Understanding Environmental Policy

Steven Cohen

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780231537681
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Environment & Energy Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The first edition of this pragmatic course text emphasized the policy value of a "big picture" approach to the ethical, political, technological, scientific, economic, and management aspects of environmental issues. The text then applied this approach to real-world case examples involving leaks in underground storage tanks, toxic waste cleanup, and the effects of global climate change.

This second edition demonstrates the ongoing effectiveness of the book's framework in generating meaningful action and policy solutions to current environmental issues. The text adds case examples concerning congestion taxes, e-waste, hydrofracking, and recent developments in global climate change, updating references and other materials throughout and incorporating the political and policy changes of the Obama administration's first term and developments in national and global environmental issues.

PART I

DEVELOPING A FRAMEWORK

1

UNDERSTANDING ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY

DIFFERING PERSPECTIVES ON ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY

Environmental and sustainability policy is a complex and multidimensional issue. As Harold Seidman observed in Politics, Position, and Power: The Dynamics of Federal Organization, “Where you stand depends on where you sit.” That is, one’s position in an organization influences one’s stance and perspective on the issues encountered. Similarly, one’s take on an environmental issue or the overall issue of environmental protection and sustainable economic development varies according to one’s place in society and the nature of one’s professional training.

For example, to a business manager, the environmental issue is a set of rules one needs to understand in order to stay out of trouble. For the most part, environmental policy is a nuisance, or at least an impediment to profit. It is true that the development of the field and practice of sustainability management is changing corporate understanding of environmental resources; however, many business managers still see environmental stewardship as a set of conditions that impede, rather than facilitate, the accumulation of wealth. For now, most business practitioners see a conflict between environmental protection and economic development, though this view of a trade-off is false. To an engineer, the environmental problem is essentially physical and subject to solution through the application of technology. Engineers tend to focus on pollution control, pollution prevention (through changes in manufacturing processes or end-of-pipeline controls), energy efficiency, closed-system production, and other technological fixes. Lawyers view the environment as an issue of property rights, contracts, and the regulations that are needed to protect them. Economists perceive the environment as a set of market failures resulting from problems of consumption or production. They search for market-driven alternatives to regulation. Some understand the importance of protecting natural resources to maintain wealth, but many do not. Political scientists see environmental policy and sustainability as a political concern. To them, it is a problem generated by conflicting interests. Finally, for philosophers, the environment is an issue of values and differing worldviews.

The environment is subject to explanation and understanding through all of these disciplines and approaches. It is, in fact, a composite of the elements identified by the various disciplines and societal positions, and has dimensions that exist at the intersection points of the disciplines and social perspectives. The difficulty is that each view tends to oversimplify environmental problems, contending with only one facet of the situation. Although such problems are multidimensional, different types of environmental issues are weighted toward different conceptual orientations. One view may explain a greater or lesser share of the problem than another. For example, the problem of electronic waste is not a technical issue, because we know how to safely remove toxics from discarded electronics; the technology need not be developed anew. Neither is it a problem of economics, for many of the parts of discarded electronics can be recycled for continued use. Rather, the fact that e-waste leaks into the environment is primarily a management problem: we have not developed the standard operating procedures needed in order to collect and safely recycle or dispose of this waste.

DEVELOPING A FRAMEWORK TO HELP UNDERSTAND ENVIRONMENTAL ISSUES

The following chapters are intended to contribute to a conversation about the problem of environmental sustainability in general, as well as some specific areas in greater detail. The environmental problem can be defined as the set of interconnected issues that determine the sustainability of the planet Earth for continued human habitation under conditions that promote our material, social, political, and spiritual well-being. In chapter 2, I develop a framework for understanding the dimensions of the environmental problem and solutions proposed to address the problem. The framework allows us to deconstruct particular environmental issues and programs to increase our understanding of the causes and effects of these issues and programs. The framework examines environmental issues as a multifaceted equation encompassing a variety of factors, including values, politics, technology and science, public policy design, economics, and organizational management. Each aspect of the framework illuminates a specific feature of the environmental issue and at the same time clarifies all the environmental issues examined here. Each separate issue, however, tends to find its main source of explanation in a single factor.

APPLYING THE FRAMEWORK TO A SET OF ENVIRONMENTAL ISSUES

With this rough framework on the table, I’ll apply it to a set of environmental policy issues. While any number of issues could have been selected, I tried to choose issues of policy import, which varied by the level of government most involved. I also tried to select issues I had experience in analyzing. In chapter 3 we will review an environmental issue that is driven by politics: New York City’s effort to enact a congestion pricing fee. In examining congestion pricing in New York City, I will be analyzing a policy with proven success elsewhere and comparing the experience in New York City to the successful implementation of congestion pricing in London, noting the differences and the lessons learned. Chapter 4 focuses on the emerging issue of e-waste, or electronic waste: the toxics from discarded computers and cell phones. E-waste is a global issue, yet local actors across many jurisdictions affect the outcome of e-waste. In the United States, no federal regulations exist to recycle e-waste, though a number of states have passed rules regulating it. Electronic waste is a multidimensional problem of management, science and technology, values, and politics. We will look at emerging strategies, including producer responsibility policies and corporate recycling programs. In chapter 5 we apply the framework to the issue of hydraulic fracturing of natural gas, commonly known as hydrofracking. Under the George W. Bush administration, this practice was exempted from prevailing federal regulation, requiring states to reluctantly and slowly step into the regulatory vacuum that resulted. In chapter 6, we present the book’s final case study as we apply the framework to climate change, an impact that is more difficult to project than many other environmental issues. The complexity in addressing this issue is due to the fact that the causes are global and the impacts are mostly in the future, making it challenging to address the issue politically.

In chapter 7, I compare the issues and discuss the strengths and limitations of the framework, as well as identify some possible modifications. In chapter 8, I present some suggestions for improving environmental policy and moving toward sustainability.

The issue of electronic waste management is an indicator of the increasing toxicity of the waste stream. In some cases, toxic substances are used in technological devices out of habit, and little or no effort has been made to produce the electronic device without these toxic components. Waste management in the United States is mainly an issue handled by local governments. While the U.S. government does regulate solid waste and hazardous waste management at the federal level, for the most part, municipal solid waste is considered an issue of local politics and policy. In the United States, hydraulic fracturing is an issue that involves all levels of government. However, because the federal government has been hesitant to take on the issue, state and local governments have assumed regulation. Similarly, when dealing with the issue of congestion pricing, New York City cannot regulate its own highways, as they are regulated by New York State. The problem then becomes one of charging people to drive their cars into a part of the state, which creates political issues when trying to get this pricing mechanism passed at the state level.

With the same impulse that drove us to landfill our garbage, we assumed that once we buried old computers and cell phones underground, they were gone forever. Few of us knew how toxic this waste was, and even fewer understood how the toxics in electronic waste materials were transported through the ground, water, and air. Today, engineers have developed a field called industrial ecology, which has the goal of creating products without generating waste. In the early days of the era of mass production of laptops and cell phones, engineers paid almost no attention to the use of toxics when they designed production processes—“You can’t make an omelet without breaking some eggs.” The rush to production and to new features could not be delayed by concern about the toxicity of the product once it was discarded as waste. In fact, until Deming demonstrated that higher-quality products were made with less waste of time, materials, and labor, most operations engineers and managers spent little time or effort attempting to reduce waste or pay attention to the toxicity of its content (Deming 1986).

When we learned about toxic waste contamination in the late 1970s and early 1980s, we wanted to clean up the places that had been damaged, and prevent new waste sites from being created. When we learned about electronic waste in the past decade, we had to face up to the fact that some of the products that were most important to us contained toxics. We had no idea how much damage had already been done or how expensive and difficult, if not impossible, it would be to detoxify future cell phones and laptops. How did we create such a lethal technology? How did this issue reach the policy agenda? How was it defined? What did the electronic waste issue teach us about environmental problem solving?

In many respects, electronic waste is simply a continuation of the general issue of toxic waste, which three decades ago led us to define environmental protection as a policy area concerned with human health. Environmental policy no longer focused exclusively on preserving mountain streams and protecting wildlife, but was also concerned about keeping poisons out of our land and water. What was the social, political, and economic impact of this change? How did it come about? In chapter 4 we will attempt to deconstruct the electronic waste problem into its component parts.

It is not difficult to understand why “fracking” became a political issue. The hunger for energy in the United States is difficult to satisfy, and much of the natural gas in the Northeast’s Marcellus Shale sits beneath the property of people of modest means. Some property owners are eager to lease their land for drilling operations, while some of their neighbors worry about the potential for accidents and damage to the environment and their rural lifestyle. Meanwhile, the Bush administration encouraged unregulated hydraulic fracturing by allowing corporations to keep the chemical composition of their fracking fluid secret. How did this problem emerge as an environmental problem and as a public policy issue? Why does this problem persist? What can be done to address and solve the problem? Can this gas be extracted without damaging the environment?

Problems like hydraulic fracturing remind us of the fragility of some ecosystems, and the ability that humans have to cause inadvertent damage to nature. While some environmental damage is a direct and unavoidable by-product of a production process, leaking gas wells and transportation accidents are caused by human and organizational management errors. Of course, it is possible to probe further and find deeper causes of damage from fracking. These are the value choices involved in our energy-dependent lifestyles.

If we ask why we need so much energy in the first place, then we need to look into the factors that generated suburban sprawl, large living spaces, and energy-intensive home and transportation technologies. These relate to our values and preferences, and are influenced by culture, history, politics, technology, and economics.

The final issue we will examine is the issue of global climate change. In many respects this is the most complex environmental problem ever faced. Earth’s biosphere is an extremely complicated system that science does not fully understand. We know that the planet has experienced non-human-induced climate changes throughout time. We do not fully understand those natural cycles, and so in the 1970s and 1980s we were not certain if some of the changes we were noticing were human-made changes or natural ones. By the turn of the twenty-first century, scientific uncertainty was fading, and it was clear that the carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels and other gases such as methane from landfills were causing global warming.

We know that pollution in one part of the planet can have an impact on another place far away. Some of the air pollution from power plants in the Midwest impairs the air quality in New York City. Still, there are clear limits to the degree of global impact from air pollution. My home city doesn’t appear to get air pollution from Mexico City or Hong Kong, but some of our pollution originates in Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and parts of Illinois. Climate change is the first environmental issue that we know about that is truly global in character. Carbon dioxide emitted from an SUV in suburban Houston contributes to raising temperatures planet-wide. This is not to say that greenhouse gas is our only global environmental problem; it is simply the first one that scientists have managed to bring to widespread public attention.

While toxic waste is an issue that can be addressed at the local level, a local approach to climate change can work only if it is part of an effort coordinated throughout the world. The need for action on a global scale presents a challenge to our international system of diplomacy. Upon reflection, it appears that technology has posed at least three threats to the viability of the nation-state. The historic origin of the nation-state derives from the need for security and the ability of this form of governance to provide that security. Threat number one came with the development of the atomic bomb. Nuclear proliferation challenges the nation state’s capacity to provide security. Threat number two came from the development of the Internet, containerized and air shipping, bar codes, microcomputers and satellite communication. The technology that has made the global economy possible has had the effect of impairing national economic self-determination. Threat number three comes from the way we generate energy for electricity, climate control, and transport. That technology has resulted in excessive releases of carbon dioxide, may cause other forms of global ecological damage, and has reduced the effectiveness of national environmental policy.

In chapter 6, we will analyze the origin and impact of the climate change issue. We will attempt to characterize the issue and identify its key elements. The impact of climate change is more difficult to project than is the impact of many other environmental issues. The introduction of a chemical pollutant into the environment can be tracked and its effects on human and ecological health can be measured. Climate change will cause a set of changes that are difficult to predict. Some areas may actually benefit from improved agricultural productivity that results from warmer weather and increased rainfall. Other areas could suffer from sea level rise, and still others could be damaged by drought. The impacts will vary in ways that are difficult to predict, and will not resemble the patterns we have seen with other environmental issues.

TOWARD AN INTERDISCIPLINARY UNDERSTANDING OF ENVIRONMENTAL AND SUSTAINABILITY POLICY

The goal of the framework presented here is to engage in a conversation across disciplines. Anyone who seriously seeks to understand environmental policy must learn a modest amount of science, engineering, political science, economics, organizational management, and some things about a variety of other fields as well. Unfortunately, the power and dominance of individual academic disciplines make it difficult for these conversations to take place with the rigor and intensity that we see within disciplines. The explicitly interdisciplinary framework I propose in this book should be seen as an invitation for those with particular disciplinary expertise to critique the framework and improve it. The goal is to develop a more powerful set of tools for understanding this complex issue. This is a theme I will return to in the concluding chapter of the book.

2

A FRAMEWORK FOR UNDERSTANDING THE ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY ISSUE

ENVIRONMENTAL PROBLEMS CROSS the boundaries of sovereign states and, in the case of global climate change, affect natural systems that are worldwide in scope. The environmental problem has a great number of dimensions, all linked to the inescapable fact that human beings are biological entities, dependent on a limited number of resources for survival. As Earth’s population continues to grow, so too does the stress on finite natural systems and resources. Yet our ability to use information and technology to expand the planet’s carrying capacity also continues to grow.

This book is a brief exploration into the fundamental issues of environmenta...