The E.P.A. Fantasy: Science Conquers All
NEW YORK TIMES
By John Tierney
Tags: E.P.A., global warming
Now that the Supreme Court has ordered the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate emissions of carbon dioxide from cars, which of these scenarios is most likely?
a) The E.P.A.'s scientists will determine the proper level of emissions, and the agency will promptly order carmakers to comply.
b) The scientists' recommendations will be ignored by the Bush administration, but promptly adopted by the next president.
c) No matter who is elected, no matter what E.P.A.'s scientists recommend, nothing will happen anytime soon.
If history is any guide, the right answer is c. Ordering the E.P.A. to address global warming may be a legal victory for environment groups, but it will probably just slow progress against global warming. The Environmental Procrastination Agency, as I like to call it, has a hard enough time taking action against routine pollutants. It's in even worse position to deal with something as complicated as carbon dioxide, because the agency was founded on a fantasy: that scientific experts can transcend both politics and economics.
This was a convenient fantasy for members of Congress who wanted to duck tough decisions. They grandly ordered the E.P.A. to clean up the environment no matter what the cost. Its experts were to be above politics, and they were even forbidden to consider economic tradeoffs: they were supposed to make a scientific determination of safety and then order everyone to comply.
It sounded wonderful — until the experts actually tried ordering anything that was unpopular or expensive. Then they found themselves tied up in endless lawsuits and behind-the-scenes political maneuvering. It took the agency 15 years to deal with pollution from leaded gasoline, which was a trivially simple problem compared with global warming. It's a lot easier to estimate the health consequences of lead pollution than to scientifically determine a "safe" level of carbon dioxide. Yes, reducing emissions means lower risks from climate change, but climate scientists don't have any special expertise in figuring out how to make reductions. It takes economists to estimate the tradeoffs — and politicians to work out the compromises.
My favorite guide to the E.P.A. is David Schoenbrod, who sued to force the E.P.A. to take lead out of gasoline in the 1970s, when he was a lawyer for the Natural Resources Defense Council. The environmentalists won in court. But as Mr. Schoenbrod watched the agency dither, through both Republican and Democratic administrations, he became convinced that the lawsuit hadn't really been a victory — that lawmakers at the state and federal levels would have been forced to act sooner if the problem hadn't been delegated to the E.P.A. In his 2005 book, "Saving Our Environment from Washington," he proposes putting pressure on politicans by turning the E.P.A. from a regulatory agency into one that offers technical guidance to Congress and state legislatures.
Mr. Schoenbrod, now a professor at New York Law School, is not celebrating the latest "victory" by environmentalists. "The Supreme Court was correct in deciding that the Clean Air Act requires the EPA to regulate all pollutants, including global warming gases," he says. "What makes no sense is the premise of the Clean Air Act that Congress can solve all pollution problems by handing them over to the EPA. History shows that is wrong."
So what does he expect? Lots of litigation and little action. "Hard choices will have to be made and the agency lacks the legitimacy to make them," he says, "so the tendency will be to delay or make symbolic choices for as long as possible."
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