Greg Easterbrook, writing in The New Republic, argues that departing Environmental Protection Agency chief Mike Leavitt is moving to Health and Human Services because he’s realized that “environmental regulatory reform is currently impossible.”
Easterbrook puts a share of the blame on “Democrats, enviros, and editorialists,” who have opposed environmental initiatives pushed by the White House “solely to prevent Bush from ending up with the credit for doing something good.” Exhibit A is Bush’s Clear Skies legislation, offered in 2002, which would rely on a system of tradable permits to regulate amounts of smog-forming pollutants emitted by factories and power plants.
Easterbrook writes, “It was true that the goals of Clear Skies were little different from future reduction targets under the existing language of the Clean Air Act.” But he’s being disingenuous from the start. It’s not just that the Clear Skies reduction targets are “little different” from what would be achieved by simply enforcing the Clean Air Act. It’s that Clear Skies, despite its name, would actually lead to more pollution than the existing Clean Air Act, because current law calls for further reductions over time.
In other words, either Clear Skies or strict enforcement of the Clean Air Act would make the air cleaner than it is today. But enforcing current law will achieve greater reductions than would Clear Skies.
Easterbrook goes on to argue that Clear Skies, by getting rid of case-by-case negotiations with power plants and factories, would cut down on litigation and therefore speed up enforcement. But he fails to note that environmentalists simply don’t believe that the putative benefits of faster enforcement would offset the drawbacks of weakening the Clean Air Act to allow more pollution. And they contend the Bush administration could solve some of the enforcement problems — without having to fundamentally re-shape one of the nation’s most successful environmental laws — simply by cracking down on known polluters who violate the law. That’s something it has shown little eagerness to do.
Easterbrook’s conclusion to the Clear Skies saga is of a piece with his one-sided report; it’s also a masterpiece of journalistic sleight-of-hand. He writes: “For reasons of political theater, Democrats and enviros were opposed to a bill to reduce pollution…” [italics his]. This is true only in the narrowest, most technical sense: Yes, the Clear Skies Act would have reduced pollution from today’s levels, but those reductions would have been less than what would be achieved if only current law were actually enforced.
In any meaningful sense, Clear Skies allows for more, not less, pollution, than laws on the books. Perhaps that’s why environmentalists opposed it. But you won’t learn that from reading Easterbrook.
–Zachary Roth
Zachary Roth is a contributing editor to The Washington Monthly. He also has written for The Los Angeles Times, The New Republic, Slate, Salon, The Daily Beast, and Talking Points Memo, among other outlets.