democrats and the elite media wasted no time in suggesting that it did. When Bush’s EPA capitulated in November of last year and implemented the Clinton standards, it was met with scant coverage in the papers and no mention in television news. In yesterday’s address, Vice President Gore implied that Bush actually sought to increase arsenic levels and failed to mention that the new tougher standards went into effect.
As a recent editorial in The New Republic joked, “no matter how hard they try, the Republicans just can’t make themselves sound good on the environment.” After all, Republican administrations are responsible for the creation of the EPA, signing both Clean Air Acts, and the implementation of Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards on auto manufacturers. Despite this record of “achievement,” the environment has been an Achilles’ Heel for the party for the past thirty years. It is unlikely that Bush’s regulatory agenda will do anything to change this dynamic.
But not only has Republican regulatory intervention done little to immunize the party from attack, there is also little evidence that it has helped the environment. As ample evidence indicates, the most statistically significant factor in improving environmental quality and public health is economic growth. When regulations undermine incentives for wealth creation, they may have the unintended consequence of actually contributing to illness and environmental degradation. A 1999 study from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) found that where industrial output collapsed, environmental standards declined. Conversely, the best performing economies in the developing world were the ones that witnessed the greatest improvements in environmental quality.
In the United States, economic growth has also proved to increase environmental standards. Between 1975-1993, U.S. Gross Domestic Product (GDP) increased by 65 percent, while carbon monoxide and sulfur dioxide levels dropped by an average of 55 percent. Wealth also permits investment in water purification and paves the way for the very debates about standards currently underway. Impoverished regions like sub-Saharan Africa and rural China have generations of wealth creation to go before their drinking water and mortality rates can even compare to those of the dirtiest places in the U.S.
When the Bush administration spurns its conservative and market-oriented allies on the environment, it stands alone against a relentless and well-funded opposition. As long as Republicans are unwilling to confront the orthodoxy that maintains that economic growth and environmental improvement are at odds with one another, or that a “balancing act” is required between the two extremes, the party will be saddled with a bad reputation and the nation will be hampered with command-and-control policies that limit economic growth and compromise improvements in the environment.
No Republican is ever going to out-do Al Gore when it comes to environmental micromanagement. But given a choice between his environmental Maoism and ecological and health improvements based on property rights and prosperity, voters may not mind a genuine Republican alternative to Gore’s hard green rhetoric.
