Of course, appropriating money is one thing, and spending it effectively and efficiently is another. At RealClearEnergy, Christopher Barnard argues that outdated environmental laws are perversely among the biggest barriers to building new clean energy infrastructure: to my knowledge, this is the first time the term “environmental racism” has been used in a federal statement of appeal. His appeal certainly generated judicial sparks and vigorous debate. In the short term, the government has largely succeeded in weakening existing environmental regulations, although the long-term effects of these environmental setbacks remain to be seen. Many of the Trump administration`s actions, whether environmental or otherwise, have not stood up in court, with the administration losing 83 percent of the lawsuits. A recent analysis by the Brookings Institution suggests that the government`s regulatory agenda has deviated from that of previous Republican administrations, abandoning the “industry-friendly” and state-centric approach to regulation rather than a more chaotic one. [7] A $6 trillion economy can absorb such losses, but these are not small changes. “Even $75 billion a year would buy a lot of schools and hospitals,” said Paul Portney, president of Resources for the Future, an environmental think tank in Washington, D.C. In other words, if Superfund laws provide lucrative jobs for armies of litigators, environmental advisors, and government bureaucrats, don`t rejoice. Directly or indirectly, you pay for them. On December 27, 2018, the EPA proposed to revise its previous cost calculation and change the calculations of human health and safety costs. As part of the recalculation of costs, the agency said MATS was no longer “reasonable and necessary,” even though power plants had already spent more than $18 billion on MATS compliance costs at the time the new discovery was published.
The updated result also considered that the residual risks of mercury and the risk of air pollutant emissions were acceptable and nullified the Obama administration`s initial cost statement. The EPA received substantial opposition to the revision for ignoring both economically important indirect health benefits and recent research identifying the direct health benefits of reducing emissions. [4] As a result, several environmental groups have filed a lawsuit against the EPA`s rejection of the 2012 standards. Recent studies also show that the benefits of mercury reduction are much greater than originally anticipated, but the EPA has continued to use the scientific evidence from the outdated 2011 regulatory analysis in its cost-benefit analysis. The EPA`s Scientific Advisory Board has even called on the agency to consider further research into the effects of mercury before finalizing its residual risk assessment. Despite these criticisms, the EPA relaxed the standards and formally removed the “reasonable and necessary” determination in April 2020, although some environmentalists speculated that the EPA would remove MATS altogether. This is especially true for the eternal debate about the economic costs of environmental protection, where passion and wishful thinking often crowd out logic and evidence. Although governments have introduced a number of environmental protection laws, our planet continues to experience unprecedented environmental crises, including climate change, resource depletion, species extinction, ecosystem damage, and toxic air-water-land pollution.
Despite the general recognition of these serious environmental problems, and despite a growing list of laws designed to address these problems, the reality is that these adverse environmental changes could persist and even worsen on Earth. Environmental protection laws have often failed because they usually contain certain problematic features: they are anthropocentric because their purpose is to protect and benefit people, not the environment in which people live; they assume human superiority and exceptionalism over nature and natural processes; they are based on the idea that man is separated from nature; They assume that man is ultimately not limited by planetary boundaries because he is superior and somehow isolated from nature. Moreover, these laws use a model unrealistic to humans – where human motivations coincide with the Homo oeconomicus model used by traditional resource economists – the always rational and self-interested economic person motivated by negative laws that tell people what not to do. They also rely on an unrealistic model for nature in which nature is perceived too simply, as a complex, tightly integrated, self-regulating system that works best when left alone by humans. This view is not in line with the science of how nature actually works, namely as complex adaptive systems. This article examines how these assumptions and models have largely influenced legal resources and environmental decision-making over the past three hundred years at four different times – periods of use, conservation, conservation and protection. For environmental laws to work in a new, more ecocentric era, laws would be built on three bases. First, environmental laws would not continue to rely solely on the assumptions and models used in earlier eras, but would rather reflect the reality of people`s behavior and the functioning of nature. Second, these laws would impose a positive obligation on people to make decisions consistent with ecological integrity and planetary boundaries – in other words, instead of telling people what to do, laws should tell or encourage people what to do. And third, instead of relying on rules designed to prevent people from creating negative environmental externalities, these new laws would incentivize people to create positive ecocentric externalities. [4] Aldy et al., “Deep flaws in mercury regulatory analysis,” 2020.