New tactics needed for today's war on environmental damage

Today's dubSJ features compelling commentary on how the environmental challenges we face today demand a different strategy. Its author is William Ruckelshaus, the first-ever administrator of the U.S. EPA. He contends the job was relatively easy in the 1970s and 80s: the problem was visible ("yellow sludge flowing into blue rivers," "black smudges against the barely visible blue sky") and the benefits of action accrued to those who undertook the costs (the costs of pollution were borne more or less instantaneously in the form of poor health and environmental degradation). Today, Enemy Number 1 is invisible and imposes costs not on the current generation, but on future generations:

On these kinds of issues where the payer and beneficiary are not the same, the American people are ideological liberals and operational conservatives. They are all for the promised results; they just don't want to pay for them. Little wonder that most people will tell their pollsters they are in favor of reducing the impact of our current lifestyle on future generations, but their scant support for policies that will accomplish that belie their commitment.

To this assessment I would only add that the problem is also a function of the fact current generations that do not contribute to solutions share in the benefits. The basic problem, then, is that in both a spatial and a temporal dimension, the benefits of action on climate change are not fully internalized to the actors. I do believe most would act to protect their offspring if they knew with some degree of certainty that costly action was necessary to protect future generations and if they knew others wouldn't be allowed to free ride. The fact that GHG emissions are a global public bad (that span's traditional political jurisdictions), then, is the biggest obstacle to a climate change solution. It isn't the delay in reaping rewards.

Ruckelshaus is in favor of Pigouvian taxes, roughly speaking, and opposed to heavy regulation in order to solve current environmental problems:

We need more democracy, not less. Trying to enact rules centrally to control the behavior of hundreds, sometimes thousands of people in a watershed when their individual contribution is minuscule, but collectively overwhelming, is futile. We have been trying a command-and-control, top-down approach for the past four decades to control non-point sources of water pollution. The examples of the Great Lakes, Chesapeake Bay and Puget Sound are grim testimony to our failure. If one solution doesn't work, the answer is not to push it harder but to look for new approaches.

This suggests he opposes the current EPA administrator's efforts to regulate carbon emissions under the Clean Air Act. He also suggests that getting good information in the hands of the public will lead them to make "correct" decisions. I am not so convinced, but this premise is something I am currently trying to test empirically in several different contexts. In the end, Ruckelshaus is an optimist, having faith that we can "harmonize human prosperity and growth with environmental protection."