Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, April 23, 1995 TAG: 9504220010
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: G-3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: J. WINSTON PORTER AND LYNN SCARLETT
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Specific legislation addressed these and other high-profile environmental problems. While we might dispute the details of this legislation, they did result in cleaner air and water in most cases.
In recent years, however, Congress and our Environmental Protection Agency have required more and more expenditures and paperwork to attack less obvious problems. Environmental regulations have grown exponentially, carrying an annual price tag of more than $150 billion.
But the price tag alone is not the problem. In some instances, dollars spent have not brought environmental improvement. In other instances, our federal laws have targeted insignificant risks. Finally, federal action has promoted a ``one-size-fits-all'' regulatory approach, even when local circumstances vary widely.
Superfund is exhibit A. Only a small percentage of Superfund hazardous-waste sites have been cleaned up since 1980. Estimates are that more than one-fourth of the money spent has gone to lawyers haggling for their clients over who will pay for site clean-up.
Congress and the EPA have insisted on keeping the lion's share of Superfund's budget and regulatory authority at the federal level. Yet what could be a more local problem than hazardous wastes in the soil, which normally affect only a few acres at most?
EPA typically takes about 10 years and $30 million to remediate a Superfund site. At one site in Fullerton, Calif., EPA actions have delayed clean-up by at least 10 years, according to California Secretary of the Environment James Strock.
State clean-up laws have been much more effective. Minnesota is completing site work in about three years with costs usually less than $5 million. New York has cleaned up 150 sites and Wisconsin more than 200, in contrast to a federal total for the whole nation of about 250 sites.
Exhibit B is the nation's asbestos-removal program. A massive federal program required removal of asbestos from schools and other institutions. It now turns out that removing asbestos may create more risk than leaving it in place.
Exhibit C is EPA's smog-check regulations. The EPA requires that some states use specific smog-test equipment. Yet the EPA had little evidence that such mandates result in cleaner air compared to other possible smog-check programs. Typical of other prescriptive regulations, EPA's smog-check requirements focus on specifying particular technologies or programs rather than identifying emission-reduction goals and letting states figure out how to achieve them.
Aggressive corrections to our federal environmental programs are in order. The drive for this change comes not from a repudiation of environmental values, but a recognition that many current programs have often been costly and poorly targeted.
Congress should call a brief timeout to look at what has worked and what has not, and make some major adjustments. We need to ask how purported benefits stack up against program costs. We need to ask whether uniform, federal prescriptions are appropriate where problems are local and clean-up needs vary. More importantly, we need to re-examine the impact that policies have on individual incentives.
Current Superfund laws create incentives for litigation rather than clean-up. Regulations that turn local dry-cleaners into criminals because they use toxic chemicals drive business owners to hide problems rather than seek technical advice in resolving pollution problems. The same perverse incentives apply to wetland and endangered-species laws that turn property owners into criminals if their land comes under regulatory scrutiny.
We know nonadversarial approaches can work. Iowa in the mid-'80s forged a program to reduce well contamination that relies on technical assistance to help farmers use fewer pesticides and herbicides. The result? Significant reductions in use of those chemicals.
The environmental debate before us is not a simple contest between the good guys and the bad, as recent pronouncements by some environmental interest groups would have us believe. It is a debate about how better to achieve environmental protection. Good guy-bad guy environmental rhetoric will not help us come to grips with an examination of what institutions, incentives and implementations will work best.
J. Winston Porter, former assistant administrator at the Environmental Protection Agency, is president of the Waste Policy Center in Sterling. Lynn Scarlett is vice president of research at the Los Angeles-based Reason Foundation.
by CNB