The Politics of Sustainability
7 It can sometimes be a struggle to understand why environmentalism and sustainability are such hot-button political issues. It is difficult to understand why safe air, water, and land should be a subject of political controversy, but this story is not new. In the 1970s, during the early environmental movement, public managers, policy experts, and students of environmental politics were working to understand the root causes of the environmental problem and trying to help the newly formed Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) as it tried to create policies and programs to address the problem. People involved in this work wanted to understand why rivers were on fire, toxics were oozing out of the ground, and the air was sometimes orange. The environment was not seen as an issue of ideology any more than cancer treatment was considered a partisan issue. It became apparent quickly that the polluters were the makers of automobiles, steel, and gasoline, and they did not want government telling them how to run their businesses. They saw environmental regulation as an inconvenient impediment to production and profit. Many were unconcerned about the environmental impact of their businesses and assumed that the planet was big enough to absorb pretty much anything. In response, a growing group of environmental activists came to demonize these businesspeople as evildoers bent on poisoning people and the planet. By the end of the 1970s all of this had hardened into an ideological battle—the economy versus the environment—resulting in the environmental politics we have seen for the past several decades. The perceived trade-off between a clean environment and economic growth persists to a large extent to this day. Fast forward to today, and we see environmental protection as a political issue co-existing with a growing concern for something we call sustainability. With the human population topping 7 billion and economic activity on a massive global scale, we are starting to see the emergence of global-level environmental challenges. Climate change is the most obvious of these challenges, but it is not the only problem. Our oceans, ecological systems, food supply, and drinking water are all threatened by the unforeseen impacts of human technology. At one end of the spectrum there are some corporate leaders and politicians who pretend that there are not any real problems. They argue that these issues are the inventions of a few pesky scientists and environmental activists. On the other end are the staunchest environmentalists who act as if we can simply shut economic production down and return to nature to live off the land. Both extremes are wrong; the environmental problems are real, but it’s impossible to go back to nature. Looking beyond these radical perspectives, the politics of sustainability and public opinion about environmental issues remain critical to policymaking and sustainability management. In this chapter, we will examine the increasing partisanship in Washington and its impact on sustainability policy. We will discuss the emergence of the Tea Party, and the deregulation agenda that helped it gain veto power over the Congressional agenda. Then, we will discuss the influence of lobbyists and the media on politics and discuss the difference between local and national politics. Next, we’ll examine public opinion on sustainability, and finally, conclude with an analysis of the key drivers of sustainability policy and the future of sustainability politics. We are living through an era of deep although not unprecedented partisanship in Washington. Congressional gridlock has become an assumption, and most Americans have little faith that the federal government can do much of anything. We have certainly been here before. Remember, this is a nation that fought a long and bloody civil war. In the 19th century there were even instances of fistfights on the floor of Congress. However, from the end of World War II until the early 1990s we saw many instances of bipartisan cooperation. The environmental legislation of the 1970s and 1980s included a number of examples of bipartisan deal making. However, with the Republican takeover of the House of Representatives led by Newt Gingrich in 1994, and the subsequent government shutdowns of 1995 and 1996, we entered the current period of hyperpartisanship. How did we get here? As the country has turned more and more against government, the Democrats have essentially adopted the policy perspective of the Reagan administration and the Republicans have continued to move as far as possible away from the idea that government has a legitimate role to play in civil society. The national political center has moved dramatically to the right. Thomas E. Mann and Raffaela Wakeman of the Brookings Institution concisely highlight this point, “It’s no secret that floor dynamics in the House of Representatives are heavily influenced by sharp ideological differences between the parties and a very high level of unity within each party…party polarization first surfaced dramatically in the 104th Congress, and now the most ‘conservative’ Democrat is consistently more liberal than the most ‘liberal’ Republican” (2013). The problem for both parties is that the world is not getting simpler: environmental sustainability, the global economy, the aspirations of impoverished people, the communications capacity of the Internet, terrorism, and the growing technology of destruction can create and possibly help solve a set of vexing problems. The partisan dynamic in Washington is no friend to sustainability. In fact, no new piece of major environmental legislation has been enacted since the 1990 amendments to the Clean Air Act. The increase in partisanship in Washington, DC, can be seen in issues like immigration reform, health care, deficit reduction, climate change, and the environment. It is impossible to deny the growing partisan divide that has profoundly influenced a U.S. climate and sustainability debate that seems to grow more polarized every year, even as climate science has become more definitive and environmental destruction more obvious. This persistent gap suggests that climate change and environmental protection have become ideological issues—much like gun control, taxes, or regulation—that define what it means to be a Republican or Democrat (Nisbet, 2009, 14). Somehow, environmental sustainability has been defined as a Democratic issue, despite the fact that breathing clean air and drinking clean water affect both sides of the aisle. The intense politicization of nearly all policy issues has made even routine congressional activities nearly impossible. The Republican preoccupation with reducing taxes and the size of government and eliminating the Affordable Care Act seems to have pushed out other issues, leaving no real opportunity for legitimate bipartisan policy conversations. Contemporary Congress seems unwilling or unable to engage in policymaking, resulting in a series of crippling struggles. In the fall of 2013, there was a government shutdown that lasted more than two weeks. Republicans, especially, use political weaponry to slow progress of any kind: They have used the debt ceiling for political leverage, putting the country’s debt rating in jeopardy; they constantly threaten to filibuster in the Senate; and they have delayed the approval of presidential appointees. Democrats have also refused to compromise, often preferring appeals to their base constituency at the expense of progress. Moderates are a rare breed in today’s Congress, which increases the distance between Republicans and Democrats. These are all indications of the degree of dysfunction in the federal government over the past several years. Senator Claire McCaskill (D-MO) noted the lack of willing dealmakers: “You’ve got an atrophy of the middle, a cannibalization of the middle, and people are worried about their right flank if they’re Republicans, some Democrats are worried about their left flank if they’re Democrats, and the way this place works is by people hanging out in the middle and forging compromise” (qtd. in Welna, 2013). The political middle, which is generally where most Americans land on the political spectrum, has very few members left in Congress, and those few who remain have difficulty finding allies. It should come as no surprise that Congress has become increasingly unproductive. In December 2013, at the close of the first year of the 113th Congress, the Pew Center looked at how many substantive laws had been enacted (excluding ceremonial legislation like post-office renamings), and found that only 55 laws had been passed. This number is low even when compared to the 63 laws passed in 2011, the first year of the 112th Congress, which was already one of the least productive in recent history (Desilver, 2013). The hyperpartisanship that has emerged in this country over the last decade is perhaps best epitomized by the rise of the Tea Party. The Tea Party emerged after the 2008 elections, which put control of the White House and both houses of Congress into Democratic hands. While it lacks an official agenda, it is known for its staunch support of a reduction of the national debt and a smaller federal government, which includes lower taxes and deep federal spending cuts. It has come to represent the most conservative of conservatives, and most Tea Partiers identify themselves as Republicans. Many Tea Party candidates were elected to office in the 2010 and 2012 elections, uprooting more moderate Republicans in Congress and resulting in a more extreme right wing. Maryland House Democrat Chris Van Hollen attributed the lack of Congressional productivity to “deep divisions within the House GOP majority. ‘The fight is between what used to be the mainstream Republicans in the House and the Tea Party Republicans in the House, and the Tea Party keeps winning’” (qtd. in Welna, 2013). The Tea Party movement is a natural extension of the Reagan revolution of the 1980s, where government was identified as a problem to be solved rather than a place where solutions to public problems might be shaped. Reagan’s approach echoed the 1964 speech of Barry Goldwater, who in accepting the Republican nomination for President declared: “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice…moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue” (Washington Post, 1998). Both Goldwater and Reagan would be considered moderate by contemporary conservative standards. Both were deal makers and today, Reagan’s fraternizing with Democratic leader Tip O’Neill would be considered socialist, rather than social. By delegitimizing government and its capacities, conservatives have made it impossible to conduct a serious analysis of the role of government in developing renewables and the conditions under which public and private sector partnership might make sense. Government is not perfect. It wastes resources and focuses far too much on process than results, especially in Washington. But the right-wing mantra that government is a beast that must be starved has only served to distract the public from real problems such as: In the contemporary anti-tax, starve-the-beast, ideology-driven budgetary environment there is little chance we can develop effective and sophisticated regulations and a meaningful public-private partnership. There seems to be no place in the Tea Party ideology for a sophisticated relationship between government and the private sector in pursuit of sustainable economic growth. In this view, government agents can only be power-grabbing, bumbling, communist bureaucrats, and regulation is never a good idea. On the one hand, it’s true that regulation costs money, and some business leaders seem to have a reflex that causes them to oppose regulation whenever it is proposed. On the other hand, it’s true that lawlessness and an absence of rules can be quite expensive. Although many of the costs of regulation are borne by individual businesses and their customers, the costs of a lack of regulation fall on the shoulders of all of us. In fact, most businesses do not believe in blanket opposition to all regulation because they understand that reasonable law helps ensure that everyone plays by the same rules. The anti-regulation attitude creates a powerful and dangerous political dynamic when it is coupled with the Republican Party’s current anti-tax, anti-government ideology. The danger of the Republican right wing’s zeal against government and regulation is that it inhibits our ability to deal with the complexity and interconnectedness of modern life and the modern economy. The BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the Fukushima nuclear power plant accident in Japan, and the damage to the environment caused by hydrofracking in Ohio and Pennsylvania are all the results of inadequate regulation—not too much government, but too little. The U.S. Department of Interior failed to adequately police deep-sea oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. The Japanese government did not require the Tokyo Electric Power Company to guard the Fukushima plant against the threat of a tsunami. And more disasters are likely to emerge. The virtually unregulated extraction of natural gas in Pennsylvania and Ohio has resulted in preventable accidents and unnecessary damage. The chemicals in the fracking fluid are considered proprietary trade secrets, and without regulation it is impossible to determine or control what effect they will have on the ground and water where they are deposited. The damage caused by unregulated business not only brings harm to our planet, but also damages the economy and communities as well. The lack of adequate regulation of mortgages led to people buying and losing homes they couldn’t afford and the lack of regulation on Wall Street led to a financial crash. Regulation is an important tool of economic development, but it must be properly designed and enforced to be effective. Conservatives say that government is too ignorant of business practices to adequately police them. By that argument only criminals are qualified to serve as police. In the conservative view, regulations destroy initiative and hold businesses back from reaching their true potential. To some degree this is true, but when economic growth is slower and more cautious, it can also be more sustainable. It is true that you can regulate an activity to such a degree that you destroy it. You can also deregulate an activity to the point that modern business operates as ineffectively as it would the Wild West. Neither approach makes sense. The anti-regulation movement is particularly pernicious because it prevents us from doing what we really need to do, which is to get better at developing and implementing effective regulation. Thanks to technology, the economic and social environment we live in is changing rapidly. We need to do a better job of understanding this environment and developing reasonable rules to govern economic competition within it. In any mining operation there are best management practices and there are also quick and dirty shortcuts. Like the citizens and wildlife that could be harmed, the companies that act responsibly are penalized in the absence of government rules and enforcement. Careless operators that damage the environment are rewarded by the lack of rules. We know that a clean environment has many more economic benefits than costs. First, there are reduced expenditures for health care. Second, clean air and water have economic value that is difficult to quantify, but areas with toxic orange air and burning water cease to be productive when residents move away. Third are the benefits of technological innovation undertaken to comply with regulation. In seeking to meet new standards, engineers are given the resources to develop engines that pollute less or air conditioners that use less electricity. All of these factors stimulate rather than stunt economic growth. Since 1997 the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has reported that the benefits of all federal regulations have far exceeded their costs. OMB submits a report each year to comply with the Regulatory-Right-to-Know Act. According to a draft 2013 report, the benefits of federal regulation over the 10-year period ending September 2012 totaled “between $193 billion and $800 billion, while the estimated annual costs are in the aggregate between $57 billion and $84 billion. These ranges are reported in 2001 dollars and reflect uncertainty in the benefits and costs of each rule at the time that it was evaluated” (OMB, 2013b, 3). Figure 7.1 provides a summary of these data for the decade between FY 2004 and FY 2013. Figure 7.1 Total Annual Costs and Benefits of Major Rules, by Fiscal Year Source: Office of Management and Budget. “2014 Draft Report to Congress on the Benefits and Costs of Federal Regulations and Unfunded Mandates on State, Local, and Tribal Entities.” Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. 2014. Page 21, Figure 1-1. In an excellent summary of OMB’s report, Katie Greenshaw of OMB Watch noted the prominence of air pollution rules in the federal regulatory analysis. According to that summary, “the highest costs and benefits come from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) air pollution rules. Specifically, the Clean Air Fine Particle Implementation Rule has the highest costs and benefits of any rule…The benefits, which far exceed the costs, include prevention of premature deaths, heart attacks, and respiratory illness among Americans” (Greenshaw, 2011). Greenshaw further observed that “Although many House Republicans claim that regulations are too costly and negatively impact jobs, this report presents findings consistent with recent independent research from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) concluding that the benefits of regulation greatly exceed the costs. The EPI research also indicates that ‘regulations do not tend to significantly impede job creation’” (Greenshaw, 2011). It is hard to believe that we are reduced to making arguments on the necessity of regulation. It would be a much better use of our time and energy to focus our attention on developing more effective regulations. We need to learn more about the planet’s conditions and the impact of our activities on productive ecosystems. It’s true that regulations come with costs, but so does everything of value. It costs time and money when a driver stops at a red light, but the cost is lower than the cost of a road system without rules. Stopping is cheaper than crashing. The problem is that the benefits measured by OMB come to all of us, but some of the costs come to the kind of people who donate money to political campaigns. The ability of powerful economic interests to control America’s political agenda is not news, and the degree to which facts and science are willfully denied seems to be getting worse. In 2010, the Citizens United Supreme Court ruling concluded that the government cannot limit corporate spending on political campaigns, cementing corporations’ ability to influence American politics, essentially introducing super PACs (political action committees) into the political game. While the actual influence of campaign finance is not clear and difficult to trace, it is hard to deny that corporate money is flooding politics today. Some studies indicate that spending bans do not change election outcomes, nor do they have an effect on the success of parties in determining control of state legislatures (Raja & Schaffner, 2014). However, some studies provide evidence of corporate influence on election outcomes while others say that it depends on the circumstance (Powell, 2013). The argument comes down to a belief in the logic that unlimited donations to super PACs could skew the agendas of candidates in favor of very wealthy individuals or corporations that supported them. Super PACs cannot make contributions to specific candidates or parties, but they can spend all they want on things like ads, mailers, and other tools to influence how people vote. Some argue that this might not matter in a presidential race, where spending is already high, but it will impact hot-button issues (such as fracking) or congressional races where an extra $5 million could have a more distorted impact (Stewart et al., 2012). This degree of influence by the wealthy class doesn’t happen in places like France, where it is illegal for corporations and special interest groups to make contributions to candidates, or in Germany, where campaigns are primarily government-funded (Simmons, 2014). However, since the Supreme Court has overturned much of the legislation that regulates campaign contributions, and since super PACs have proliferated rapidly, there is a growing concern over the influence corporations and wealthy individuals have on elections. In the McCutcheon
The Politics of Sustainability
Introduction
Increasing Partisanship in Washington
The Do-Nothing Congress
The Tea Party and the Deregulation Agenda
Deregulation at All Costs
The Costs and Benefits of Regulation
The Influence of Money, Lobbyists, and the Media