We often fall into the trap of splitting the world into two groups of people when thinking about a problem. In the case of environmental protection, we’re tempted to think of people as either “pro-industry” or “tree huggers.” The truth is that every person is an environmentalist on some level, but that label means different things to different people. “Environmentalism” means advocating for the protection of the environment, but reasonable people can disagree on the nature and extent of the advocacy. At a basic level, nobody wants to live in a dump. Everyone wants to live in a nice place that is not littered or contaminated.
You can come up with a few more categories to further elucidate the problem. Here is a rough outline from the most extreme “tree huggers” to the most “pro-industry.”
- Hardcore environmentalists believe that heavy industry is repugnant anywhere; very few people fit in this category.
- Reasonable people are willing to tolerate some amount of heavy industry, provided it is sited away from residential areas (how far away is debatable), and the water discharges, air emissions, and wastes are carefully controlled.
- People who are less inclined to restrict industry just want it to be away from residential areas, but otherwise largely unregulated. They may support deregulating industry because they believe the economic costs of additional regulation are not worth the marginal benefits.
- The most pro-industry people tend not to care much about regulating environmental releases, or the separation between homes and factories. This is a relatively small group.
I think it’s fair to say that wealthier societies tend to produce people higher up on the list above. I think it’s also true that people tend to move down the list as they finish school and see what is really required to manufacture things. The challenge is to educate children about the virtues of both environmentalism and industry.
When I finished college, I was inclined to think that a company should not be allowed to operate if it could not do so without negatively impacting the environment. Having seen environmental regulation up close in the two decades since, it is obvious that US environmental policy has developed to balance the need for environmental protection with the need for industry. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) staff have come up with a good heuristic to describe this balance – they say they know they are close to striking the right balance when EPA is being sued by both industry groups and environmental groups for the same rule.
A great way to understand the balance is through the simple metaphor of home construction. I chose to use my free time as a young environmental professional to build my own house, and I tried to minimize the environmental impact of the construction process. Even if you forego heavy machinery and try to use as much recycled materials as possible, a modest starter home will generate more than two trash trucks full of waste. Obviously, this doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have homes – it just means we should be conscientious with our choices, and honest about the impacts of our activities.
One of the difficulties that young environmental regulators have to grapple with is the collective delusion that exists in society between two countervailing desires: (1) the desire to have a wealthy life that includes occasionally purchasing new and beautiful products; and (2) the somewhat irrational desire to have zero environmental impacts from industrial activities. People tend to fulfill the first desire with their personal choices and assume that environmental professionals will fulfill the second desire using environmental regulations, but only magic could really do that. The very existence of environmental regulations allows people outside of the environmental profession to live with this cognitive dissonance, but the truth is that the regulations exist to keep the environmental impacts down to a “manageable” level, that is negotiated between industry, the public, and the government.
Even though industrial activities can significantly impact the environment, the wealth that usually comes with industrialization tends to make the visible environment in industrialized countries cleaner and tidier. Freedom-loving capitalists try to minimize the government’s involvement in most parts of public life. For waste management, this means that the government regulates the landfills, by making them use liners, reclamation practices, leachate and stormwater management, and groundwater monitoring to ensure that their environmental impacts are mitigated. The cost to comply is passed on to the consumer through the tipping fees, the prices that are paid to dispose of trash at the landfill. We have similarly tried to “price in” the externalities of air and water pollution, but the complexity of this problem means that we often fail to price those externalities appropriately.
Carbon cap-and-trade systems are an attempt to price in the externalities of greenhouse gas emissions, but without understanding exactly how much carbon dioxide impacts the climate, for example, pricing such systems accurately is difficult and controversial. I believe that we will get better at this as time goes on, but we have to do so in a manner that doesn’t strangle industry, which is really the engine that drives us to a place where we can afford to have a truly clean environment. We will not get there by bureaucratically latching on to new technologies and forcing them onto industry without a firm understanding of their capabilities and effects.