Today is Earth Day. The Antiplanner remembers the first Earth Day in 1970, when it was called the National Environmental Teach-In. As a senior in high school in Portland, I had already started my first environmental group, whose pretentious and somewhat ominous name was the “Regional Environmental Research and Control Organization,” which we abbreviated to “ERC.”
Since ERC was already up and running, we had one of the largest environmental teach-ins at any Portland school. We brought in State Treasurer (and future governor) Bob Straub, City Commissioner (and future major) Neil Goldschmidt, City Commissioner (and also future mayor) Frank Ivancie, as well as representatives from state and regional water and air pollution agencies.
In 1970, when Portland photographer Ray Atkeson tried to take a photo like this, there was so much pollution that he had to stitch together a photo of Mt. Hood on top of a photo of the city. Now the mountain is visible from the city on any sunny day.
Flickr photo by RG Photo.
The environmental teach-in changed my life. Up to then, I wanted to become an architect. Instead, I decided to save the forests by going to forestry school and then to work for environmentalists, which is what I did.
As I describe elsewhere, I wasn’t the only one. Prior to 1970, most people going to forestry school were ruralites with what might be called a rural-land ethic, one that focused on resource use: hunting, fishing, timber cutting, mining, etc. After 1974, most forestry school graduates were urbanites with an urban-land ethic, one that focused on resource preservation.
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Unlike me, most post-Earth Day graduates went to work for the Forest Service or another timber company or forest land agency. But they didn’t lose their core attitude, and by 1990 many of them were gaining leadership positions within the agencies. This contributed to the 85 percent decline in national forest timber cutting between 1990 and 1995. So some of the credit for the change in the Forest Service after 1990 can go to Wisconsin Senator Gaylord Nelson, who first conceived of the 1970 Environmental Teach-In.
Although I say Earth Day changed my life, I sometimes suspect it wouldn’t have been much different otherwise. I was never really suited to be either a forester or an architect, so I imagine I would have eventually found economics either way. My education in economics helped me understand a lot about the environmental issues of 1970.
At that time, most environmental problems involved some polluter dumping stuff into an open-access resource (sometimes called a commons) like a stream or the air. Before 1970, there was no Clean Air Act or Clean Water Act, and many rivers (such as the Willamette in Portland) were so polluted you couldn’t swim in them and urban air was so polluted that you couldn’t see, for example, Mt. Hood from downtown Portland.
Today, those problems have been largely solved. Only clouds, not smog, obscure Mt. Hood from Portland and you can swim in the Willamette on any sunny day (watch out for rainy days, but that’s another story). Although these problems were solved with regulation, and not markets, that regulation relied on the same sorts of technological improvements that markets would have introduced. In any case, their resolution makes me optimistic about the future.
Such optimism is no longer admired in today’s environmental movement. Today, we are supposed to be afraid that the sky is falling and that only massive changes in lifestyles and massive growth of government can save us. The Antiplanner is dubious about this pessimistic view: If we have problems, we can solve them with new and better technologies, not by going back to nineteenth-century living conditions.
So while other people cry wolf, I’ll celebrate Earth Day by remembering the gains we have made: the reductions in pollution, the improvements in public forest management, the clean air, clean water, and wilderness we have saved, and by imagining the improvements that are going to come in the future if the heavy hand of government does not get in the way.
Although these problems were solved with regulation, and not markets, that regulation relied on the same sorts of technological improvements that markets would have introduced
Perhaps you can explain the incentives that would have inevitably driven polluters to stop polluting, in the absence of regulation.
Essentially, you are saying that in your day, environmentalists were realistic and eventually won because their policy suggestions were implemented through government interventions (taking advantage of emerging technologies) rather than through the market place.
You are also saying that today’s environmentalists unrealistically think that the same kind of government intervention (taking advantage of emerging technologies) can work to solve to today’s problems.
We have made enormous environmental strides in the last 30 years, and we should be proud of that. But we also must recognize that our effects on the environment are both more subtle and systemic to the way we currently live our lives.
In order to solve these problems, we need to look to what has worked in the past.
Short-term exposure to smog, or ozone, is clearly linked to premature deaths that should be taken into account when measuring the health benefits of reducing air pollution, a National Academy of Sciences review concludes.
Fortunately, we don’t have to worry about smog on planet earth because we can rely on altruistic businesses to invest in the necessary technologies to eliminate smog. Sure, such investments might cut into their profits, but if history has taught us anything, it’s that businesses care more about public health than private wealth.
http://www.cnn.com/2008/HEALTH/04/22/smog.death.ap/index.html
“Perhaps you can explain the incentives that would have inevitably driven polluters to stop polluting, in the absence of regulation.â€Â
The issue is always over the perceived magnitude of what collectivists like to call externalities and the cost and restriction to human liberty required to address them.
Otherwise, everything can be viewed as an externality. The fact that I’m a runner is an externality since my very increased lung breathing puts out additional CO2 into the atmosphere.
Reducing automotive pollution by 98% at a cost of $500 per vehicle seems like a good choice. But trying to force people to buy renewable electricity at $0.50/kWh when the conventional price is $0.10/kWh is trying to force a square peg into a round hole.
…Just wait until solar energy becomes competitive and then people will buy it voluntarily. Phenomena like climate changes have a time horizon of hundreds of years anyway. What difference would it make to be obsessed with trying to accelerate the development of alternative energy by 1-5-10 years? Most likely, technology will follow its course anyway.
Collective thinking is, in any case, notoriously ineffective at predicting and steering technological innovation. Was the predominant thinking in the 60s that the solution to automotive pollution lay in the development of the computer? Did we pour massive subsidies into integrated circuit with intent to address automotive pollution?
If technology cannot solve the problem then returning to the 19th century is not an option, regardless of global warming or not.
…The type of externalities I see enviroNIMBYs address is the fact that they cannot stand to see Dorothy English’s daughter additional house on the hill whenever they happen to mountain bike a mile away on some ridge.
I think this is quite different from spending $500 per vehicle to reduce automotive pollution by 98%.
werdnagreb,
I am saying that regulation that is based on trying to change people’s behavior is not going to work; regulation based on improving technologies will work far better.
Ettinger,
One way of using markets to deal with pollution is through cap-and-trade. Give everyone a permit or property right to pollute as much as they are polluting today. Then allow them to trade those permits. Want a new car? You have to buy a permit. Then you reduce pollution by allowing people to buy permits and not use them.
AP,
It seems logical to me that cap and trade is a better system than direct regulation, however I still remain skeptical of such schemes. For one, who and what determines what constitutes the appropriate cap level ?
While cap and trade gets around some of the special interests problem that you often describe, cap and trade is still regulation which will attract a large amount of corruption. In Europe’s carbon trading market I know of at least a few cases of profiting from “smoke and mirrors†carbon trading, bogus carbon savings etc. Needless to say, of course, that direct regulation has the same problems and more.
AP,
Ironically, I also started as what one might call an environmentalist. But I soon parted with the movement because I love nature and I soon realized that a large part of environmentalism had to do with restricting access to nature and its enjoyment.
Many people have followed that path. Over the years I have noticed that the environmental movement contains two main currents. One is the environmental NIMBYs who want to keep other people off their nature. The second is what I call Latte Environmentalists, urban dwellers who have little contact with nature, feel guilty for their civilized footprint on mother nature and somehow want to vaguely wash this sin by keeping other humans out of nature.
Our abrupt change to Ethanol has had a large part in doubling the cost of food world wide. Many families living on a dollar or two a day will not make it. Starving is real! Global Warming is still questionable.
Ettinger, Where do you get the idea that automotive pollution can be reduced by 98% at a cost of only $500 per vehicle? Leading auto makers have testified to Congress that it will cost thousands of dollars per vehicle, that Americans won’t pay that much, that this will cost tens of thousands of jobs. They have said this every time Congress has considered new emissions limits. Yet you claim the actual cost has turned out to be hundreds of dollars not thousands, for all of the emissions standards not each seperate one. It seems the auto makers aren’t much better at making predictions than government planners.
In a perfect world the markets would work perfectly. In our imperfect world they work imperfectly. That does require corrective action. Perhaps from the public or their chosen representatives, but I’ve seen what happens to thoroughly researched proposals when they collide with public opinion and/or pork barrel politics. It is actually better to have undemocratic regulation by technocrats. Economists, political and social scientists and [various subgroups] planners don’t count as technocrats since there’s nothing technical or scientific about the way they work.
Well if people observed the golden rule.
“Do on to others, as they’d have done on to you.”
Also Plato said:
“Good people do not need laws to act resposibly, while bad people will find ways around them”
Mr.O’Toole doesn’t observe or comprehend such things so despite his claims of being pro market, he’s really quite the opposite.