ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, April 21, 1996 TAG: 9604230025
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: 2 EDITION: METRO
TOMORROW is Earth Day 1996, the 26th such observance since Gaylord Nelson, a former U.S. senator and Wisconsin governor, founded it in 1970 as a way to heighten national awareness of environmental issues.
Along the way, the cause of environmental protection has both enjoyed successes and suffered setbacks. The water Americans drink and the air they breathe is cleaner than before; the American bald eagle has been brought back from the edge of extinction. But loss of habitat has kept high the extinction rate for lesser-known species; global industrialization and population growth continue to stress Earth's forests, oceans and atmosphere.
Along the way, a couple of underlying lessons have emerged:
Environmentalism is a cause embraced by not only, or even primarily, tree-huggers and back-to-the-land zealots.
Traditional forms of government intervention are not always, or even usually, the most effective way to safeguard the environment.
Environmental issues are of abiding interest to a broad swath of the American, and worldwide, public. If not unanimity, there is at least widespread consensus in this country that environmental protection is one of government's most important roles.
Moreover, environmental and related studies have become a major specialty in scientific research. The acquisition of knowledge has both made humankind aware of problems it hitherto didn't know existed and helped us find ways to solve or contain them.
Research interest in the environment isn't confined to life scientists and environmental engineers. Economists, too, are interested. They often cite pollution as a commonplace example of "market failure" - that is, of the market's failure in some situations to do what it normally does best, allocate resources efficiently.
In the case of pollution, this failure arises from the so-called free-rider problem. If those who benefit from pollution do not also bear the costs of that pollution - if, say, the dirty-water cost of a manufacturer's toxic effluent is involuntarily borne by parties (such as downstream landowners) external to the manufacturers' economic transactions - then the polluters have no market incentive for finding and adopting ways to cut costs by improving anti-pollution efficiency.
Enter, necessarily, government. But if the market sometimes fails, so of course does government. Command economies, as the fate of the Soviet Union has shown, are notoriously unproductive. Lacking the constant information feedback of information that market systems provide economic players, command economies end up allocating resources not just inefficiently but often bizarrely.
Traditionally, governmental efforts to protect the environment mimic command economies. Regulators, often working in a void of hard information, try to write rules to cover every situation conceivable; polluting industries are told not only what standards they must meet but also in precise detail how to meet them. Resources that could go to clean-ups instead are devoted to the cumbersome regulatory process itself; minimal risks are too often magnified and big risks minimized; the discovery and application of advances in environmental technology are slowed.
The challenge is to make environmental regulation more marketlike, to more closely connect profits from polluting to the costs that polluting exacts, to better define who "owns" pollution. Transferable tax credits that reward those who meet environmental standards are one way to do it; higher fuel taxes would be another.
The more that the costs of environmental degradation can be assigned to those who do the degrading, the likelier that environmental successes will outnumber the setbacks.
LENGTH: Medium: 69 linesby CNB