Protecting the Environment: A Free Market Strategy is a most interesting booklet, somewhat overpriced at $7 for its 88 pages, in the "Critical Issues" series published by the Heritage Foundation (214 Mass. Ave. NE, Wash. DC 20002).
Apart from the more predictable items, there is an excellent article by Ben Zycher, "Creating a market to control Pollution," and a revealing piece "Environmental protection under Reagan: what went wrong" by N.E. Clark, former associate administrator at the EPA, who presents a sad catalog of missed opportunities
¾if one can call it that, for they never had a chance of being taken. The typical administrator of the Great Reagan Revolution, particularly in its later years, is a speech-making weakling and unprincipled me-tooer like George Shultz. The opportunity of Unproving the environment while showing up the sham-environmentalists for what they are, could never have been taken by the political bureaucrats who tried to out-Sierra the Sierra Club."Burford ... had little use for market-oriented approaches to environmental protection, and she believed in the philosophy of command and control," writes Clark. "Her dispute with the environmentalists related to the level of protection to be afforded, not to the means to achieve that protection."
It's a good little booklet, which I recommend as far as it goes; but it does not go far enough. It is by now trivial to say that a government bureaucracy will never look after wilderness areas and parks as well as a private, genuine environmental organization. As a matter of fact, even a fraudulent environmental organization like the Sierra Club will do the job better. It is doing very well on its own bird sanctuaries, where it also busily pumps oil and gas
¾something it would never approve of for private industry to do on government lands.But the booklet is incomplete in that it fails to note the fraudulence of the Sierra Club and similar lobbies in posing as "environmental" organizations. The Sierra Club's political deals with eastern coal lobbies have kept the air unnecessarily dirty; their inflammatory pamphlets scream about the deadly dangers of radon escaping from uranium tailings, but keep mum about the vastly greater dangers of radon in energy-conserving homes; they ignore the more than 100 US deaths to the public from transporting 700,000 tons of coal per year to power plants, but maintain a special department to sabotage the transportation of radioactive material, which would reduce this very death toll. They are, in short, an ideological lobby that is designed to dupe its members and the public by the use of environmentalist camouflage. The NRDC and dozens of similar deceivers are in the same category.
A book that fails to point out the distinction between genuine concern about the environment and Sierra-type masquerade is necessarily incomplete, as are articles about the political necessity to appeal to "environmentalists."
Which "environmentalists"? To what "environmental" organizations are the wilderness areas now administered by the government to be entrusted?
Privatization, yes; politicization, no.
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Vol. 14, No. 6
Newsletter: Access to Energy Newsletter Archive Volume: Issues Issue/No.: Vol. 14, No. 6 Date: November 30, 2004 08:41 AM Title: "The same thing"
Copyright © 2004 - Access to Energy Newsletter Archive
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